Hype and celebrity have taken a virtual stranglehold on the bookshop market for modern poetry, leaving less publicised writers only a tiny share, an Arts Council report reveals today.
The report marks National Poetry Day by disclosing that two contemporary authors - the late poet laureate Ted Hughes and the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney - together seized nearly 60% of poetry sales last year and the year before.
Even the poet laureate, Andrew Motion, managed only 1.7% of the market, selling 6,000 copies. The 16th best-selling poet in Britain, Fleur Adcock, achieved this placing while selling only 200 copies. Her share of the market was 0.06%.
Yesterday, the Arts Council said the report had exposed "an enormous gulf" between bestsellers, heavily promoted by their publishers, and the rest.
It had also demonstrated an "equally huge" gulf of understanding between publishers and booksellers about how poetry books should be promoted.
John Hampson, Arts Council literature officer, said the report delivered "a cry from the heart" about the gap between publishers and bookshops. "We will be looking to see if we can bridge this - perhaps through a conference, or providing a permanent forum".
The 156-page report - Rhyme and Reason: Developing Contemporary Poetry - is the first to compile a poetry bestseller list using authoritative electronic high street sales from the monitoring group Whitaker BookTrack. It discloses sales of nearly 2m copies of the 1,000 top-selling poetry titles of 1998 and 1999. These were worth £13m.
It stresses how one poetry publisher, Faber and Faber, scooped the pool. The market was dominated by three of its massively marketed blockbusters: Birthday Letters, Hughes's impassioned revelation of his marriage to Sylvia Plath, his Tales from Ovid and Heaney's translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf.
In the two-year period, Hughes, who died in 1998, sold 172,174 copies worth £2m. That gave him 49% of the market. Heaney sold 34,690 books worth £356,000, taking just under 10%. Third was Carol Ann Duffy (22,364 copies, £193,000, 6.3%).
Other Arts Council figures show that, if only living poets are included and a more restrictive definition of "contemporary" is applied, Heaney emerges as taking nearly two-thirds of all bookshop sales within the period. Under this definition - which uses criteria including academic, intellectual, experimental and innovative appeal - a different top 10 list emerges: Heaney, Les Murray, Tony Harrison, Paul Muldoon, Don Paterson, Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, Wislawa Szymborska, Tom Paulin and Michael Ondaatje.
Both this list and the straightforward top-selling list are put into perspective if poetry anthologies are included. An Arts Council index of best-selling titles for the period is, in one to 10 order: The Nation's Favourite Poems, Birthday Letters, The Nation's Favourite Love Poems, The Nation's Favourite Comic Poems, Birthday Letters (paperback), Tales from Ovid, Poems of the Great War, Classic FM 100 Favourite Poems, 366 Poems Worth Learning By Heart and 101 Poems And How to Remember Them.
The most acute problem identified by the report is that there is too little "crossover" in the poetry market. The public which abundantly buys anthologies rarely ventures into contemporary verse written by practitioners who are struggling to keep the tradition alive and depend on sales for their livelihood.
Publishers alleged that bookshops no longer "tolerated" stocking most contemporary poetry because it sold slowly.
Readers' groups interviewed for the report said the "range and quality of poetry available in bookshops" was in decline.
Booksellers complained that poetry reviews in newspapers and on television, though important, were "declining in both quality and quantity".
They counterattacked against publishers by blaming them for insufficient back-up and point-of-sale promotional material for poetry book launches.
Publishers' representatives were blamed for carrying fewer poetry books than previously.
Some booksellers were convinced that the poetry market was in decline except for the lure of big names like Hughes and Heaney. But John Hampson said: "Overall, I think poetry sales are static rather than declining".
Some observers will argue that the two years covered by the report were unusual in being dominated by celebrity poets. But a similar list 30 years ago would probably have been equally overshadowed by Philip Larkin and John Betjeman.
