Reviews of Women’s Work and A Twist of Malice

 

Eva Salzman and Amy Wack (Editors) Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English (Seren, 2008), £12.50.

Joy Howard (Editor) A Twist of Malice: Uncomfortable Poems by Older Women (Grey Hen Press, 2008), £8.

Compiling any anthology can be a daunting prospect for an editor. The specific challenges of collating an anthology of women’s poetry are so significant that Eva Salzman feels the need to address them in her introduction to the new anthology, Women’s Work. Many pages are dedicated to what is referred to as the ‘polemic before the poetic.’ Who do you include? Who do you leave out? Is there a place for women-only anthologies? Can anyone decide upon a list of the best contemporary women writers writing in English? Is it hubris to define a canon whilst many of the selected poets are still alive and kicking? Without the gift of godly omniscience how can you be certain that all the work of all the worthiest poets is included? How can you know which of those you choose will stand the test of time? Can you be sure that each of the poems you have selected gives a true flavour of the banquet one would feast upon if able to read a wide selection of each of the chosen poets’ work?

The selected canon comprises 270 poets. Of these 142 have strong connections with the USA. Many readers from outside the USA will be familiar with the work of such writers as Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Mew, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov (born in England but living mostly in the US) and perhaps a few others such as A.V. Christie, Denise Duhamel and Kim Addonizio whose poem ‘What Do Women Want?’ was so well received on the Being Alive (Bloodaxe) performance tour. Without a comprehensive knowledge of the rich vein of women’s poetry to be found in the United States of America it is hard to make judgments about this selection. What I can say is that I valued the opportunity to read poems by unfamiliar American writers.

The British poets were a more familiar feast; the delectable offerings of Carol Ann Duffy (‘Small Female Skull,’a special treat), Jo Shapcott’s melt-in-the-mouth ‘Muse’ and tasters from other excellent poets including Gwyneth Lewis,Wendy Cope, Maura Dooley, Jackie Kay, Jane Draycott, Alice Oswald, Patience Agbabi, Jenny Joseph, Carol Rumens, Gillian Clarke, Clare Pollard, Kate Bingham, U.A. Fanthorpe, Ruth Padel, Gwyneth Lewis, Kate Clanchy, Helen Dunmore, Polly Clark and Sophie Hannah. There were many others of course but the list is already too long to have mentioned in a review and so I’ll let you discover the ones I have missed out as you dip into your own copy. As well as other excellent British voices it was wonderful to discover the less familiar voices of poets from other countries: Tess Gallagher, Jane Hirshfield, Heather McHugh, Marie Howe, Sara Teasdale and Janet Frame.

Every reader will have his or her own preferences and it is all too easy to disagree with an editor’s selection. Eva Salzman comments in her introduction that May Swenson, Anne Carson and Nina Cassian are ‘particularly regretted omissions.’ A few problems regarding the granting of permission for poems to be released and factors relating to the cost involved necessitated the omission of a number of poets one would expect to find here. I was sorry not to be able to read any of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry in this selection (she declined to be in a women only anthology) and I wondered why Edith Sitwell, Frances Bellerby, Robin Hyde, Rosemary Dobson, Jane Cooper, Elizabeth Jennings, Anne Szumigalski and Molly Holden, all of whom appeared in the 1987 Faber Book of 20th Century Women’s Poetry, were not featured. I was also a little confused to find, in an anthology intending to focus on women’s writing in the late twentieth and the beginning of the twenty first centuries, that poetry of several nineteenth century poets had been included: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Edna St Vincent Millay and Emma Lazarus. It was, of course, a pleasure to read them but I was left questioning why these particular writers were included and some of their contemporaries were not. There were also a few contemporary poets whose place in the book seemed questionable and I couldn’t help wondering if it would have been better to have replaced their work with the work of some better known nineteenth century women writers.

The introduction claims, ‘You’ll find here a dazzling plurality of idiom, style and subject, well-established poets appearing with lesser known and newer voices deserving of a wider audience: the latest contemporary writers set in context against their heritage, to represent the full sweep of the modern period.’ Classic and new treasures can be found in such places as the small selection of sonnets ranging from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnet 43’ to Fiona Sampson’s more playful ‘Hay-on-Wye’ and there are a few ghazals, pantoums and a small sprinkling of other forms; their appearance is rare however and, for my taste, I would have enjoyed a fuller sweep of styles. There were many excellent poems in this anthology. Many were well known, others were chosen to show another string to a famous poet’s bow. I enjoyed the linguistic and tonal richness in the work of Carol Ann Duffy, Jo Shapcott, Amy Clampitt, Sarah Arvio and Sarah Hannah (to whom this book is dedicated) and thoroughly enjoyed much of the powerful writing in this carefully presented and most informative anthology, but I still longed to feel more of the old ‘blood-hum’ singing its way to me through the pages.

