LARB Reviews an Anthology of London's Poetry

Following England's magnificently poetic summer, the Los Angeles Review of Books has a review of Mark Ford's London: A History in Verse. Of course, it wasn't too terribly hard for Ford to find good poets from England's capital. The challenge, it seems, was deciding who to leave out:

London’s vitality is its powerful folk identity, the combined stories and personalities of its mongrel people — Napoleon’s “nation of shopkeepers,” servant boys and fine ladies and rakes and priests — and the stories it tells about them. Canonical characters of course include Good Queen Bess, Will Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson and his cat, Edward Lear and his cat, Oscar Wilde in Cadogan Square, and John Betjeman at St Pancras Station. And perhaps the most powerful presence of all: Anonymous.

...The contemporary list is noticeably, overwhelmingly, led by Faber’s (admittedly crucial) roster of poets. Admirably, Chivers, Warner and Borek are all published by indie presses. (Though Chivers has blogged that he was never asked permission to be represented in the book, I’m glad he is.) British poetry is undergoing a bit of a renaissance lately. There has been a plethora of exhilarating poetry in recent years, much of it engaged in various ways with London as a city, exploring her history, textures, presents and futures, her languages. Of course, every poem in this book deserves to be here. The trouble is that there are so many more.

I miss Anna Robinson’s glottal-stopped voice in The Finders of London, for example, about the really poor who have always populated London — children and others who made their livings scavenging, including the so-called mudlarks along the river. Or something from Jon McCullough’s The Frost Fairs, which reclaims secret gay histories, some written in Polari (an underground slang used by homosexuals and theatre people). Glyn Maxwell’s description of the burning of the Tate and Lyle factory during the Blitz, from his verse radio play The Sugar Mile, is unforgettably vivid. And dissident Chinese poet Yang Lian’s poem “Stoke Newington Scene,” from his Bloodaxe collection Lee Valley Poems celebrates the importance of the “local” to even the most international Londoner. I’d also have loved to see Cockney skinhead poet Tim Wells’ class-war dating poem, “Epsom,” in this anthology. It is hilarious and spot-on about the conflict between inner London and its suburbs, a little bit of a legend on the London performance scene, and a genuine working-class storytelling voice.

But this is the only real criticism reviewer Katy Evans-Bush reserves for this anthology. After all, with Jonathan Swift, Geoffrey Chaucer, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Plath, and William Shakespeare in the roster, London's poetry isn't anything to scoff at. Read the full review here.