What is The Zoo of the New? While many animals roam its pages, this isn’t a collection of animal poems; and it isn’t, either, an anthology of poetry which is ‘new’ in the sense of having been composed and published recently. It’s just a book of things we love, which we thought you might love, too. Its ‘zoo-ness’ consists in the variety and strangeness of the poems, and its newness in the apparently inexhaustible ability of those poems to surprise, delight or shock us, no matter how many times we read them. Ezra Pound’s declaration that ‘literature is news that stays news’ seems, appropriately, never to get old, and of all literature it may well fit poetry best. A good poem is a record of the poet’s real-time excitement as they composed it – and just by reading it aloud, we can awaken that same shiver, ache or visceral thrill in ourselves. When this happens across many decades or centuries, we experience the little transmigration of souls that is perhaps the most distinctly magical thing a poem can accomplish.
The title comes from Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Child’, included here, which opens: ‘Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing’. A poet is always on the hunt for the next poem – not just one they might write, but one they might read, fall for, make their own, and even learn by heart. The poems in this anthology are taken from our own commonplace books, from the files and folders we’ve filled over decades with poems from any and every time and place. The price of entry here is simply that the poem had to feel exceptional to us in some way, alive enough to have been written this morning. It had to possess that ‘clear eye’, and we had to feel that the stir of its conception has been matched by its embodiment in language. And, no less crucially, it had to slap us awake to our world by means of its alertness to its own. The poems were mainly written in English, although we’ve kept certain translations which mean a lot to us, and which seem to us to have taken on their own lives as poems in this language.
Inevitably, every anthology will trawl behind it a giant shadow representing the sum of its omissions. When we started thinking about this book in 2014, it quickly became apparent – for considerations of cost, size, friendship, and a dozen other things – that we’d have to lay down some ground rules. We decided, firstly, that we would have to agree on every poem. This led to much scrapping, and a few vehement denunciations, as not all of our enthusiasms were shared; but at least this way, we knew that we’d done what we could to avoid the unconscious nepotism all anthologies are partly shaped by, and to guard against the inclusion of poems only one person on the planet liked. Secondly, we decided that poets under sixty could not pass. Poets, after all, are almost always rotten judges of the true importance of their own contemporaries. This meant the loss of a huge number of recent favourites; but without this rule, The Zoo of the New would have been a two-stone, six-volume boxed set pitched mainly at the landed gentry.
There is another regrettable casualty of the latter decision: an anthology which ignored our cut-off date would be a considerably less pale and male affair, and while there are a great many women and people of colour in these pages, our choice inevitably reflects the historical inequalities of poetry publishing, and more generally of an iniquitous cultural imbalance which did not start to be addressed in any significant fashion until the 1980s and ’90s. For example, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes’s 1982 anthology The Rattle Bag – inevitably, the principal inspiration for our own book – featured ten women poets out of a hundred and thirty; in this book, roughly one in four-and-a-half of the poems are written by women. Clearly, this remains a long way from ‘good enough’. But, while anthologies of contemporary work are well-placed to (and in our opinion should) exercise some degree of corrective bias, this becomes considerably more difficult when the focus is retrospective or historical, as here. We have, nonetheless, made serious efforts to correct for our own blind spots, and we hope that the result will be to introduce you to some poets overlooked by previous anthologies.
We both believe that what initially seems a poem’s ‘subject matter’ will often prove merely a pretext to write about something else – often something so elusive that the poem itself is its only record. While many poems here address the Eliotic brass tacks of birth, copulation and death, there are also poems about friendship, war, animals, religion, science, metaphysics, joy, envy, rage, grief, snails, pebbles and microscopes. We haven’t shied away from including both the momentous and the momentary, the deadly serious and the seriously funny, poems caught in the clear shallows and in the murky depths, poems by the famous and by the not-so-famous, poems already widely anthologized and poems completely unknown. What unites them is their power to offer some relocation in the sense of things, some moment of recognition or surprise.
Randall Jarrell commanded us all to ‘read at whim!’ and we’ve tried to honour that wise injunction. We’ve randomized the poems – and hopefully made a big book a little more navigable – by alphabetizing the titles. So open it anywhere, then anywhere, then anywhere again. We’re sure it won’t be long before you find a poem which brings you smack into the newness and strangeness of the living present, just as it did us.
Nick Laird
Don Paterson