| Ever since the Cuckoo Song ('Summer is y-comen
in') - British poets have found inspiration in the
British countryside - so there are an enormous number of poems
to chose from for a anthology of this kind. When you throw into
the mix (as they have done here): farming, trees, woods, birds,
animals, seasons, water and the Cotswolds - then the choice becomes
literally endless.
One of the main pitfalls of such an anthology is to slip into an
over-romanticised view of 'England's green and pleasant land' -
which the editors have successfully avoided here by
mixing old and new and serious and satirical. Certainly there are
old favourites by Wordsworth, Hardy, Hopkins, Housman, Clare and
Edward Thomas - but these are interspersed by modern, more off beat
poems which, for me, were the main focus of interest. I particularly
enjoyed Soil
by Roger McGough and I Saw A Jolly Hunter and On Being Asked to Write a School Hymn
by Charles
Causley. I was also pleased to see poems by
R.S.Thomas whose
portrayals of Welsh hill farming are always remarkably unsentimental.
And Betjeman's wonderful parody 'We
plough the fields and scatter the poison on the ground' was a brave
choice for a book sponsored by the Royal Agricultural College in
Cirencester.
A new anthology about the countryside should, I feel, also remind
us (though we shouldn't really need reminding in the 21st century)
that it's a fragile resource continually under threat from the
relentless pace of human expansion
- so the poem The Future of Forestry by CS Lewis (of Narnia
fame) was a timely inclusion: 'How will the
legend of the age of trees/ Feel, when the last tree falls in
England?/When the concrete spreads and the town conquers/The
country's heart; when contraceptive/ Tarmac's laid where farm has
faded,/ Tramline flows where slept a hamlet,/ And shop-fronts,
blazing without a stop from/ Dover to Wrath, have glazed us over?'
My main criticism of this anthology is not with the choice of
poems or the tone of the book - but with the layout of the
poems on the page. Call me a purist if you
like, but I prefer my poetry plain and unadulterated - and
certainly not with a chunk of biography sandwiched between the poem
title and the first line. Take, for example, Gerald Manley Hopkins'
exquisite, timeless curtal sonnet
Pied Beauty - which comes with
6 lines of blurb -
nearly as long as the poem itself. Why couldn't this information
have been added at the foot of the page or
in a biographical section at the end of
the book? For me this spoilt an otherwise varied and well chosen
anthology.
7/10
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