Staying Alive

real poems for unreal times

Neil Astley

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781780371764
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Staying Alive is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow. These are poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations with our humanity, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. The Staying Alive trilogy of anthologies have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry.

Many people turn to poetry only at unreal times, whether for consolation in loss or affirmation in love, or when facing other extremes and anxieties. Staying Alive includes many of the great modern love poems and elegies, but it also shows the power of poetry in celebrating the ordinary miracle, taking you on a journey around many of the different aspects of everyday life explored in poems.

A strong poem is not just for crisis. Such a poem is there for all times, helping us face or embrace daily change and disruption. It will also speak to us when nothing seems to be happening, when the poem's importance is in helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves.

Staying Alive has reached a wider readership than any other anthology of contemporary poetry. It is a landmark in the history of literary publishing. A sequel, Being Alive (2004), and 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.

'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

Body and soul

Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.

LUCILLE CLIFTON

Poetry says more about the psychic life of an age than any other art. Poetry is a place where all the fundamental questions are asked about the human condition.

CHARLES SIMIC

THIS SECTION begins with poems that celebrate the joy of living, the beauty of the natural world and the pleasures of the body and the senses. Denise Levertov’s ‘Living’ (31) captures the vitality of nature and the preciousness of every life and every minute of life. The oneness with the body which Lucille Clifton expresses in ‘Homage to My Hips’ (36) contrasts with Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Chemin de Fer’ (39), a cry for love which speaks to her own struggle to accept her homosexuality when she wrote this poem in 1946; it could also be read as a “coded” account of female masturbation. The Canadian writer Alden Nowlan had a miserable childhood, leaving school at 12 to work in a papermill. Written at a time when it was normal to talk about ‘retarded’ children, Nowlan’s poem (40), like those by Tess Gallagher (38) and Les Murray (41), is about not being afraid to show our emotions: giving physical expression to the way we feel, here by hugging or crying in public.

There’s also a sense of mystery in this: no one knows why the man is crying in ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’, and Les Murray evokes the baffled, communal response to a spectacle both ordinary and extraordinary by echoing a famous poem by ‘Waltzing Matilda’ author ‘Banjo’ Paterson in his opening lines. Every Australian of Murray’s generation would know by heart ‘The Man from Snowy River’ which begins: ‘There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around / That the colt from old Regret had got away’, but instead of bushmen from different cattle-stations, Murray homes in on men reacting from familiar Sydney locations, drinking or eating in Repins and Lorenzinis, or watching the horse sales at Tattersalls.

Poets often draw on well-known poems, stories or myths to nudge us in unexpected directions. At one time they could rely upon most readers sharing their own knowledge and love of literature and history, of the Bible and classical mythology, but people today are generally less familiar with that cultural heritage, so that poetry drawing on this tradition has less resonance. Myths restate recurring archetypal patterns and psychological truths. When poets use myth they make potent connections with living stories just as relevant to us as they were to the ancient Greeks. Our growing separation from that heritage is even more telling in relation to the poetry itself, for the single most important stylistic influence on the language of English poetry over the past four centuries has been the beautifully cadenced prose of the King James Bible.

One story from the Eng...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Poets on poetry
• Introduction
• Wild Geese
• 1: Body and soul
• 2: Roads
• 3: Dead or alive
• 4: Bittersweet
• 5: Growing up
• 6: Man and beast
• 7: In and out of love
• 8: My people
• 9: War and peace
• 10: Disappearing acts
• 11: Me, the Earth, the Universe
• 12: The art of poetry
• The Sound of Poetry
• Glossary
• Further reading
• Acknowledgements
• Index of writers
• Index of titles and first lines
• Copyright