In 1998, two similar poetry anthologies were published: The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945, edited by Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford, and The Firebox: Poetry from Britain and Ireland after 1945, edited by Sean O’Brien. In neither did Jon Silkin, one of Britain’s most prolific and influential postwar poets, who had died the year before, appear. This, despite the fact that he had edited a well respected collection of first world war poetry, written the very popular poem “Death of a Son”, and had his work included on the GCSE syllabus. He also founded and edited for 45 years (with a three-year hiatus between 1957 and 1960) the poetry magazine Stand. But then inclusion in anthologies is always a matter of taste and circumstance.
The editors of this Silkin collection have done a supremely conscientious job. The book is not cheap, but it does include a lot of poetry. Silkin published 11 volumes from 1950 on; also included here are 11 sections containing uncollected and unpublished poems, which do his legacy no harm. His first collection, The Portrait and Other Poems, published shortly after he was discharged from national service as a sergeant instructor, was one he didn’t reprint, and he didn’t include any of its poems in collections published during his lifetime. But there is good work in it (such as “The Author Addresses His Razor”: “You do not flinch. / Your edge is fire and calm oiled seas. You know / Your ultimate power as I know mine, you are keen / For the end”. Note the double edge, so to speak, that he gives the word “keen”).
Silkin’s arrival on the literary scene coincided with that of the group broadly known as “the Movement”, whose members included Philip Larkin, Donald Davie and Kingsley Amis (when he was better known as a poet). He can be included among them, but the voice he developed was his own. It is resistant to parody because he wrote in so many registers. (Perhaps he didn’t make it into those postwar anthologies because the editors couldn’t think of a “typical” Silkin poem.) There is no country like it, to take the title of one of the poems from the 1954 collection, The Peaceable Kingdom: “My country is a fox’s country / With moors of drenching sunlight and olive trees, / And peace hanging from the branches in clusters of birds / There is no other country like it.” Never mind the lovely image of peace hanging from branches: what country has both moors and olive trees? It’s a clever act of dislocation, and you have to look at it closely to appreciate it.
It is possible he was expressing a personal sense of dislocation. Silkin was Jewish, and in his later poems, “Two Poems Concerning Jews in England” (one called “The Jews of England”, the other “The Jews in England”, both from 1993) he writes: “I had no voice, and borrowing one I made English harsh, / which is your tender complex English. / It is your language, and I must look for mine.” By contrast, many years earlier, he had written about the kinds of subjects that people do not immediately associate with the Jewish diaspora: Shetland, say, or flowers. The latter sequence contains some of the most tenderly observed nature poems I have ever read; one, “Iris”, performs that rare poetic trick of daring to rhyme using the same word (“Not striped like the first three, / Above these a further three”), which reflects a real confidence.
So this book is Silkin’s postwar anthology of his own: his gift and his voice – or voices, if you wish – finally have their own monument.
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