Stanzas in the Stacks

Here's another selection of the substantial collection of poetry down in the stacks, a relic of the days when county libraries had their special subjects, the better to order inter-library loans. One of Exeter's was poetry, which is good news for us.

Ruth Fainlight and Elaine Feinstein were both poets who also translated the work of others. Fainlight was born in New York but moved to England when she was 15 and has lived in London for the bulk of her life. She was good friends with Sylvia Plath towards the end of her life, and was also married to Alan Sillitoe, one of the working class writers of the post-war years who got unjustly lumbered with the 'kitchen sink' label. She translated the works of other poets from French and Spanish into English, and spent time in both countries. As well as her poetry, she has also written short stories and libretti for operas.

Elizabeth Jennings was a poet from the post-war period who was born in Boston - but that's Boston, Lincolnshire. She was based in Oxford for a good deal of her life, and was part of a post-war poetic movement which was closely allied with Philip Larkin. Jennings was also a librarian at the Oxford city library for a number of years. Inner struggles with religious faith and mental health were a focus of her work, although we should always be cautious about reading them through a direct autobiographical filter.

Elaine Feinstein was part of the Cambridge literary scene, although her outlook was internationalist. She was greatly influenced by the Russian poets, and had an abiding interest in Russian and Eastern European culture. This in part arose from her keen awareness of her Russian and East European Jewish roots; her grandparents all came from Odessa in Ukraine. She translated the poetry of Anna Akhmatova into English and also wrote a biography of her, Anna of All the Russias, which we have a copy of down in the stack (we also have her biography of Pushkin). Her translations of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva were instrumental in bringing her work to a western audience. Fainlight also wrote novels and dramas for radio and TV, but central to all her literary endeavours was her identity as a poet. The Celebrants is a fairly early collection from 1973; we do have her first, In A Green Eye, which was published in 1966. There's also a small press collection from 1972, At The Edge, which was limited to 150 copies. Unfortunately, ours is not one of the first 50 which were signed by the author. There's a loose leaf inside which corrects a small but significant error. The 's' in 'snow' was omitted from the original print run. The verse in question becomes far less cryptic once it is re-introduced.

We have a general anthology of the poems of Anna Akhmatova, the subject of Elaine Feinstein's biography, although not her translations (they are by the American poet Stanley Kunitz). Another Complete Poems edition, published in 1992, has translations by Judith Hemschemeyer. Akhmatova was a figure of immense significance in 20th century Russian literature, and in its wider culture. Her endurance of both post-revolutionary crackdowns on supposed dissident movements and the paraonoid surveillance of the Stalinist terror state, and her expression of the Russian experience through these turbulent years, made her an icon for many. The cover photograph conveys this near-holy status perfectly. The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse contains a wealth of Yiddish poetry in translation. The mirroring of English and Yiddish texts on opposite pages has a beautiful symmetry, given that Yiddish reads from right to left. The biographical sketches of the poets included collectively map out the 20th century Jewish diaspora from Russia and Eastern Europe to America, with the likes of Mani Leyb, Anna Margolin, H. Leivich, Kadya Molodovsky, Jacob Glatstein and Aaron Zeitlin finding a new home in New York. Others, such as Dovid Hofshteyn, Perets Markish and Moyshe Kulbak fell victims to the anti-semitic purges of the Stalinist years, their place of execution, often after years of incarceration, left unrecorded.

Here are some books in blue. There's really no other reason to group them together, although there are always connections and links to be found if you look attentively. Kathleen Raine was well known as a literary essayist and critic, writing informed and insightful books on William Blake, WB Yeats and the artist Cecil Collins. Collins provided the cover for her 1967 essay collection Defending Ancient Springs, which we have a copy of in the stacks. She was born in Ilford in Essex, going on to study at Girton College, Cambridge, the first women's college to be established in that institution. She always felt an affinity for the mystical stream in British literature and art (not something you associate with Essex) and this is to be found in her own poetry. Ursula Vaughan Williams is always likely to be spoken of as the soulmate of English composer par-excellence Ralph Vaughan Williams. But she was a writer n her own right, publishing novels, biographies (including one of her husband), libretti (notably for Herbert Howell's Hymn to Cecilia) and poetry. Harold Pinter was renowned for his plays and film scripts; works such as The Caretaker, The Birthday Party, The Servant and The Homecoming are modern classics, and led to the coining of the adjective 'Pinteresque'. Poems were evidently a literary side road for him, but few are and far between as they were, they are gathered here. Gerard de Nerval was a right character, or whatever the French equivalent to that equivocal phrase might be. Struggling with his mental health throughout his life, his prose and poetry was fevered and dreamlike, sharing much in common with his contemporary Charles Baudelaire. He proved a significant influence on the decadent writers of the fin-de-siecle and on the surrealists of the twentieth century. Apparently he had a pet lobster called Thibault who he would take for walks on a lead fashioned from blue silk. This seems implausible and more than likely apocryphal given the lobster's favouring of the aquatic medium.

