This book is, as its title may suggest, an anthology of contemporary* poems written in, about, or by people from the greatest city in Yorkshire (and therefore Europe); and much like the city itself, it's an exceptionally diverse collection, ranging widely in theme, style, length, and [sorry] quality.** I did find that reading them aloud in a strong local accent did make basically all of them better - but common sense aside, there's more than a few that did leave strong impressions on me, talking about everything from walks in the Peaks and the joys of multiculturalism and crumbling old graveyards and homeless people on West Street and trees and rivers and students in pubs and bus drivers and the scrub-dank backdrop of post-industrialism that seeps through this city & deeper through t'memories of its longer-lived inhabitants. If you like poetry and love Sheffield, there's guaranteed to be several pieces at least in here that'll tingle you somewhere.
Because that above paragraph is more like an unasked-for spout of Sheffieldy things but also I'll be damned if I'm going to actually write out meaningful reflections on the book as a whole because that's not really a plausible stake given the variety therein*** - I'll instead just provide a list of all the poets who contributed to this book, in alphabetical order, with those in italics being the fine folks who then edited together t'anthology as a whole: Anthony Adler - David Annwn - Charlotte Ansell - Simon Armitage - Ann Atkinson - Angelina Ayers - Elizabeth Barrett - Paul Bentley - John Birtwistle - Matt Black - Joe Caldwell - Clare-Jane Carter - James Caruth - Liz Cashdan - Debjani Chatterjee - Matt Clegg - Jarvis Cocker - Martin Collins - Stanley Cook - Sarah Crewe - Amanda Dalton - Beth Davyson - Russell Dobson - Berlie Doherty - Jenny Donnison - Mark Doyle - Carol Ann Duffy - William Empson - Suzannah Evans - Neil Farrell - Veronica Fibisan - Roy Fisher - Leah Fleetwood - Cliff Forshaw - Andrew Forster - Michael Glover - Sally Goldsmith - Cora Greenhill - Alan Halsey - Geoff Hattersley - Jeanette Hattersley - Lewis Haubus - Ray Hearne - Rob Hindle - Jenny Hockey - Alex Houen - Gary J. Hughes - Karl Hurst - Chris Jones - Donna Jones - Maria Kardel - Linda Kemp - Christine Kennedy - David Kennedy - Jenny King - Agnes Lehoczky - Margaret Lewis - Yann Lovelock - George MacBeth - Jack Mann - E. A. Markham - Roger McGough - Ian McMillan - Allison McVety - Julie Mellor - Bo Meson - Geraldine Monk - David Morley - Helen Mort - Andrew Motion - Fay Musselwhite - Beverley Nadin - Daljit Nagra - Sean O'Brien - Conor O'Callaghan - Alan Paine - Lesley Perrins - Adam Piette - John Quicke - Karl Riordan - Peter Riley - Rony Robinson - Shelley Roche-Jacques - Ann Sansom - Peter Sansom - Seni Seneviratne - Susan Shaw - Diana Syder - David Tait - Bryn James Tales - Sarah Thomasin - Katharine Towers - John Turner - Carolyn Waudby - Christine Webb - Linda Lee Welch - Ben Wilkinson - Noel Williams - Tony Williams - River Wolton.
As much as I'd love to provide an in-depth analysis of each poet individually based on their work as compiled in this anthology, my arm is about to fall off and nobody reads this shit anyway. Goodnight
* So none of these feature, more's the pity.
** Don't @ me, most are pretty decent and well over a third are genuinely good-to-great poems, but there are also far more than an entirely-forgiveable share of poems that have virtually no literary or imaginative depth to them and are little more than (-[insert place name] [insert anecdotal memory of activity there] [mention local history nugget or item of reputation associated with aforementioned place name] [oops, add some adjectives!]-), and like - while yeh, these technically are Sheffield-related poems, but I could've stood to see a fair bit more editorial grit. Even the pieces by people literally employed by universities to teach poeting are, in my opinion, miles less noteworthy than the best poetry book to come out of Sheffield in recent years as far as I'm aware.
*** Also because I started reading this book in maybe autumn of 2018 and have only today finished it, so doing anything remotely comprehensive (as per standards I've occasionally been known to hold myself to for these posts) would basically require re-reading the first two-thirds or so, which I'm not going to do solely for the sakes of this blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment