
The jacket of
My Life in Verse shows a rocky coast with the sea quietly breaking on the dark and backlit cliffs. I prefer to think of poetry as a peering into the mist. The book, published by Penguin Classics in 2009, accompanies the BBC series.
So what does it all mean? It means that Robert Webb selects the poetry chapter to do with
Modern Life, Cerys Matthews tackles
Britain in Poetry, Malorie Blackman gives us
Searching for a Voice, and
Love and Loss is left in the hands of Sheila Hancock. And the four of them have 250 pages to do it all in.
Do they succeed? Let's take a look. Webb, covering
Modern Life, gives T S Eliot pride of place. Now, T S Eliot as we all know was born in 1888. We are now living in 2009, or at least we were when
My Life in Verse was published. Notwithstanding, the 19th century Eliot graces the 21st century publication with 6 poems. But perhaps we can admit that Eliot actually lived until 1965 and therefore he is allowed by default to be
modern.
Maybe
modern, for the wo/man in the bankomat queue, began with the invention of the Internet, or when Neil Armstrong sang his poem from the Moon? I won't even wonder what the likes of Rupert Brooke have to do with
modern. Brooke, born even before Eliot, left his mortal coil as long ago as 1915. Allen Ginsberg, he is in anybody's book an observer of
modern life, was allowed only 2 pages from
Howl.
My Life in Verse is already beginning to remind us of
The Nations Favourite Poems, that Griff Rhys Jones offering from 1996 which curiously featured
the favourite poem by proxy, for the simple reason that
the Nation voted Kipling, Tennyson and De La Mare onto the podium. But then, when all is dusted and done, the BBC is simply being the BBC when it comes to defining our taste in poetry.
Cerys Matthews had an easier task.
Britain in Poetry is not a difficult category to fill. W B Yeats with 9 poems, Dylan Thomas with 7 poems, and Robert Burns with 5 were the standard bearers. A poem from Seamus Heaney, another from Patrick Kavanagh, a couple from Ted Hughes and so on. No risks. No pack drill. Louis MacNeice got in with
Snow.
Malorie Blackman filling the void known as
Searching for a Voice journeys from William Blake to Hilaire Belloc via Emily Dickinson (4 poems), Langston Hughes (7 poems) and Ogden Nash (5 poems). A curious mixture of styles and topics. A search for a voice it is...
Finally when it comes to
Love and Loss Sheila Hancock turns in large measure to the usual suspects; think Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Dickinson, Wordsworth, Rossetti, Shakespeare's Sonnets (29, 30 and 73). Elizabeth Barrett Browning, of whom Virginia Woolf said "her only place in the mansion of literature [...] is downstairs in the servants' quarters" is with 5 poems the Hancock star.
My Life in Verse is a journey through poetry along a main road. The signs for the less-known attractions are in the main ignored. It was an opportunity lost.
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gw2011
My Life in VersePenguin Classics hardback
ISBN 978-1-846-14187-4
18.99 GBP