The New Penguin Book of English Verse
edited by Paul Keegan
Penguin £20, pp1,139
Buy it at BOL

The solid shape and glowing cover of The New Penguin Book of English Verse set beating a pulse of excitement. Seven hundred years of language, distilled into its sharpest and brightest forms, are here to be discovered. The poems, like jewels, have to be reset for new admiration.

The reader is very much at the centre of Paul Keegan's enterprise. He has chosen to arrange the poems not by date of composition, or by the order of their authors' births, but as they were first published in volume form. As Keegan points out in his preface, his method of structuring an anthology makes quite a difference to how we view the poems. What a year 1819 was for the reader, for instance. He or she might first have encountered Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, Keats's The Eve of St Agnes, the first Canto of Byron's Don Juan, Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy or Blake's To the Accuser Who is the God of This World. A reader in 1611 might have looked into Chapman's Homer for the first time, as well as the Authorised Version of the Bible.

Keegan's decision on chronology is justified by the vibrancy of communication between one poem or the next. It is fascinating, for example, that two poems that make such deep but different appeals to public emotion as Kipling's 'Recessional' and Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' were published within a year of each other, and are set side by side in this anthology.

Kipling and Wilde, strangers in many things, share a confident sense of audience which today's poets can only wonder at, and perhaps envy. Both poets believe in their hold on the public, and that poetry must use this hold to enlighten and instruct. 'By each let this be heard,' urges Wilde, as he forces his readers to contemplate their own kinship with the condemned man in prison. Kipling, too, warns against insular complacency as he addresses the British Empire at its zenith:

Far called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Ninevah and Tyre!

Again and again, the reader comes across such thoughtful, thought-provoking juxtapositions of poems.

Keegan's respect for the contemporary reader's experience of these poems as they were published has also led him to leave spelling and punctuation unmodernised. The risk that this may make some poems more difficult is balanced by the gain of a certain frisson of strangeness, as the rind of familiarity is stripped away:

They fle from me that sometyme did me seke

With naked fote stalking in my chambre.

I have seen theim gentill tame and meke

That nowe are wyld and do not remembre

That sometyme they put theimself in daunger

To take bred at my hand...

(Sir Thomas Wyatt)

Such a well-known poem can only gain from this slight linguistic estrangement. The royal court Wyatt describes here is no haven of trundling Germanic protocol, but the court of Henry VIII, foreign by more than four centuries, a place of danger, rumour and execution.

Keegan follows tradition in calling this a book of verse, rather than a book of poetry. Hymns, carols, street cries, epitaphs, ballads, adages, nonsense verse and rhymes thicken the brew. The plangent, poignant voice of Anonymous is among the strongest. Here again, Keegan's emphasis on chronology comes into its own. It's easier to appreciate the influence of the traditional ballad on Coleridge, for instance, when 'Dejection, An Ode' faces 'The Wife of Usher's Well', which was published the same year in Scott's edition of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.

The delight of any poetry anthology lies not only in finding new facets to well-known poems, but also in being introduced to less familiar work. John Davidson's 'Thirty Bob a Week' describes the grind of a clerk's life in the 1890s. At first it seems conventional enough in its touching detail, but then the voice grows stronger. Suddenly the poem takes fire from the defiant sweep of this clerk's imagination, and his claim for justice:

It's a naked child against a hungry wolf;

It's playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;

It's walking on a string across a gulf

With the millstones fore-and-aft about your neck;

But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;

And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.

When it comes to the twentieth century, Keegan makes clear that his coverage is not inclusive. Poets born later than the outset of the 1950s do not qualify. This seems reasonable, bearing in mind that the poems and the reputations of younger poets are still very much in the making.

But there are other exclusions which are more surprising and more questionable. Keegan devotes 279 pages, out of 1,100-odd, to twentieth-century poetry. Fewer than 30 poems by women feature on these pages, and none is a long poem. There is nothing by Fleur Adcock, U. A. Fanthorpe, Liz Lochhead, Selima Hill, E. J. Scovell, Elizabeth Jennings, Wendy Cope, Gillian Clarke, Anne Stevenson, Carol Rumens, Ruth Padel, Pauline Stainer, Kathleen Raine, Patricia Beer, Elaine Feinstein, Ruth Fainlight, Vicki Feaver, Penelope Shuttle, Gillian Allnut; many other fine women poets born well before 1950 come to mind. You will not find Jenny Joseph's 'Warning' here; it has been much anthologised, it's true, but surely no more than Heaney's 'Personal Helicon', which is included.

All this is such a loss to the reader. Vital registers and qualities of late twentieth-century poetry are missing. There's none of Cope's formal wit and play, Hill's ferocious originality, or Fanthorpe's Janus-faced monologues. Their absence is baffling and the anthology's representation of the twentieth century is diminished by it, as is the reader's pleasure.

Anthologies are built on arguments and will always provoke them. But, as The New Penguin Book of English Verse demonstrates, we have the good fortune to live in the English language, perhaps the richest, most supple, promising, sharp-tongued and rule-breaking playground for poetry. Argument will only find its answer in more poems.