Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (12 page)

John Burnside
(
b
. Dunfirmline, Fife, 1955) is a Scottish writer of radiant, meditative poetry and of dark, brooding fiction. His books include several collections of poetry and one of short stories, several novels, and a memoir,
A Lie About My Father
(2006). In his essay in
Strong Words
(2000), he wrote: ‘Our response to the world is essentially one of wonder, confronting the mysterious with a sense, not of being small, or insignificant, but of being part of a rich and complex narrative.’
‘Unwittingly’ [44];
from
‘Of Gravity and light’ [72].

Edip Cansever
(
b
. Istanbul, 1928-86) went from school into business at his father’s antiques shop in Istanbul, later lamenting he hadn’t studied philosophy: ‘At nineteen I was married, and at twenty I was a young man with a child. I was at the same time obliged to make a living, and drawn to poetry. […] My partner was a good-hearted man. He was in charge of sales, while I would read and write in the mezzanine. Our true friendship began in those days with poetry and continued for twenty-two years. The results are in my home, my room and among my books.’ [‘Autobiographical Sketch’,
Irish Pages
, 4 no.1.] Cansever became one of Turkey’s leading post-war poets.

First published in 1954 in his second book of poems, ‘Table’ [
15] became a talismanic poem for Turkish readers but was a mixed blessing for its author: he said if he had written nothing other than this poem, ‘it would have been worth it. And yet I haven’t been able to escape from this poem ever in my life.’

Translators Julia and Richard Tillinghast: ‘Cansever’s imagination is a place where physical objects, sense impressions and ideas coexist not only with ease, but with joy.[…] But if Cansever is not religious, he is, in a strikingly unacademic way, a philosophical poet. Who other than a philosophical poet could have written these lines in “Precipice”: “O appearances, there’s something about you I just don’t understand!” In “Table” we suspect he was thinking of Plato’s “forms”, and that his table represents something like the Platonic idea of a table.[…] The poem
is given some background by the knowledge that Cansever owned an antique shop in the Covered Bazaar, so he must have bought and sold many an old table that wobbled but then stood firm.’ [‘Neither Hopeless Nor Not Hopeless: At Cansever’s Table’,
Irish Pages,
4 no.1.] 

Raymond Carver
(
b
. Clatskanie, Oregon, 1938-88) viewed Chekhov as common soul in his practice both as a poet and a highly influential short story writer. His stories chronicle the lives of marginalised people in smalltown America, while his poems tell stories about difficult marriages, strained relationships and dealing with illness. Winning his own personal battle with alcoholism, he found happiness late in life with the poet Tess Gallagher – the gift of ten more years he celebrates in ‘Gravy’ [
119] – only to be defeated by lung cancer. The poem ‘Late Fragment’ [
124] is inscribed on his grave.

Nina Cassian
(
b
. Galati, Romania, 1924) is a Romanian poet, journalist and classical composer. She was granted asylum in the US when a friend was arrested by the Securitate in 1985 for possessing a diary including poems by her satirising the Ceausescu régime. Her poetry is highly personal and courageous, with passion as its central concern: passion as desire and passion as suffering. She believes that poetry ‘is not to transcend life or to transform it, but it is life…Art is as alive as an animal.’
‘Temptation’ [25].

Charles Causley
(1917-2003) lived for most of his life in his birthplace, Launceston in Cornwall, where he worked as a schoolteacher, and produced many books for children and six poetry collections. He said he couldn’t tell when writing if a poem was for children or for adult readers, and included children’s poetry in his 1975
Collected Poems
. His poetry is both traditional and visionary, drawing on timeless forms such as ballads, folksongs and hymns.
‘Eden Rock’ [118].

C.P. Cavafy
(
b
. Alexandria, Egypt, 1863-1933) was a Greek poet who lived in Egypt, where he worked as a journalist and civil servant. His poetry was little known outside the Greek community
of Alexandria, only winning critical recognition in Greece itself after his death and wider international renown much later with the publication of numerous translations into other languages. Cavafy divided his poems into three categories: philosophical, historical and hedonistic or aesthetic, the eroticism of the latter emerging as explicitly homosexual only after 1918. Common to all his mature work is his ‘unique tone of voice’ which, according to Auden, ‘survives translation’. ‘Ithaka’ [
28] is his quintessential life-quest poem 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).

Julius Chingono
(
b
. Norton, Zimbabwe, 1946-2011), the son of a farmworker, worked for most of his life as a blaster on the mines. Made redundant in 1999, he worked intermittently as a rock-blasting contractor. His poem ‘As I Go’ [
27] depicts a life stripped to its essentials. ‘His often deceptively simple poetry was written with compassion and clarity, feeling deeply as he did for the hardships of the poor and marginalised, while his honesty, humour and ironic eye made him a sharp and witty observer of those who abused their station through corruption and hypocrisy.’ [
Poetry International Web
]

Kate Clanchy
(
b
. Glasgow, 1965) is a poet whose work has had a mixed reception, earning immediate recognition with her first book,
Slattern
(1995), but unjustified, damaging attacks by male critics for her otherwise much admired and popular third collection,
Newborn
(2004), which ‘draws on common experiences of women, and the unfamiliar world they enter once they have boarded the pregnancy train and realise, to use Sylvia Plath’s metaphor, that “there’s no getting off ” [Deryn Rees-Jones].
‘Love’ [50].