E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

The highly-influential and important poetry critic, editor, anthologist, scholar, writer and poet, Alfred Alvarez (Al to friends), has just died. He was very welcoming to me when I moved to London, and we met often for a time in Hampstead and elsewhere. I arranged for him to do readings and talks for the Oxfam series, and at Kingston university. Al was a funny, gracious, helpful guy, and a great talker - a real mensch, and a one-off character with a touch of genius and more than enough brilliance and bravery. He mentored my collection - the most personal and distressing of my life - about my breakdown and despair on receiving the news I was infertile - his advice was strict and invaluable. I already miss him. Here was a guy who had been friends with Sylvia Plath, Zero Mostel, and John LeCarre, who still had time for the lesser-known, the smaller fry. That was because he was a maverick, outsider, and shit-disturber - he was frank and daring, and had great taste, but also heart. ...

Ten years ago, as the UK prepared for a potentially illegal war against Iraq, Nthposition , edited by Val Stevenson , and myself, the site's poetry editor, hurriedly compiled a global anti-war anthology that was soon followed by many others.  The anthology, ten years later, has been written about in several academic studies, sometimes vilified, and was even mocked by the comedian S. Fry .  It was also downloaded tens of thousands of times, launche d in dozens of cities at once, from Russia to Japan to America to the UK - and was turned into a very rapid book by Salt (when it was featured on CNN).  The Guardian that year selected it as the most popular poetry book of the year, in terms of library loans.  It was called 100 Poets Against The War .  That's what I did, way back then, when younger, with my spare time; it is now available online for sale for one penny .

I've just received my review copy of Dear World & Everyone In it: New Poetry In The UK , edited by Nathan Hamilton .  I'll briefly comment on it, here, in weeks to come, but my main review on the collection will appear in The Wolf magazine.  What I will say now, and here, is that, surely, anyone interested in following the development of the young British poets generation of the last 15 years will want to own a copy of this collection, or at least read it, as it forms a part of the ongoing discussion.

Sylvia is Missing Flarestack Poets, 2012 Reviewed by Christian Ward Sylvia is Missing is an anthology featuring poems from Flarestack Poets’ 2012 pamphlet competition. The slender volume looks and feels like one of Flarestack Poets’ pamphlets, boasting a bright pink cover and a large, simple font. If you passed it in a bookstore, you would notice it immediately. There are no quotes from poets on the back cover, just a blurb that boldly says it contains “Poetry that dares outside current trends, even against the grain...collections that aren’t bus queues, from poets forging their own linguistic connections with the root-ball of experience.” I’m always wary when presented with statements like these, particularly if the poetry doesn’t always fall in line with their description. If you’re going to use such hyperbolic language to try and win me over as a reader, then it has to deliver - even more so when the pseudo-academic babble of ‘forging their own linguistic connections w...

Eyewear  highly recommends  The Wolf - A Decade: Poems from 2002-2012 .  It is a recently published anthology recording the incredible publishing efforts of Britain's finest little magazine of the new century, powerfully edited by James Byrne .  It includes poems by an impressive international list of poets, showcasing the always innovative and original editorial brio that makes The Wolf the lone strong voice it is: C.D. Wright, Bei Dao, Peter Redgrove, Adonis, Ilya Kaminsky, Evan Jones, Andrea Brady ... fearless, surprising choices, one and all.

A recent review of Rita Dove 's new anthology of 20th century American Poetry, for Penguin, by Helen Vendler , really takes exception to a multicultural Keith Tuma -style approach to the anthology.  Vendler is clearly on the side of a canon of well-made poems, versus Dove's attention to identity poetry, and poetry of the often marginalised.  Both sides can become entrenched.  I welcome diversity, but Vendler, in this case, seems to have a firmer grasp of history and quality.  Surely it must be wrong in a Kantian sense to include twice as much of Melvin B. Tolson as Wallace Stevens ?  Stevens is one of the pillars of American modernist and post-modernist poetics.  Tolson is an important outrider of the Harlem Renaissance, and a key African-American modernist.  If this decision gets more Tolson readers, that's fine.  But such large-scale anthologies do also need to keep some sense of balance.  I look forward to reading it myself.

