Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (20 page)

Anne Stevenson
(
b
. Cambridge, England, 1933) is an American and British poet, born in Cambridge of American parents, who grew up in the States but has lived in Britain for most of her adult life. Rooted in close observation of the world and acute psychological insight, her poems continually question how we see and think about the world. They are incisive as well as entertaining, marrying critical rigour with personal feeling, and a sharp wit with an original brand of serious humour.
‘Poem for a Daughter’ [49], ‘The Victory’ [51].

Ruth Stone
(
b
. Roanoke, Virginia, 1915-2011) lived in rural Vermont for much of her life. After her husband’s suicide in 1959, she had to raise three daughters alone, all the time writing what she called her ‘love poems, all written to a dead man’ who forced her to ‘reside in limbo’ with her daughters. She only won wide recognition for her work in her late 80s, and was still writing poetry of extraordinary variety and radiance well into her 90s – fierce feminist and political poems and hilarious send-ups, meditations on ageing, love and loss.

Ruth Stone once said, ‘I decided very early on not to write like other people.’ Her late retrospective
What Love Comes To
(2008/2009) shows the fruits of this resolve in the lifetime’s work of a true American original, whose writing process was unlike anyone else’s: ‘I wrote my first poem without knowing I’d done it – and found that poems came with this mysterious feeling, a kind of peculiar ecstasy. I’d feel and hear a poem coming from a long way off, like a thunderous train of air. I’d feel it physically. I’d run like hell to the house, blindly groping for pencil and paper. And then the poem would write itself. I’d write it down from the inside out. The thing knew itself already. There were other times when I’d almost miss it, feeling it pass through me
just as I was grabbing the pencil, but then I’d catch it by its tail and pull it backwards into my body. Then the poem came out backwards and I’d have to turn it round.’ [
PBS Bulletin
, 2009]
‘Second-Hand Coat’ [16]. 

Arundhathi Subramaniam
(
b.
Bombay, 1967) is an Indian writer whose poems explore various ambivalences – around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megalopolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey.
‘Prayer’ [120].

Anna T. Szabó
is one of Hungary’s leading younger poets. Born in 1972 in Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania (Romania), she moved with her family to Hungary in 1987, later studying English and Hungarian literature at the University of Budapest and obtaining her PhD in English Renaissance literature. She published her first book of poems at the age of 23, and has since published several others as well as translations of writers such as James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, W.B. Yeats and John Updike. She is one of the key figures in George Szirtes’ anthology
New Order: Hungarian Poets of the Post 1989 Generation (2010);
her selection there includes ‘She Leaves Me’ [
52].

Wislawa Szymborska
(
b
. Bnin, Poland, 1923-2012) was one of Poland’s four great 20th-century poets. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996 ‘for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality’. Her mostly short poems are concerned with large existential issues, exploring the human condition with sceptical wit and ironic understatement.
‘Could Have’ [17].

Toon Tellegen
was born in Brielle in the Netherlands in 1941. He is a leading Dutch poet as well as a novelist and children’s author, and worked as a GP until his recent retirement. His tragicomic poems convey human predicaments with great economy and vitality, often rendering them in the form of dramatic stories or dreamlike events, as in ‘I drew a line…’ [
32].

R.S. Thomas
(1913-2000) was one of the major poets of our time as well as one of the finest religious poets in the English language and Wales’s greatest poet. Born in Cardiff, he was an Anglican priest, an isolated figure who worked in only three rural parishes over a lifetime. Most of his poetry covers ground he treads repeatedly: man and God, science and nature, time and history, the land and people of Wales.
‘The Bright Field’ [73]. The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, Sweden’s

Tomas Tranströmer
(
b.
Stockholm, 1931) is Scandinavia’s bestknown and most influential contemporary poet, and worked as a psychologist for 30 years. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states. Many use compressed description and concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conflicting elements or forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control, as in the poem included here, ‘Alone’ [
36].

His translator Robin Fulton has noted how such images ‘leap out from the page, so that the first-time reader or listener has the feeling of being given something very tangible, at once’, which has made Tranströmer’s poetry amenable to translation into other languages. Fulton’s authoritative English translations of his work are published in Tranströmer’s
New Collected Poems
(1997/2011) in Britain, the American edition of which is titled
The Great Enigma
(2006).

Derek Walcott
(
b.
St Lucia, 1930) is not only the foremost Caribbean poet writing today (as well as a dramatist and painter) but a major figure in world literature, recognised with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 ‘for a poetic
œ
uvre
of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment’. Most of his work explores the Caribbean cultural experience, the history, landscape and lives of its multiracial people, fusing folk culture and oral tales with the classical, avant-garde and English literary tradition.
‘Love after Love’ [66].