Time's Spaceship

I didn't know Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's Contemporary British Poetry (1982) was a follow up to A. Alvarez's The New Poetry (1962), but the former mentioned it in their "Introduction," so there you go.

I purchased The New Poetry (substantially revised in 1966) in 1982, and have kept it with me ever since, wondering if this was the last British poetry anthology of its kind, only to find out forty years later that it wasn't; that the year I purchased The New Poetry was the year it was succeeded.

Always behind, in a history most of us step over to get to what's freshest, to what doesn't stick to our shoes.

Alvarez's anth notes the influence of Americans (it was Alvarez who first championed the poetry of Sylvia Plath), while in Morrison and Motion's anth, Northern Ireland is the hotspot (Seamus Heaney, et al.). Another noteworthy revelation is M & M's declaration of a "'Martian' school," after a poem I'd never heard of -- Craig Raine's "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" (1979). (For a less lyrical version of what this poem is and isn't, see Horace Miner's 1956 report "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema".)

This school and its exemplary poem allow the editors to speak of a postmodern turn in British Poetry. Our current turn has books left on shelves for what can be had quicker online. Here's a taste of "A Martian", the poem's last third:

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves --
in colour, with their eyelids shut.