
Being Alive
Description
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Staying Alive didn't just reach a broader readership, it introduced thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry, giving them an international gathering of poems of great personal force, poems with emotional power, intellectual edge and playful wit. It also brought many readers back to poetry, people who hadn't read poetry for years because it hadn't held their interest. Being Alive gives readers an even wider selection of vivid, brilliantly diverse contemporary poetry from around the world. A companion anthology, Being Human (2011), completed this poetry trilogy. Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (2012) selects 100 poems from all three anthologies, a third from each. These anthologies have been welcomed not only by poets but by a wide range of well-known people respected for their work in fields other than poetry - all avid readers of poetry. They want to recommend these books above all other anthologies of contemporary poetry.
'I love Staying Alive and keep going back to it. Being Alive is just as vivid, strongly present and equally beautifully organised. But this new book feels even more alive - I think it has a heartbeat, or maybe that's my own thrum humming along with the music of these poets. Sitting alone in a room with these poems is to be assured that you are not alone, you are not crazy (or if you are, you're not the only one who thinks this way!) I run home to this book to argue with it, find solace in it, to locate myself in the world again.' - Meryl Streep
'Truly startling and powerful poems.' - Mia Farrow
'These poems distil the human heart as nothing else... Staying Alive celebrates the point of poetry. It's invigorating and makes me proud of being human.' - Jane Campion
'Staying Alive is a blessing of a book. The title says it all. I have long waited for just this kind of setting down of poems. Has there ever been such a passionate anthology? These are poems that hunt you down with the solace of their recognition.' - Anne Michaels
'Staying Alive is a magnificent anthology. The last time I was so excited, engaged and enthralled by a collection of poems was when I first encountered The Rattle Bag. I can't think of any other anthology that casts its net so widely, or one that has introduced me to so many vivid and memorable poems.' - Philip Pullman
'Usually if you say a book is "inspirational" that means it's New Agey and soft at the center. This astonishingly rich anthology, by contrast, shows that what is edgy, authentic and provocative can also awaken the spirit and make its readers quick with consciousness. In these pages I discovered many new writers, and I've decided I'm now in love with our troublesome epoch if it can produce poems of such genius.' - Edmund White
'Staying Alive is a wonderful testament to Neil Astley's lifetime in poetry, and to the range and courage of his taste. It's also, of course, a testament to poetry itself: to its powers to engross and move us, to its ability to challenge and brace us, and to its exultation. Everyone who cares about poetry should own this book.' - Andrew Motion
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Content
- Intro
- Description
- Title Page
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1: Exploring the World
- This Poem.
- The Iceberg Theory
- Introduction to Poetry
- The Horses of Meaning
- Symposium
- Not the Furniture Game
- A Song of Lies
- Mappa Mundi
- The Poem
- Saint Francis and the Sow
- Celebration
- At the Fishhouses
- Tremors
- Night Journey
- The Orient Express
- Ithaka
- What If This Road
- Poetry of Departures
- The Last of the Fire Kings
- The Appointment
- The Mayo Tao
- Echoes
- No Matter What, After All, and That Beautiful Word So
- Migratory
- Close-up on a Sharp-shinned Hawk
- Inventing the Hawk
- The Hawk
- The southern skua
- 2: Taste and See
- The Simple Truth
- The First Green of Spring
- O Taste and See
- From Blossoms
- Peaches
- Blackberry Eating
- Blackberrying
- A Kumquat for John Keats
- Crab Apple Jelly
- A Jar of Honey
- Sweetness, Always
- For Desire
- Wild strawberries
- Horses
- The Horses
- Horses at Christmas
- Calf
- How Everything Adores Being Alive
- In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus
- Cleaning the Elephant
- The Bull Moose
- The Fish
- The Peace of Wild Things
- Gift
- Not-Yet
- A Pre-Breakfast Rant
- Hunger for Something
- Talking to God on the Seventh Day
