WHEN CHOOSING GIFTS, handsome anthologies often beat slim volumes, perhaps because the giver hopes to instruct as well as entertain. With this in mind, Josephine Hart’s Catching Life by the Throat: How to Read Poetry and Why (Virago, £15/offer £13.50) is a seductive possibility. Her enthusiasm is infectious. She has taken eight important poets, including Auden, Emily Dickinson and Larkin, and introduces each one with a straightforward, informed biographical page. The CD in the cover has poems read by stars such as Ralph Fiennes, Juliet Stevenson and Harold Pinter.
James Fenton’s The New Faber Book of Love Poems (Faber, £17.99/£16.19) has no truck with the educational mode. He puts his poets into alphabetical order and relies on the surprises of juxtaposition: American folk song next to Auden, for instance; or lesbian blues songs of the 1920s next to wry lyrics from the 19th-century poet Amy Levy. There are several surprising inclusions: Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, for instance, usually read as being about the waning of religion, here presented as a poem about the primacy of love.
For readers seeking a judicious account of much-loved writers, Michael Schmidt’s The Great Modern Poets: An Anthology of the Best Poets and Poetry Since 1900 (Quercus, £14.99/£13.99) is a good bet. His short introductions to the 50 poets he has chosen cogently argue the main issues around their lives. And each poet has a surprisingly touching photograph.
If you want a strong, individual voice as well as variety you might look at Ted Hughes: Selected Translations, edited by Daniel Weissbort, (Faber, £20/£18). Hughes fired a generation to read Miroslav Holub, János Pilinszky and Yehudah Amichai, brought dramatic new versions of Aeschylus, Racine, and Euripides to the London stage and gave us a magnificent Tales from Ovid. Here Weissbort offers a seriously chosen sampling of a poet who valued translation as highly as his own verse.
Paul Muldoon’s The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures on Poetry (Faber, £25/£23) has an idiosyncratic approach to poets from W. B. Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop to Eugenio Montale and Marina Tsvetaeva. He is obsessed by etymology, puns and literary allusions, frequently highlighting borrowings we might have missed. I found this most persuasive in his account of Yeats’s All Souls Night.
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This has been altogether a rich year. There is Alice Quinn’s edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments (Carcanet, £16.95/
£15.25), which proved controversial when it was published in US; it is a huge trove of verse discovered among Bishop’s archive at Vassar. Alice Quinn has annotated the manuscripts and facsimiles brilliantly.
There is a string of slimmer volumes to choose among. Peter Redgrove’s posthumous volume The Harper (Cape, £9/£8.50) throws a visionary light on the world around him, even as he moves on into his own darkness. Eavan Boland, who has often articulated the dilemmas of being a woman poet in Ireland, takes on other powerful themes in her New Collected Poems (Carcanet, £14.99/£13.45): emigration, exile, the violence of Irish history, deaths in famine. Dannie Abse’s Running Late (Hutchinson, £9.99/£9.49) has all his usual gentle lyricism; he remains one of our few great poets of married love.
Then there is a poet altogether new to me. John Hayne’s Letter to Patience (Seren, £7.99/£7.59), written in effortless terza rima, brings the bars and politics of post-colonial Nigeria vividly to life. Simon Armitage’s Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid (Faber, £12.99/£11.69) has some wonderfully ambitious poems and a scattering of powerful translations; Ruth Fainlight’s Moon Wheels (Bloodaxe, £8.95/ £8.50) allows her insomniac mind to puzzle over plants, painting, and her own ageing in a characteristically ironic voice; while Hugo Williams, in Dear Room (Faber £8.99/£8.54), describes love lost and remembered in poems both wistful and raw, his craftsmanship always impeccable.
Vicky Feaver’s, The Book of Blood (Cape, £9/£8.55) has themes of jealousy and revenge, which may seem familiar, but her control of pace and tone and some marvellous imagery make this a memorable book.
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Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle (Faber, 8.99/£8.54) greets old friends in the afterlife with affection: sometimes those he met only on the page, such as Cavafy and Neruda. His warm, direct voice can be heard even across so many other singers. And there are many others I have no space to mention.
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