Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (15 page)

Kerry Hardie
(
b
. Singapore, 1951) is an Irish writer who has published six books of poetry and two novels. Often following the annual round of rural life, her poetry questions, celebrates and challenges all aspects of life and experience, exploring the mystery of ‘why we are here’, but is ultimately concerned with the quiet realisation that ‘there is nothing to do in the world
except live in it’. A number of her poems are narratives or parables in which experience yields a spiritual lesson and consolation; others chart a coming to terms with death or continuing illness and an acceptance of inevitability or flux. Human life quivers in consort with other lives in these seasons of the heart. ‘In many of these poems, illness opens into a compassionate understanding of suffering and death, familial and historical […] she finds in nature a redemptive power for the body, prompting the big questions of human and divine purpose.’ [Selina Guinness,
The New Irish Poets
].
‘Sheep Fair Day’ [70].

Seamus Heaney
(
b
. Mossbawn, Co. Derry, 1939) is a world-renowned Irish poet and critic, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Born into a Catholic farming family in Co. Derry, he left Northern Ireland in 1972 and has since lived in America, Wicklow and Dublin. His concerns for the land, language and troubled history of Ireland run through all of his work. His early poetry is notable for its sensory, lyrical evocations of nature and rural life, and of childhood, which has nurtured many of his most memorable poems, as Heaney has acknowledged: ‘My poems almost always start in some kind of memory […] like a little beeper going off in your mind. Some little thing wakens excitement, and it gets connected with some other things. Ideally, it’s like an avalanche – a little pebble begins to move, gathers a lot of energy and multiplies itself.’
from
‘Clearances’ [48], ‘Postscript’ [24].

Turkey’s most celebrated modern poet,
Nâzim Hikmet
(1902-63), served thirteen years of a 28-year-sentence as a political prisoner, accused of inciting Turkish armed forces to revolt because military cadets had been reading his poems. He was only freed after a worldwide campaign, with protests led by Picasso, Paul Robeson and Jean-Paul Sartre adding international pressure to turmoil created by his hunger strikes. Hikmet’s poem ‘It’s This Way’ [
108] was written in 1948 from the prison infirmary. Still persecuted after his release, he spent his last thirteen years in exile in Russia. His work was banned in Turkey for thirty years and has been translated into more than fifty languages.

Born in Thessaloniki (then Selânik, part of the Ottoman Empire), Hikmet grew up in Istanbul. After fighting in the Turkish War of Independence, he spent part of the early 1920s in Moscow, witnessing revolutionary politics and influenced by Mayakovsky and the new Soviet poets. On his return to Turkey, he became the foremost figure in the Turkish avant-garde, known for his innovative poetry’s unusual synthesis of iconoclasm and lyricism, ideology and poetic diction.

‘In prison, Hikmet’s Futurist-inspired, often topical early poetry gave away to poems with a more direct manner and a more serious tone.[…] He not only composed some of his greatest lyrics in prison but produced, between 1941 and 1945, his epic masterwork,
Human Landscapes
,’ wrote Mutlu Konuk. According to Terrence Des Pres, Hikmet’s ‘exemplary life’ and ‘special vision’ – ‘at once historical and timeless, Marxist
and
mystical’ meant that ‘in his art and in his person Hikmet opposes the enemies of the human spirit in harmony with itself and the earth’. Reading Hikmet, said Carolyn Forché, we are in the presence of ‘a rare guide to the work of remaining hopeful and in love with life, pure of heart and human, passionate and dedicated to the common good’. [
Poems of Nâzim Hikmet
, tr. Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk, 1994/2002] 

Sir Geoffrey Hill
is widely regarded as Britain’s greatest living poet. Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, he read English at Oxford. He taught at Leeds University from 1954 to 1980, and thereafter at Cambridge and Boston. He was made Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2010, and was knighted in 2012.

Hill’s densely allusive poetry has earned him a reputation for “difficulty” which he has defended as the poet’s right in the face of cultural disintegration, political opportunism and media-driven mediocrity, arguing that to be difficult is to be democratic and equating the demand for simplicity with the demands of tyrants. His approach to “difficulty” includes subjecting his own lyricism to intense interrogation and self-questioning, as in ‘September Song’ [
102], an early poem written for an unknown child who died anonymously in one or other concentration camp. Throughout this oblique and understated poem, Hill writes with an acute awareness of how the Nazis perfected the art of misusing
language to disguise the nature of their ‘Final Solution’, simultaneously masking and revealing the horror behind that phrase through painful irony, awful double-meanings and juxtapositions (‘routine cries’), so that the meaning of each line changes, or shifts, with each line-break.

Jane Hirshfield
is a visionary American poet who trained as a Zen Buddhist. Born in New York City in 1953, she has lived in northern California since 1974, for the past 20 years in a small white cottage looking out on fruit trees, old roses and Mt Tamalpais. Her poems are both sensual meditations and passionate investigations which reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, they celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate.
‘The Weighing’ [95], ‘Burlap Sack’ [96].

Miroslav Holub
(
b
. Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, 1923-98) was the Czech Republic’s foremost modern poet, and one of her leading immunologists. Often employing scientific metaphors, his fantastical and witty poems give a scientist’s bemused view of human folly and other life on the planet.
‘The door’ [19], ‘The fly’ [98].

Langston Hughes
(
b
. Joplin, Missouri, 1902-67) was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. A poet, novelist, short story writer and dramatist, he was known for his vivid portrayals of black life in America as well as for his engagement with the world of jazz. Resisting demands from younger and militant black writers to be a political spokesman, Hughes maintained a belief in humanity and tolerance which ensured that his poetry remained universal in its appeal while staying relevant to the plight of his downtrodden people.
‘Harlem [2]’ [21].

Mohja Kahf
(
b
. Damascus, 1967) is an Arab-American writer who moved with her family from Syria to the US when she was a child. Her interest in morality, gender, politics and how Muslim-American communities relate to others in both religious and secular spheres finds expression in her poetry, fiction and academic studies. Her collection
Emails from Scheherazad
(2003) draws on the Arabic oral tradition and Arabic poetry as well as
American free verse, and includes ‘Hijab Scene #7’ [
109], one of a series of poems on that theme.