Andrew Marr
SCANNING THE CENTURY: THE PENGUIN BOOK OF THE 20th CENTURY IN POETRY edited by Peter Forbes (Viking)
It is, of course, a completely bonkers idea, which is why it is so attractive. The story of the century in first-person prose; film; economics – yes. But in poetry?
After all, few art forms have struggled for popularity and relevance as desperately as poetry during the century now leaving, and modern poetry has turned resolutely away from public life, becoming increasingly inward, self-reflexive and complex. Even the achievements of the Russian greats, Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, were hardly public poetry in the traditional sense – it would have been suicidal to try that under Stalin.
Given this, it is remarkable that the book works at all. Yet it does. Peter Forbes has written a brisk, chatty introduction to each chapter of poems grouped around a period or theme (for example, End of Empire, Decolonisation 1947) and the semi- narrative intention allows him to dig out whoever he can find to get us through wars, dictatorships, science and Alzheimer’s.
On the whole, the results are convincing. One can imagine someone whose modern history is sketchy coming out feeling they’d had a satisfying whistle-stop tour of the century, conducted admittedly by a wise and garrulous maniac.
Forbes’s problem is that the best poems of the century are not necessarily the same as the poems which best describe the century. The answer, probably, is to wrench the structure of the book until you’ve got as many wonderful poems in as it will fit. Of this one, my main criticism would be: not enough wrenching.
But when Forbes does find things that are both glorious in their own right and capture important themes – Les Murray’s The Quality of Sprawl or Frank O’Hara on the film industry, for example – one feels doubly pleased: a goal in extra time.