- Hunger
- Dark Pines Under Water
- Toxicity
- Planet Earth
- The Ball
- The Passionate World
- World Truffle
- You, Andrew Marvell
- Look and See
- Stationery
- The Present
- Blessing
- The Rain
- So Much Happiness
- Happiness
- The Third Body
- On Pilgrimage
- The Summer Day
- The God Who Loves You
- The Ikons
- Veni Creator
- Prayers of Steel
- 'Last night while I was sleeping'
- Mission Impossible
- from Counterpoint
- Missing God
- The Forest of Tangle
- Credo
- Retro Creation
- God Says Yes To Me
- Sheep Fair Day
- Oh God, Fuck Me
- 3: Family
- Smoke
- The watch
- the lost baby poem
- Heartsong
- Scan at 8 weeks
- Ultrasound at 13 weeks
- The Sonogram
- The Ringing Chamber
- Ninth Month
- An Unborn Child
- Prayer before birth
- Births
- The night before the last day of January
- Driving to the Hospital
- The Harvest in March
- And let us say
- Tempo
- Counting
- Love
- Morning Song
- Natural Son
- Baby Song
- Newly Born Twins
- My First Weeks
- Nursling
- The Victory
- Stance
- Red Onion, Cherries, Boiling Potatoes, Milk -
- from Elizabeth Near and Far
- For Andrew
- Let Him Not Grow Up
- Daystar
- The peacock of motherhood
- Single Parent
- Bearhug
- Cartoon Physics, part 1
- A Tray of Eggs
- Skating with Heather Grace
- Benevolence
- Infancy
- The Mother
- Sunlight
- Starlight
- from Clearances
- My Father
- Genetics
- Digging
- I See You Dancing, Father
- My Papa's Waltz
- My Father Is Shrinking
- Little Father
- My Grandmother's Love Letters
- Climbing My Grandfather
- Custody
- Second Home
- How Many Times
- No fairy story
- House
- The Cockfighter's Daughter
- Daddy
- Waste Sonata
- The Survivors
- The Strait-Jackets
- Self-Portrait as a Warao Violin
- But till that morning, ain't no one gonna harm you
- Hollis Street Square, Halifax
- Returning North
- Time Out
- The blessing
- Walking Away
- Mother-May-I
- Kid
- Guests
- from Book of Matches
- Johnson Brothers Ltd
- Laws of Gravity
- Transmutation
- Family
- Animals
- Animals
- Forty-one, Alone, No Gerbil
- Putting Down the Cat
- On the euthanasia of a pet dog
- 'Noticing a man unable.'
- Walking the Dog
- 4: Love Life
- Love at First Sight
- Story of a Hotel Room
- Tryst
- Love after Love
- Love, Like Water
- To My Love, Combing Her Hair
- The White Porch
- Rosy Ear
- Variation on the Word Sleep
- The Blindfold
- Silk of a Soul
- The Fist
- What It's Like To Be Alive
- Alive
- Misery and Splendor
- This Hour
- After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
- Love
- The Great Fires
- Knowing Nothing
- Warming Her Pearls
- Look at These
- I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine
- Valentine
- Ode to the Onion
- If Love Was Jazz
- Litany
- from 100 Love Sonnets
- On Raglan Road
- Raglan Lane
- Touch Me
- Misgivings
- The Hunter Home from the Hill
- The Waterfall
- Atlas
- An Arundel Tomb
- 5: Men and Women
- Men and Woman
- The Dress
- The Mutes
- The Inspection
- In the men's room(s)
- A Simple Story
- The Change
- Mrs Midas
- Spunk Talking
- Four of the Belt
- A Man in the Valley of Women
- Prayer To Be with Mercurial Women
- Bloody Men
- And Another Bloody Thing.
- sexpot
- I'll Be a Wicked Old Woman
- Ballygrand Widow
- 'What Do Women Want?'
- Rapunzstiltskin
- English Girl Eats Her First Mango
- Pleasure
- Done
- Please Can I Have a Man
- Man in Space
- Wedding
- The Tightrope Wedding
- The Whitsun Weddings
- The Pattern
- Les Grands Seigneurs
- Being a Wife
- The Ache of Marriage
- The Applicant
- Good Gifts
- Breakfast
- Ill-Wishing Him
- My Way
- Love Rats
- Recension Day
- Before That
- The New Bride
- Sleeping with the Fishes
- Let's Go Over It All Again
- Sonnet
- 6: Being and Loss
- The Emperor of Ice-Cream
- Somebody Else
- Mirror
- The Mirror
- Cat and Mirror
- Transmutation
- Original Face
- The essential
- Pond
- The Circus Animals' Desertion
- Measuring the Tyger
- The black heralds
- from Dream Songs (155)
- The Death by Heroin of Sid Vicious
- Otherwise
- The Mistake
- Che Fece.Il Gran Rifiuto
- Speaking About My Cracked Sump
- Ophelia's Confession
- Hairbrush
- Elvis the Performing Octopus
- Flight
- Autumn Cancer
- Chemotherapy
- Transmutation
- She Replies to Carmel's Letter
- Caesura
- Heart
- Descent
- Broken Moon
- Names
- Alzheimer's
- Have We Had Easter Yet?
- Lucky
- Brilliance
- Flames
- The Very Rich Hours
- The Embrace
- What's Left
- poem to my uterus
- to my last period
- The Pruned Tree
- Tomcat
- The Hoist
- Lore
- Here
- Who's Joking with the Photographer?
