Hilary Menos reviews Contraflow: Lines of Englishness 1922–2022, selected by John Greening & Kevin Gardner (Renard Press, 2023)
Does poetry sell? Not a lot, with the exception of a few big dead poets and a few – very few – big live ones. Anthologies used to sell, and you can see why. Can’t commit to spending a whole book with just one poet? An anthology offers a different poet on every page – surely one will work for you. Feeling low? Try one hundred poems to make you smile – each poem the funniest one in a poet’s oeuvre. Are you interested in parenthood, spirituality, farming? There’s a themed anthology to suit you. And the belief that you can, in one book, get the ‘best’ poems – the cream of the crop – is pretty compelling. The poetry section in a bookshop often carries more anthologies than anything else. In fact, there are probably too many now, and they don’t sell like they used to. What can a new anthology add to the growing pile?
Contraflow promises something a bit different. It doesn’t offer English poetry, but poetry about Englishness. And rather than being arranged chronologically or alphabetically, its poems are governed by two opposing chronologies – “two timelines running in different directions” says Ian McMillan, in his effusive foreword. So poems from the 1920s “rub stanzas” with poems from the 2020s and so on. This has, apparently, the “almost miraculous effect” (oh Ian, really?) of making the reader “examine the poems of each decade” in the “direct sunlight” of the other. It’s an interesting notion. Does it work? Well, McMillan has set the bar high and the answer is of course ‘No’, if we’re holding on to “almost miraculous” as a measure of success. But by reasonable standards, does it work? Hey, slow down, there’s more to say first, before we get on to the judgy bit.
First of all, why ‘Englishness’? Well, the politics of identity is very fashionable at the moment. Perhaps Renard felt that an interrogation of Englishness – especially one that promises lively commentary from Black and Asian writers – might sell well. More importantly, the last hundred years has seen vast economic, cultural and social changes in England, and in what it means to be English. We’ve seen the end of the British Empire and the rise (and the beginning of the fall) of the Commonwealth. There has been a partial erosion of the class system, shifts in gender roles, and growing ethnic diversity. More recently, the Brexit vote has crystalised the formation of a new English identity – one which is nationalist, anti-EU, and which regards foreigners as a threat. The two Contraflow editors, John Greening and Kevin Gardner, refer to these “tumults” in a ten-page ‘Conversation about Englishness’ at the start of the book. There’s plenty to say about Englishness, if you’re interested.
Which is the first hurdle this anthology has to jump. Aren’t we all fed up with the English now, their exceptionalism, their pride, their bull-headed arrogance? And here they are again, banging on about what it’s like to be English. Will that sell in Scotland, Wales or Ireland? Probably not. Perhaps it may in America, parts of which retain some fondness for us. One poet I spoke to was pretty scathing. She said her Scottish partner would chuck this book in the fire. An anthology of poems about what it is to be English needs to be saying something pretty interesting about Englishness today to earn a place on anyone’s bookshelf.
An anthology of poems about what it is to be English needs to be saying something pretty interesting about Englishness today to earn a place on anyone’s bookshelf
So what are the editors saying? Well, their title implies that Englishness is not a fixed, linear concept, and their subtitle suggests multiple versions of national identity rather than a single, unvarying one. In their conversation, they say the idea of Englishness is complex, and many-faceted, and not what it used to be. So far so obvious. They say that there is a “resonant continuity of tone” running through the anthology. That many poets of colour have contemplated what it is to be English, but “there are few reliable patterns that indicate gendered or racial ways of looking at the subject”. That there are poets of colour who express nostalgia for an England of the past. That there has been a gradual shift to what they term a “new English pastoral”, tied in with a “new, detoxified sense” of what Englishness might mean. Well, the anthology does include poems that illustrate this, but I’m not sure it’s the whole story, or even the main one. This ‘Conversation about Englishness’ is all starting to sound a bit self-satisfied, if not self-congratulatory. Maybe two white, educated, older men aren’t quite the right people to choose what goes into an anthology on Englishness?
So why choose the year 1922 as the starting point? Two reasons. Firstly, James Joyce’s Ulysses was published in February 1922 and ‘The Waste Land’ in October 1922. This was also the year Virginia Woolf published Jacob’s Room, her first radically experimental novel, and began writing Mrs Dalloway. Ezra Pound declared it a new era in the spring 1922 issue of the avant-garde American literary journal Little Review. History has vindicated him on this count. 1922 still looks like year zero – the year modernism started.
