Here to Eternity: An Anthology of Poetry

Publisher and industry reviews

Jacket review

'A thoroughly illuminating anthology...a welcome treasure trove.' Times Educational Supplement"

UK Kirkus review

Our current Poet Laureate has always taken seriously his ex-officio responsibilities as an educator, and this copious selection, unbounded in time and space (but with an understandable leaning toward Britain and the 20th century), exemplifies his sense of public purpose. There's a dazzling wealth of imagination here - Wordsworth, Whitman, Shakespeare, Lowell, Amichai, Plath, Hardy, Yeats, Heaney, MacNeice, Cavafy, Neruda, Celan, Hughes, Donne, Pound, Marvell and Burns, to name but a few at random (unchronologically, as the book presents them). The problem is that there's no connection between them other than the selector's sensibility, and this makes the book hard to get to grips with. Motion has had a clever, simple, populist idea: to structure the poems concentrically, progressing from Self to Home to Town to Land to Work to Love to Travel to War to Belief to Space. Such thematic clarity enables Motion to set up some interesting conversations between adjacent poets, but also results in regrettable curiosities of selection: T.S. Eliot crops up three times but there's nothing from The Waste Land; Basil Bunting warrants a cheap satirical poem but nothing from Briggflatts; Wallace Stevens, one of the most challenging writers of the century, has to be content with the bantamweight Anecdote of the Jar. In part such oddities may result from a penchant for the explicable and the accessible. There are gems aplenty, though it's difficult to prize them out of their unflattering setting. There are fine pieces by living writers (especially British and Irish) who deserve to be better known, such as Mick Imlah, Bernard O'Donaghue and Medbh McGuckian. There's a song lyric by Bob Dylan (surely one of his worst). And there is much that has been deadened by overexposure elsewhere (perhaps the only way to revivify such poems is to see them in a less general context). A granary of wheat and chaff, more didactic than inspiring, but worthwhile if it makes a thousand new converts to poetry, as it might. (Kirkus UK)

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