The Best British Poetry 2011

The Best British Poetry 2011, edited by Roddy Lumsden (Salt)

You don't expect to find the most startling line of a poetry anthology in the introduction but here Roddy Lumsden advises us that,

around a quarter of the poets here are under 30, representing a coming generation that I believe to be the strongest ever in UK poetry

It's a lavish claim, not one that can be verified for a while yet and not one that all of us will necessarily be around long enough to see proven or otherwise. But, who can say. Maybe we are on the brink of the finest Golden Age that will outshine, say, the 1590's, 1820's or 1910's (and, please, add your own choice of generation in here, too).

This title has been welcomed as the overdue equivalent to a similar, long-established American one. Whether Britain needs everything that America has just because they have it is another thing one might wonder about. We got the credit crisis from them as well as gangsta rap. And, as Roddy readily anticipates, there are inevitable problems with proclaiming the 'best' and we shouldn't take that title too seriously. Whereas The Forward anthology picks out highlights from new books as well as magazines, this book is like an uber-magazine, not much more expensive that an issue of any one of them but selected from a wide range of them so someone like me who no longer has subscriptions to any can have a look at some recommended poems.

One never expects to like a very high percentage of poems in a magazine and so it's to this books credit that it contains a satisfactory quotient of things one is glad to have seen. While one can be confident that Ian Duhig and Sasha Dugdale are going to be worth having, I was pleasantly surprised by Deryn Rees-Jones and, a new name to me, Lizzi Thistlethwayte. Every poet has a biographical note that contains their own comments on their featured poem. These divide broadly equally, it seems, between those who appear to have had a very clear idea of exactly what their poem was going to do and those who only found out during its making or are perhaps not even quite sure yet.

For me the mystery goes on surrounding the industry darling, Ahren Warner, whose meta-narratives refer us through, here, a Baudelairean transaction within comparative linguistic approaches. It is clearly me that is the loser in having not the faintest idea of what it means or why it's so admired and my main regret is that I won't be anywhere in the vicinity when the time comes to register whether such poems take their place in the long and glorious history of poetry in English or are making their way sublimely into a cul-de-sac.

As so often, anthologies are unsatisfactory in being able to allow so few examples of each individual's work- and here it is only one each. The composite impression of poetry in 2011 is unfulfilling and half a dozen poems by much fewer poets would make a better book, with more chance of appreciating the talents that are in it, although would not meet Roddy's purpose. Which is why I think roughly the same amount of money spent on Sasha Dugdale's collection was the better spent.

I'm well aware that it is entirely my fault that far too much of this book passes me by but at least I tried, fed money into the machine, and I keep on trying while realizing that for me the real thrills of poetry are elsewhere.