The other (no less compelling) reason must have been that 1922 to 2022 makes a neat century. Marketing departments love easily graspable concepts (ten poems about frogs; a poem for every day of the year; 100 poems to break your heart). So a century’s worth of poems covering the first stirrings of Modernism to pretty much the present day is a no-brainer, sales-pitch-wise.
A century’s worth of poems covering the first stirrings of Modernism to pretty much the present day is a no-brainer, sales-pitch-wise
And this is where I think this anthology comes somewhat unstuck. It covers a lot of ground, and brings itself bang up to date with poems by contemporary poets that haven’t yet stood the test of time. In A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, Robert Graves and Laura Riding say, of this type of collection, that the “new Corpus” would do best to present poetry “removed by at least a generation from the politics of contemporary literature.” Wikipedia says a generation is “generally considered to be about 20–30 years”. So if Graves and Riding were editing this book they wouldn’t consider anything published much after the year 2000. But then they wouldn’t be bringing out an anthology at all.
Actually, the poems chosen to represent the noughties and the teens include work by Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Andrew Motion and Sean O’Brien, and few would say they haven’t earned their stripes. But poems from the 2020s constitute a mixed bag. Some of the poets included here have been in the public eye for a while and clearly merit inclusion, writers like Grace Nichols, Penny Shuttle, Philip Gross and David Constantine. Meanwhile, a few of the poems by newer poets are self-evidently strong and relevant. One cracker is Hannah Lowe’s sonnet, ’The Only English Kid’, about schoolboy Johnny “in his spotless Reeboks and blue Fred Perry” who, when presented with evidence of racism,
[…] would sit there quietly, looking guilty
for all the awful things he hadn’t done.
On the other hand, this poem is deemed “mendacious” in a review of Contraflow by Christopher Madden on The Poetry School website, an unfair description to my mind. For me, it encapsulates the variety of Englishnesses existing in England today, and the feeling that the bulk of the white population – while clearly having benefited from England’s past injustices – can’t be blamed for them on an individual or personal level. Another humdinger for this themed anthology is ‘Foxglove Country’ by Zaffar Kunial, which uses language as a way in to an exploration of his own identity. “Xgl / a place with a locked beginning / then a snag, a gl / like the little Englands of my grief”.
So yes, there are good, recent poems here. But I may not be the only reader who feels certain others are worryingly weak. And this poses a real problem. Greening and Gardner hope that by putting old poems alongside newer ones, each will shed light on the other, generating insights that a one-way chronology or alphabetical ordering would not. But whatever system of ordering you use, when one poem is clearly a big hitter while its newer neighbour is rather slight, what I get, as a reader, is the sense of an opportunity wasted.
… when one poem is a big hitter and the other is rather slight, what I get, as a reader, is the sense of an opportunity wasted
And many of the older poems in the book are real heavyweights. Of course they are – their feebler contemporaries have had anything up to a hundred years to fall by the wayside. We’re talking Hardy, Thomas, Lawrence, Larkin, Auden, Plath. What recent poem can stand being placed next to T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece? (It’s something of a poisoned chalice – like being seated beside Jonathan Miller or Germaine Greer at supper.) What do Greening and Gardner bookend ‘The Waste Land’ with? I’ll tell you. ’Lord of Misrule’ by Gregory Leadbetter, and ‘Innocent England’ by D. H. Lawrence.
‘Innocent England’ is a satire, channeling Lawrence’s outrage at the suppression of his painting exhibition in London in 1929. The authorities feared for public morals because he’d painted accurate anatomical details on his nudes. It opens:
Oh what a pity, Oh! don’t you agree
that figs aren’t found in the land of the free!
Fig-trees don’t grow in my native land;
there’s never a fig-leaf near at hand
when you want one; so I did without;
and that is what the row’s about.
This is light and amusing. And it links with the Leadbetter poem ’Lord of Misrule’ in that both poems protest against official sanction. In ‘Lord of Misrule’, the poet writes:
They will trespass at dawn
To drag me from my enseamèd bed
In the name of the crime they’ve dressed as the law
And ungratefully frame my jest as offence.
