Being Alive

the sequel to Staying Alive

Neil Astley

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781780371771
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Being Alive is the sequel to Neil Astley's Staying Alive, which became Britain's most popular poetry book because it gave readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world. Now he has assembled this equally lively companion anthology for all those readers who've wanted more poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit. Being Alive is about being human: about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder.

Staying Alive didn't just reach a broader readership, it introduced thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry, giving them an international gathering of poems of great personal force, poems with emotional power, intellectual edge and playful wit. It also brought many readers back to poetry, people who hadn't read poetry for years because it hadn't held their interest. Being Alive gives readers an even wider selection of vivid, brilliantly diverse contemporary poetry from around the world. A companion anthology, Being Human (2011), completed this poetry trilogy. Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (2012) selects 100 poems from all three anthologies, a third from each. These anthologies have been welcomed not only by poets but by a wide range of well-known people respected for their work in fields other than poetry – all avid readers of poetry. They want to recommend these books above all other anthologies of contemporary poetry.

'I love Staying Alive and keep going back to it. Being Alive is just as vivid, strongly present and equally beautifully organised. But this new book feels even more alive – I think it has a heartbeat, or maybe that's my own thrum humming along with the music of these poets. Sitting alone in a room with these poems is to be assured that you are not alone, you are not crazy (or if you are, you're not the only one who thinks this way!) I run home to this book to argue with it, find solace in it, to locate myself in the world again.' – Meryl Streep

'Truly startling and powerful poems.' – Mia Farrow

'These poems distil the human heart as nothing else… Staying Alive celebrates the point of poetry. It's invigorating and makes me proud of being human.' – Jane Campion

' Staying Alive is a blessing of a book. The title says it all. I have long waited for just this kind of setting down of poems. Has there ever been such a passionate anthology? These are poems that hunt you down with the solace of their recognition.' – Anne Michaels

' Staying Alive is a magnificent anthology. The last time I was so excited, engaged and enthralled by a collection of poems was when I first encountered The Rattle Bag. I can't think of any other anthology that casts its net so widely, or one that has introduced me to so many vivid and memorable poems.' – Philip Pullman

'Usually if you say a book is "inspirational" that means it's New Agey and soft at the center. This astonishingly rich anthology, by contrast, shows that what is edgy, authentic and provocative can also awaken the spirit and make its readers quick with consciousness. In these pages I discovered many new writers, and I've decided I'm now in love with our troublesome epoch if it can produce poems of such genius.' – Edmund White

' Staying Alive is a wonderful testament to Neil Astley's lifetime in poetry, and to the range and courage of his taste. It's also, of course, a testament to poetry itself: to its powers to engross and move us, to its ability to challenge and brace us, and to its exultation. Everyone who cares about poetry should own this book.' – Andrew Motion

1

Exploring the World

Good poets are the explorers of the world. Out on the frontiers, they send back bulletins.

EAMON GRENNAN

A poem should take you somewhere different…a poet should be the one least likely to step into the same river twice.

SEAMUS HEANEY

THIS BOOK’S JOURNEY through the world begins with poetry itself, followed by celebrations of the natural world, journey poems and some of those meetings mentioned in the Introduction: here the encounters are with birds, while in section 2 they’re with animals and fish. But these are not the familiar kind of nature poems typical of traditional pastoral verse: indeed, what they evoke is not familiarity but unfamiliarity in crossing paths with other lives, opening up the self to otherness. Just as in Lawrence’s animal poems, the writers feel a quickening of consciousness in meeting another creature, and the poem captures that pivotal moment. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, her insights into the world are achieved through acute observation, as in ‘The Fish’ (70). In this section, Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’ (31) shows poetry’s transforming power, her accumulation of minute detail leading to the incantatory finale where the sea is described as like knowledge, ‘flowing and drawn, and since / our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown’. That word ‘flown’ is the past participle not of ‘flow’ but of ‘fly’; ‘flown’, chiming with ‘drawn’, sounds better than ‘flowed’, but completely changes the sense. James Merrill, Anne Stevenson and Robert Pinsky have all written illuminating commentaries on these few lines.

The journey poems include Cavafy’s quintessential life-quest poem ‘Ithaka’ (36) in which the journey itself is what’s important, not the final landing (the Laistrygonians and the Cyclops were giants encountered by Odysseus on his ten-year odyssey after the Trojan War).

The idea of disappearance has fascinated many poets (Staying Alive, 407-11). Larkin focuses on those left behind in ‘Poetry of Departures’ (38), while Derek Mahon (39) and Matthew Sweeney (40) follow their fugitives. Mahon’s ‘The Mayo Tao’ (41) evokes a remote place of refuge in the same Irish landscape memorably celebrated by Michael Longley in ‘Echoes’ (42) and other poems from his books The Ghost Orchid, The Weather in Japan and Snow Water.

This Poem…

This poem is dangerous: it should not be left

Within the reach of children, or even of adults

Who might swallow it whole, with possibly

Undesirable side-effects. If you c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: Exploring the World
• 2: Taste and See
• 3: Family
• 4: Love Life
• 5: Men and Women
• 6: Being and Loss
• 7: Daily Round
• 8: Lives
• 9: Mad World
• 10: Ends and Beginnings
• Further reading
• Acknowledgements
• Index of writers
• Index of titles and first lines
• Copyright