- Weathering
- 3 A. M.
- The Shade
- Dune Road, Southampton
- The Box
- The Murderer Is a Cow
- Moving House
- This room
- Kindness
- 7: Daily Round
- The Way
- The Nerve
- Killing Time #2
- Bagpipe music
- Life
- City Lights
- Snow in North Jersey
- Grief
- To Virgil
- Mind the Gap
- My Life Asleep
- New Year Behind the Asylum
- Great Things Have Happened
- Night Taxi
- Message on the machine
- Clearing a Space
- Clearance
- Turn Again
- In Spite of Everything, the Stars
- Searching for Pittsburgh
- Zombies
- Home
- What Work Is
- Alive or Not
- At the Florist's
- Her Retirement
- Toads
- The Panic Bird
- Managing the Common Herd:
- Fight Song
- A Malediction
- Some People
- TV
- The Way We Live
- Every Blessed Day
- Pity the Bastards
- Photographs of Pioneer Women
- Names of Horses
- The Ballad of John Barleycorn, The Ploughman, and the Furrow
- Sugar Cane
- Fish Tea Rice
- Everything Is Going To Be All Right
- The Round
- 8: Lives
- Lives
- The Story
- Transmutation
- Acting
- The sea question
- The Sea
- No Problem, But Not Easy
- Seder Night with My Ancestors
- The Dacca Gauzes
- Still I Rise
- Sadie and Maud
- Glasgow Schoolboys, Running Backwards
- The Magpies
- The Loaf
- Imperial Measure
- Nostalgia
- Plague Victims Catapulted over Walls into Besieged City
- Part of the crowd that day
- Desertmartin
- Ecclesiastes
- Now the City Has Fallen
- from Going On
- Honour killing
- Geography Lesson
- Refugee Blues
- My father carries me across a field
- Escape Journey, 1988
- Someone else's life
- Migration
- Limited
- Arrival 1946
- The City
- Malenki robot
- The Mouse
- The Emigrée
- The Ideal
- A Poet's Confession
- Tongue
- Conversation
- Losing a Language
- From the Technology of Tears
- from The Country Without a Post Office
- 'The Rustle of History's Wings,' as They Used to Say Then
- Jerusalem
- Jerusalem
- In This Land
- The Sari
- Wind
- 9: Mad World
- ABC
- The Dog
- 'I reason, Earth is short.'
- Earth Dweller
- The End of the Owls
- The end of the world
- The Horses
- The Disappearances
- The Shield of Achilles
- Five Ways to Kill a Man
- Pigtail
- Shemà
- The survivor
- 'First they came for the Jews.'
- What Happens
- To Whom It May Concern
- 'When Statesmen gravely say'
- Explaining the Declaration
- Untitled
- War Has Been Given a Bad Name
- He Embraces His Murderer
- from A German War Primer
- Song of the Juggler
- Conversation with a Survivor
- Twelve Bar Bessie
- from An Atlas of the Difficult World
- At Last the Women Are Moving
- Ourstory
- The low road
- Revenge
- Dedication
- Ratatouille
- In Memory: The Miami Showband - Massacred 31 July 1975
- Casual Wear
- The Diameter of the Bomb
- The Red and the Black
- The Wound Man
- History
- The Hearth
- Musée des Beaux Arts
- Reality Demands
- Try to Praise the Mutilated World
- A Prison Evening
- To the Days
- Sometimes
- Spells
- Glad of these times
- Staple Island Swing
- 10: Ends and Beginnings
- The Trees
- Late Snow
- Candles
- Night in Al-Hamra
- Candle poem
- A Piece of the Storm
- Going Without Saying
- Wet Evening in April
- For the Anniversary of My Death
- Final Notations
- Gravy
- In the Nursing Home
- Lovebirds
- Beyond Harm
- The Entertainment of War
- Mid-Term Break
- Sounding the name
- When a Friend
- And another thing.
- Detour
- Tullynoe: Tête-à-Tête in the Parish Priest's Parlour
- Concordiam in Populo
- A cortège of daughters
- After the Funeral
- A Last Marriage
- Musician's Widow
- Anniversary
- A Marriage
- Love Song
- Poems
- The Eyes
- Curtains
- Not at Home
- A Room
- We Are Living
- What the Living Do
- Sea to the West
- Girls
- A Mistake
- Migration
- A Prayer for Sleep
- The Task
- from Autumn Testament
- Some Questions You Might Ask
- A Riddle: Of the Soul
- 'There will be a talking.'
- For the Children
- In the Next Galaxy
- Let Evening Come
- from Four Quartets
- Further reading
- Acknowledgements
- Index of writers
- Index of titles and first lines
- Copyright
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