From Rupert Brooke and Thomas Hardy to today’s famous names, such as Seamus Heaney, Stevie Smith, Derek Walcott and Jackie Kay, A Century of Poetry Review plots the story of poetry through the past century

 

  

 

 

 

A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY SPECIAL COMMENDATION


Published to mark the Poetry Society’s centenary, A Century of Poetry Review is a fascinating selection of the poems and essays that have been published in the magazine during its 100-year history. Many
are reproduced in the anthology for the first time since original publication.

From Rupert Brooke and Thomas Hardy to today’s famous names, such as Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, the anthology plots the story of poetry through the past century. Other contributors include: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith and Jackie Kay. Edited by Poetry Review’s current Editor, Fiona Sampson, this inspirational, 400-page book is published for the Poetry Society by Carcanet Press, RRP £14.95.

"Anybody even remotely interested in English poetry will be rewarded by a dip inside this big, rich collection, which offers the overview of chronology but which also – like any really good slim volume – can be opened at random in the sure prospect of alighting on something remarkable and engaging." – PBS Bulletin, Winter 09

"A fascinating collection... and proof, should anyone require it, that British poetry is alive and kicking." – Blake Morrison, The Guardian

From Fiona Sampson's Introduction

It was going to be easy: I would simply cherry-pick one hundred highlights from the Poetry Review archive.  After all, a centenary anthology is essentially celebratory.  It has a licence to echo the curatorial practice of great travelling exhibitions, like The Treasures of Tutankhamun or, more recently, Treasures of the Winter Palace. Presenting important pieces out of context isn’t just Cook’s-touring for the MP3 generation, I thought: it can also bring these things to an audience which doesn’t have access to them in their original setting.

Very few libraries hold a complete archive of Poetry Review. The Poetry Society’s own holdings are no longer quite complete: one can’t help wondering how much this has to do with its own public access remit. The British Library holds a complete set, but other copyright libraries do not. The holdings of private collectors remain private.

Even with unlimited access, reading one hundred years of Poetry Review is a sizeable, and not always particularly digestible, task.  In part, this is because there’s simply so much of the magazine. It was originally published monthly, then from 1915 to 1951 bi-monthly – although in a format smaller than today’s – and didn’t become quarterly until 1952. But this indigestibility also comes from a peculiar unevenness of quality. When editorial control has been taken in-house, either through direct editing by the Chair of the Society (during the long reign of Galloway Kyle, from 1916-47) or a house editorial board (as under the Chairmanship of Thomas Moult, from 1952-62), the magazine ceases to be a literary review and becomes an organisational mouthpiece. Yet where it is edited by a serious poet or critic, whatever their poetic orientation, it has contributed to literary history, transcending passing institutional concerns to rehearse contemporary attitudes to poetry itself.

Sometimes fussy, by turns cantankerous and charming, the Review, read over its lifetime, emerges as a fascinating, infuriating institution, conscious of its responsibilities as what Michael Schmidt has called the “magazine of record”. Its public role leads it to comment on everything from the appointments of Laureates and Professors of Poetry to the responsibilities of editors ; to publish literary memoirs of purely specialist interest as well as of literary celebrity as well as to print newly-discovered posthumous work, whether by Scott or Sorley [...]..