One Foot on the Mountain is an anthology of British feminist poetry written between 1969-79, a key decade which saw the flowering of the second wave of feminism. The radical intent is set forth in the prefatory quote by American poet and activist Robin Morgan, who talks of poetry thus: 'It can create the rage, the longing the joy, the courage, the consciousness to make real revolution. For poetry is a dangerous force; it can move mountains; wars have been made over it...When people have been robbed of their own culture and forced to identify with the oppressor's culture, there is no real way they can make a revolution, unless of course they use his means and his weapons and wind up like him. But, when contrarily, people begin to create or regain their own culture, there is no stopping them'. The writers include familiar names such as Alison Fell, Sheila Rowbotham and Zoe Fairbairns along with others less well known - a reflection of the democratic nature of the endeavour. One of the poems is Barbara A Zanditon's The Big Tease Lady Playing Games With Death, which is dedicated to Anne Sexton and expresses the sense of loss at her suicide. We have a number of individual volumes of Sexton's raw and unabashedly personal poetry, including the starkly titled Live or Die, with her photographic portrait looking tentatively out at the reader from the cover. Marilyn Hacker is another poet who has also translated the work of others, winning an award for her work with Moroccan poet Rachida Madani. I first encountered her as the model for the interstellar poet (and translator) Rydra Wong in Samuel Delany's classic 1966 science fiction novel Babel-17. Although both would go on to identify as gay, Delany and Hacker lived together in New York at the time and were married in 1967. Love Death and the Changing of the Seasons is a collection from 1986 sensually addressing affairs of the heart in beautifully constructed sonnet form.

Labi Siffre is best known as a musician and songwriter. His song It Must Be Love became a hit for Madness and Something Inside So Strong is an anthem for the oppressed which draws on his own experiences of prejudice as a gay black man growing up and reaching maturity in 50s and 60s Britain as well as his reaction to footage of police violence in apartheid South Africa in the 80s. He has also written three volumes of poetry including Blood on the Page, which was published in 1995. James Baldwin wrote in a wide variety of literary forms, including novels, short stories, plays and brilliantly passionate and insightful essays. He was also a hugely charismatic and eloquent speaker. His poetry is less well known, and Jimmy's Blues is the only book which gathers his published and unpublished poems together. As the title suggests, they draw on African American musical forms, singing the blues in lyrical prose. There is a musical connection to the collection of Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky's work, too. He is the Andrei V of Scott Walker's song The Old Man's Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime) from his classic 1969 album Scott 4. Scott writes 'the anti-worlds go spinning through his head', a reference to the poem Antiworlds which can be found in this volume.

A number of poetry books from small presses have beautiful illustrations, often woodcuts or other forms of print, making them little works of art in themselves. The Ark Press, based in Marazion, Cornwall, produced lovely editions of D.H.Lawrence's The Body of God with woodcuts by Barbara Whitehead, and Harold Morland's David Dancing with linocuts by Mort Baranoff. Gavin Bantock's Isles, meanwhile, has integral prints by Peter Paul Piech, whom we have encountered in a previous post.

Maya Angelou is better known for her autobiographical memoirs than her poetry, but she regarded herself equally as a poet and published a number of collections in her lifetime. Her poems are often declaratory and come to life when read aloud, particularly by a speaker of such eloquence and charisma as Angelou herself. And Still I Rise was published in 1978 and includes the title poem, which has become an established classic of defiant positivity in the face of oppression and prejudice. I came across Ron Padgett through Jim Jarmusch's film about a poetry writing bus driver, Paterson. It was Padgett who wrote the poems which this working-class poet composes throughout the movie. Jarmusch provides a lyrical portrait of the seemingly prosaic New Jersey city, with references to its cultural history. This includes William Carlos Williams' everyday epic Paterson, which we have a lovely Faber edition of downstairs in the stack, pale blue cover relatively intact.

Carol Ann Duffy is one of Britain's best-known and well-loved poets who achieved the high accolade of being appointed Poet Laureate in 2009. We have a small press limited run pamphlet which marks her humble beginnings. Fleshweathercock was published in 1974 when she was just 19 years old. Charlotte Mew was born in the Bloomsbury area of London but her background was less comfortably off than the select members of the renowned 'set'. She did share their daringly (for the time) liberal attitude to sexuality, however, and dressed dandyishly in fine gentlemen's clothing. Her writing was published in the scandalous fin-de-siecle literary journal The Yellow Book, but it was only some years later, from the 1910s onwards, that she began writing and publishing the poetry for which she would subsequently be well regarded by a dedicated few. Sadly, she became prone to the depression and mental ill-health which had afflicted several of her siblings and took her own life in 1928. The Farmer's Bride was her first collection, published in 1916, and including the exquisitely sad and tender title poem.

Iain Sinclair has become renowned as an explorer of London's hidden circuitry, the psychogeographer in chief. His book Lights Out For The Territory began these journeys across the capital, compressing layers of history, literary associations and film locations to conjure a combinatory spirit of place. But he began his literary career as a poet, crossing over to a poetic prose hyrbrid with his book about Spitalfields and its notorious history, White Chapell Scarlet Tracings, which juxtaposes the bloody Victorian past of Jack the Ripper with the seedy contemporary world of second-hand book dealing. He set up the Albion Village Press in the early 70s to publish the experimental poetry and prose being produced by him and his London cohorts. It was named after Albion Drive in Hackney, his address at the time. Hackney would remain his home-base and territory which he would explore extensively for decades to come. We have two of his early collection printed by that press, The Birth Rug and Muscat's Wurm, the latter featuring pictures of a number of collaborators who also turn up as 'characters' in his later books. The Birth Rug links to his most recent work, The Gold Machine, with its allusions to the colonial journey of his Victorian ancestor Arthur Sinclair into the heart of Peru. For that book, he travelled with his daughter Farne, who created a podcast and collaborated on a film about the experience. That may even be her that Iain Sinclair is cradling in the picture below. These treasurable small press publications are amongst many artefacts residing down below in the stacks which give palpable form to nascent literary careers which ascended to significant heights. To browse through their few lovingly printed pages is almost to be transported back to a lost or half-remembered era. So dig them out and travel back in time. Immerse yourself in a small capsule of history, a captured moment.