As I said at the beginning, editing such an anthology is a worthwhile but difficult pursuit and it may well be too overwhelming to complete on your own. It is no surprise therefore to find Eva Salzman thanking Amy Wack for her great surety and enthusiasm in this epic task. I can only begin to imagine the heated discussions that must have taken place as poems were placed and replaced and the anthology took shape. When editing an anthology the phantoms of poems you have missed often come back to haunt you. Eva Salzman and Amy Wack have much to celebrate in the final collection; there are some magnificent poems in here and there is a variety of less familiar poems too, especially from the United States. I think this book will be of great interest particularly to an academic audience. I suggest Eva and Amy open a bottle of wine, kick off their poetry-searching shoes for a while and celebrate. After publishing this book, which took three years in the making, they deserve a well-earned rest.

A Twist of Malice (Grey Hen Press) calls to the reader to pick it up from the shelf. The cartoon by Jacky Fleming of a grumpy old woman with a secretive smirk and an intriguing twinkle of the eye, set on a cream coloured square against a rust coloured cover, ideally conveys the tone of the poems inside. Every tiny detail was carefully considered by the editor, Joy Howard, who has a rust-never-sleeps attitude to life. Grey Hen Press aims to collect and to share exciting new work of today written by older women, ‘Especially those who have reached their sixties before realising their writing potential.’ As rust sets in they are keenly aware that time is not on their side.
Many of the contributors to this anthology evidently do love poetry, are passionate about their writing and have spent some years polishing and honing their writing skills. These poets are serious about and dedicated to producing their best poems while at the same time retaining a sense of humour. They take the perfection of their art seriously but are able, one senses, to have a good laugh at themselves and to thrive within a spirit of camaraderie. The editor, Joy Howard, has no great pretensions about this anthology. The purpose is, she states in the Preface, ‘First and foremost … to entertain.’ Some of the poems are gems; you have a refreshing sense of there being people behind these poems who write in a variety of styles and who have a heartfelt desire to connect with their readers.

The anthology is divided into six sections from, All’s Well that Ends Badly to And Another Thing. In the first section, Ann Alexander builds on words found in a restaurant setting in order to, through humour, show the painful spaces between the lady who is ‘plain vegetarian quiche’ and the couple who are ‘Chateaubriand’ and ‘the well-hung game’. In the Ghosts, Ghouls and Visitations section, Christine Webb’s poem, ‘Exploit’, slips and lifts from the tongue. Vowels roll out to suit the mood, to move the readers’ emotions and to dance them out on a journey:

When, that February evening, a scuttling leaf
shape-shifted into a frog, to springheel
over the pavement, out to the thundering headlights
while we stood gawping,

flinching as it swerved and emerged by the breadth
of a webbed toe between giant wheels, still leaping,
passionate and elastic …

the poem continues to drift, to shift, to shape-shift as it takes us with it. Christine Webb has four poems in this collection. The poem ‘Martha’ (from Gospel Truths) is also well worth a mention. Writing from the point of view of Martha, she offers up a more grounded poem that exhibits the same feeling for the sounds of the words. The sound resonates subtly through the poem and as the subject also resonates a whole weight of meaning is loaded into the final, muttered, single word of, ‘God’ :

Mary’s made the best choice,’ he says.
I stare. Is this a joke? My good lamb
hardly out of his mouth, beard stained with gravy:
‘You should prioritise more. Don’t spend so long
in the kitchen.’ And he’s on his way,
picking a thread of meat from his teeth. God.

Michele Hanson writes of this anthology, ‘Nothing mimsy about these poems by older women. Fierce, funny, disturbing and fairly viscious. Lovely.’ (The Guardian) I completely agree. There are many good and some excellent poems in this collection that would appeal to a wide audience and these are exemplified in the work of Angela Kirby, Anne Alexander, Helen Burke, Anne Drysdale, Kate Foley, Angela France, Marianne Burton, Ruth Sharman, Ruth Silcock, Christine Coleman, Joy Howard, Berta Freistadt, Alice Beer, Anne Stewart and Jenny Morris to name but a few. I enjoyed reading them and can think of many friends who are likely to enjoy them too.

As to women’s anthologies and the question Eva Salzman poses in her introduction to Women’s Work, ‘Should the writing be all that should count?’ Yes, I think it should — but I am ever the optimist. I am aware of the silent spaces in anthologies of the past, of the debt we owe to women who came before us and of the gender imbalance which did and often still does, to a certain extent, favour men and yet I still hope we will begin to see new canons of writing where poets, male and female, are fairly represented on the merit of their poetry alone. Eva Salzman mentions that Bloodaxe include more poets who are women in their anthologies than many other publishers do. As more women’s poetry becomes known and as newly discovered excellent poems emerge let’s hope this work finds its way into the anthologies of other publishers too.

For my own taste, I would love to see more anthologies like Carol Ann Duffy’s anthology of Love Poems, Hand in Hand, where a magnificent selection of poems, written and selected by excellent writers who happen to walk in the body of a woman or of a man, walk out together. In the meantime anthologies such as Women’s Work and A Twist of Malice give us a flavour of the work of women writing today and a taste of what there is out there to celebrate.