The Faber Book of Beasts, edited by Paul Muldoon, review by Pat Boran

The Faber Book of Beasts, ed. Paul Muldoon. Faber and Faber, £14.99 hb.
Beyond Bedlam: Poems Written out of Mental Distress. Ed. Ken Smith and Matthew Sweeney. Anvil Press Poetry. £7.95 pb.
By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember. Ed. Ted Hughes. Faber and Faber. £7.99 pb.

PAT BORAN

(Poetry Ireland Review)

In the short introduction to his The Faber Book of Beasts, Paul Muldoon reminds us that the first animal poems were 'among the first poems of any kind' (and indeed a glimpse at the margins of many early Irish manuscripts, or into the body of recent collections, shows that the fascination, thankfully, has stayed with us). To Muldoon's mind, this is because 'animals bring out the best in us' (though they are also used here to satirise, see Robbie Burns' 'Bookworms', and to symbolise the unspeakable, see Robert Herrick's 'The Captiv'd Bee: or, The Little Filcher'). For the most part, though, the chosen poems support Muldoon's thesis, and where they don't quite, it might be because, as Swift concludes in his 'The Beasts' Confession to the Priest', 'Beasts may degenerate into men'.

What Muldoon has achieved is an anthology in which the individual poems are almost always deserving of collection, their thematic connections aside. In many ways, this is the real test of an anthology, that its poems fascinate and entertain individually as well as collectively. Here, then, are fair-sized clumps of Beowulf, snatches of anonymous nursery rhymes (including 'Baa Baa Black Sheep', where I was surprised to find that the maid of the penultimate line had become a 'dame', but then that's how it goes with the oral tradition). There's also, of course, the expected Chaucer, Blake, Shakespeare, Auden, Frost and Heaney, but also wonderful surprises such as James Wright's 'A Blessing' in which a relatively low-key encounter with two Indian ponies by the side of a road suddenly leads into a marvellous, magical epiphany.

Inevitably there are questions raised (indeed Muldoon's introduction positively invites them, as it should), some for the anthologist himself, others for the poets under his generous umbrella. To Muldoon: why, for instance, isn't there room for Neruda's 'A Dog has Died' - one of my own personal favourites - in a book that 'in general' draws the line at poetry in translation while going on to offer such delights as Yehuda Amachai's 'A Dog after Love' or Miroslav Holub's much anthologised 'The Fly'. But, carping aside (Muldoon never resorts to such base puns), there's very little to justify complaints about this selection, and in the end the real questions are for the poets themselves and are what will bring readers back to this book and to the familiar and unfamiliar poems set by it in new light. Why, for instance, is Elizabeth Bishop's 'Armadillo' not called 'Owls'? Could Marianne Moore have pushed the opening of her 'Elephants' any further without making it an elocution test? And how the hell does Auden manage to get away with his sideways dismissal of 'brilliant sillies like Hegel' in his 'Address to the Beasts'?

The delights, though, far outnumber such silly preoccupations. Among other things, this anthology reminds us just how good Ted Hughes is (on bullfrogs, in particular, 'disgorging your gouts of darkness like a wounded god'), how spooky Frost could be (see 'The Draft Horse'), and how, despite our limits as curators of the planet, occasionally one of us manages to produce a poem or a line that seems to somehow render new and familiar at once our beastly neighbours. Even D H Lawrence, who for me too often indulges in declaration and repetition to keep my attention, can save himself with lines such as this description of bats: 'Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags / And grinning in their sleep.'

Paul Muldoon has decided not to include any of his own often brilliant invocations of/salutations to animals, which is a pity. But he has made a book which will live, and where alphabetical order means that Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale' is preceded by Thomas Gray's 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes'. You can imagine Muldoon's chuckle of delight at that particular juxtaposition.

At many levels, poems written out of mental distress (the sub-title of Ken Smith and Matthew Sweeney's anthology 'Beyond Bedlam') have to grapple with obstacles to communication. Indeed, mental distress and communication difficulties often go hand in hand. The hearing of incorporeal voices, or the failure to attend to the real voices of the outside world, are often among the first signs of some mental difficulty.

For this reason, Smith and Sweeney's collection of poems both by and about those afflicted with such disorders is something of an exception to the rule that poems in anthologies must satisfy individually as well as collectively. Often, in fact, the real glimpses into mental disorder come in those poems which fail to achieve the level of coherent communication.

Sweeney's own 'Bagpipes' in which a man has 'gatecrashed a bagpipers' convention / in his own home, that was no home now' or Selima Hill's 'Voices of Bulgaria' ('He's found a bear the same size as his mother / and walks about the dayroom holding her') are convincing reads on psychologically altered states, but poems like John Horder's 'The Sick Image of My Father Fades' (in which the speaker's father 'used to take me / Tied up in a sack to the cliff's edge / And threaten to throw me over') get considerably closer to the awful truth, while the tiny, resolutely lowercase four-liner 'ha ha' ('ha ha / hee hee / help help / me me') is almost unbearably affecting (that sense of haunting echo conveying so much), though the poem makes little concession to comment or explication.

In the opening to their introduction, Smith and Sweeney suggest that 'It is the unconscious that drives poetry' and in compiling their anthology from the work of well-known poets (and often sufferers) such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Ezra Pound, alongside the work of sufferers who have used poem-making as a therapeutic tool, they manage both to elucidate the inner workings of the poetic art and to raise some very interesting questions about the wisdom of madness. There's nothing from Shakespeare collected here, but when Lear takes to the moors and invokes the wrath of the elements, he might be the stereotype of both the madman and of the poet.

Ted Hughes' 'By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember' is an extraordinary and timely book, not just for the poems it contains, but for Hughes' introduction to the art of memorising poems, both the practice and the technique. Where the vast majority of the readers of this issue of PIR, for instance, can be presumed to have suffered a school system which taught 'learning by rote' (and which now shies away more and more from suggesting any kind of memorising at all), some other aspect of memory must have kicked in at some stage to make them (you, all of us) fans of poetry.

To Hughes' mind, preceding the introduction of learning by rote, and never quite wiped out by it (despite the best efforts of 'the Puritan/Protestant ascendancy of the [English] Civil War') the technique of memorising by linking images together was what kept oral cultures alive. And it is hard to argue. How, for instance, might Homer have memorised (if obviously not verbatim) the mass of lines of his Odyssey or Iliad were there not recourse to some other organising principles than mere rote?

In seven short pages, Hughes explains the principle in a manner clear enough for both adults and young students of poetry to follow (in short a combination of learning by rote and the exaggerated visualisations re-popularised by 'memory educators' such as Paul Goldin) before revealing his top 101 poems for processing. Dead poets are in the majority, showing that strong end-stopped rhyme and metre are certainly a help, though R S Thomas gets a look in, alongside Heaney, and, stepping back decades rather than centuries, Sylvia Plath is remembered for 'Crossing the Water' ('This is the silence of astonished souls') rather than for any of her rawer, unforgettable, rhyming outbursts.

Hughes suggests that 'in most verse worth remembering, the lines always yield some kind of pattern, though often the pattern is hidden, and not so much 'heard' as 'sensed through hearing''. The one pity about this anthology, then, is that it does not present a wider range of tones and emotions, and take the risk of placing more unproved 'moderns' alongside their more secure predecessors. For if poetry is to find its way back into our memories, and into the memories of our young, then it must meet us close to home, close to where our imaginations reside.