Nicholas Lezard Reviews Penguin Modern Poets No. 1

At the Guardian, Nicholas Lezard reviews iteration numero uno of the re-vamped Penguin Modern Poets Series: a collection featuring work by Anne Carson, Emily Berry, and Sophie Collins.

Getting people to read good contemporary poetry is never easy, but in 1962 Penguin cracked it with their Modern Poets series. Each slimmish volume featured a representative selection from three poets; there were two series (1962-75, 1995-97), and No 10 – 1967’s The Mersey Sound, featuring Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten – sold 500,000 copies.

And now, after a two-decade gap, we have a new series. The first thing to note is that this initial volume wholly consists of work by women. Good. By my calculations, to reach gender parity, Penguin would have to put only one male poet in the next 27 volumes. (Obviously that’s not going to happen: the next book in the series, featuring Michael Robbins, Patricia Lockwood and Timothy Thornton, will be published at the end of October.)

This collection hits the ground running, both in terms of the work chosen and the way the first poem starts: “Actually, it’s Tuesday, and I’m taken aback.” This technique, starting in medias res, is of course as old as Homer, and it’s the opening line of Emily Berry’s “Dear Boy”, the title poem of her first collection, which won two awards (Forward First Collection, Hawthornden). We pick up the thread of the story in the next 11 lines: a voicemail saying, “I can explain everything!” And the rejoinder: “You know perfectly well I believe/ nothing worthwhile is explainable.”

There is deep, anxious wit in her work. The prose poem “Some Fears”, a list of dozens of phobias separated by semicolons, illustrates what poetry does best: make us look at the world anew, and not necessarily with ease. “Fear of catching anxiousness from dogs; fear of ragged-right margins; fear of exposure after pruning back ivy ...” (A nice touch, that, the fear of ragged-right margins, as that is how the work is laid out.)

Read more at the Guardian.