I have received, recently, one of the most thoroughly enjoyable books of poetry I have read of late - Reading Poetry: An Anthology .  From Two Rivers Press, and edited by  Peter Robinson , it puns on the fact that this is actually a very local anthology, of poets writing from and about the much-maligned town of Reading (home to Ricky Gervais ).  Robinson observes that Rimbaud had an address here; Jane Austen was schooled here; Wilde was gaoled here. What makes the anthology so refreshing is that it isn't grandiose in its claims - this isn't the best of anything.  Indeed, Robinson's introduction is a model of true modesty.  These are simply poems by Reading-based poets, each prefaced with a poet's commentary on how this place has or hasn't impacted on them.  As it turns out, Reading, for all its small-town Englishness, has a thriving poetry community. The poems - mostly in the Larkin line - are well-written, observational, clever, and amusing.  I...

Professor Patrick Crotty has compiled a massive anthology of Irish poetry, The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry , that covers an impressive chronological sweep, and features many new translations, by the editor, David Wheatley, Tiffany Atkinson , and others; it also has a preface by Seamus Heaney .  At over 1,000 pages, it can hardly be said to be less than definitive. It would be foolish to carp, but odd gaps remain in the book, chinks that naturally intrigue critical arrowing in.  I am still reading the book, but a few questions - they are really just that - have emerged.  Firstly, why are the ballads put at the end, as their own section?  Some, like 'Down by the Salley Gardens' or Kavanagh 's Raglan Road lyric, could easily have worked within the main historical sections.  It seems an unnecessary distinction in genre.  More notably, where is the ' Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire '? More curiously, there are no poems by Oliver St. John Gogarty or A.E. - ...

A good Canadian blog has just run a feature on myself, rob mclennan and Marilyn Bowering , on the role and value and nature of anthologies, especially "Canadian" anthologies.  I am glad to be included in this group of poet-anthologists, and I think readers of Eyewear would find their comments of interest.

In 1957, James Reeves wrote an Introduction for a slim and relatively open-minded anthology of British and American modern poetry, published by Heinemann (London), The Modern Poets' World . Among the poets included are Lynette Roberts, FT Prince, George Barker, Hardy, Dickinson, Lawrence, ee cummings, Gascoyne, Heath-Stubbs, Empson , but also Frost, Eliot and Yeats . Notably, Whitman, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane are absent, though Ransom makes it in. Lowell is not yet in - nor any of the future confessionals. Dylan Thomas is there, Hopkins and Edith Sitwell , but not WS Graham . The sense of what was modern is jostled, often pleasingly. Blunden gets a large inclusion. He has not aged well, nor has Roy Campbell . Enright is in, but not Larkin . A lot of this might be down to acquiring rights and space limitations. It is still a good and surprising collection, only 100 or so pages of poetry. His Introduction says a lot, that was then no doubt new if perennial...

I've just received my review copy of New Order: Hungarian Poets of the Post 1989 Generation , edited and introduced by George Szirtes , from Arc Publications.  I lived in Budapest for almost five years, and met several of these poets.  It is a very good-looking book.  I look forward to writing on it for Eyewear this summer.

David Wheatley , a leading Irish critic-poet of his generation (those born in the 70s), is one of the poets selected to appear in the latest - and from the looks of it, invaluable (or at least intriguingly copious) - anthology of "modern" Irish poetry to appear .  Cynics might say these anthologies are as regular as "bloody buses" - but then again, if anthologies usefully update and revise canonical thinking, each one subtly or not so subtly, shifting the relations between poems, then, the more the merrier.  Eyewear looks forward to reading this one, edited by Wes Davis .

Jeet Thayil , the Indian poet, has edited an important new anthology of Indian poetry (in the English tradition), just out from Bloodaxe, a book Eyewear will review in time. Before then, it needs to be said that The Guardian ran a hugely blundering (and borderline offensive) review of the book - a dismissal by other means - on Saturday, an odd act since the UK has been in need of such a collection for more than a decade. I have long believed that the best of Indian English-language contemporary poetry, from the likes of Ranjit Hoskote , Vivek Narayanan , and Sudeep Sen , is among the best of contemporary poetry from anywhere - and its lack of availability, until now, was almost silly, if not sad. So, Thayil should have been thanked first, criticised, if at all, later. Anyway, he's responded .

Sad news. One of America's major poets, Hayden Carruth , has died . His own poems won prizes, and told truths, and his anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us , was a touchstone for generations of young poets discovering new ways in American poetry. He will be much missed.