The real Lord of Misrule was a peasant appointed to oversee the revelries at the Feast of Fools, and Leadbetter’s dedication is to Ian Marchant, who knows a bit about revelry. The poem itself? I’ve tried to like it. And I’m pleased that Greening and Gardner have chosen a less familiar bit of ‘The Waste Land’ to plonk it next to (the first stanza of ‘The Fire Sermon’). Because if they’d used the opening (“April is the cruellest month”) or even the Phlebas-the-Phoenician bit, then Lawrence’s ‘Innocent England’ would have seemed even more trite and Leadbetter’s poem even more diminished. (The latter still reads, to me, as a pale imitation of Eliot’s style.)
But why, when finding a poem by Daljit Nagra, choose ‘Parade’s End’ and not ‘Look We Have Coming to Dover’, a response to Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’? Why ‘Vision’ by Simon Armitage when there are so many more ‘Armitagey’ poems to choose from? Why choose ‘Tell me not here …’ by A. E. Housman over the splendid ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’ by Robert Browning? And while Kunial is strong (and one of the few poets to have two poems selected) perhaps including something by Fran Lock might have brought an edge to the study of how language affects identity.
The poetry critic Dana Gioia once defined an anthology as “a book that omits your favourite poem”
I know, I know, it’s not my anthology. The poetry critic Dana Gioia once defined an anthology as “a book that omits your favourite poem”, and Jeremy Noel-Tod says the anthology reviewer inevitably ends up “sharing their own roll-call of omissions, modestly revealing in the process their own taste and erudition”. I put my hand up to this.
However, here’s a disclaimer. I happen to be English, and since I’m living in France, I am occasionally made aware of my Englishness, though in general I don’t feel particularly English, nor do I feel that England has much to be proud of. I come from Luton, and there’s not a lot to celebrate there. (The fibreglass flamingoes in the fountain at Luton Arndale Centre? The six-year experiment with an astro-turf pitch at the Hatter’s stadium in Kenilworth Road? Tommy Robinson and his EDF crew?). If I have any allegiance it’s to the English language, which is magnificent, but mostly because it’s a glorious blend of other languages. My intellectual loyalty is to France, because it’s secular and a republic and isn’t class-based in the way the UK is, and to the EU because the EU is all about working together, co-operation not division. In an age when we’re meant to be thinking globally and breaking down barriers and building connections, should we really be focussing on Englishness?
Ah, anthologies are difficult to review. Almost as difficult as they are to compile. All credit to Greening, Gardner and Renard for creating this rather beautiful book, with its art-deco-inspired cover, quality paper, and some peachy poems within. (I was particularly glad to be reunited with Anne Stevenson’s ‘A Prayer to Live with Real People’ and thrilled to discover ‘Costa Brava’ by John Gohorry.) I might not think the volume goes far enough in reflecting attitudes of marginalised groups towards Englishness, but it gestures in the right direction. As for the contraflow ordering principle, I think the book might work just as well – better, even – if ordered chronologically. I found the present system more confusing than helpful, but maybe I haven’t spent enough time with the book to see its good points. I still think there are issues, though, with the entire concept of an anthology (who is doing the choosing, the issue of permissions, the prevalence of the ‘anthology poem’). So I’m going to give Beachcomber, of the London Express, the last word. Here he is, as quoted by Robert Graves and Laura Riding in A Pamphlet Against Anthologies:
ANOTHER ANTHOLOGY
Mr. Dribble’s ‘Hundred Best Telephone Numbers’ is all that an anthology should be. It is comprehensive and free from prejudice. Moreover, it includes many new numbers, the compiler having gone to the little-known outlying exchanges for fresh talent. 28443 Pobham, for instance, is a genuine discovery. Nearly all the favourite West-End exchanges are well represented, but one misses the superb 00010001 Mayfair. Also, one could have done with more Park numbers. It must be admitted, however, that the compiler has done his work so well that he has included numbers to suit all tastes. And if I were condemned to a life in prison or on a desert island, and were allowed to take six numbers with me, I should find them all in this anthology. One may conclude with the hope that each one of these hundred numbers may find an answering echo in at least one exchange.
Hilary Menos is editor of The Friday Poem
