Lifesaving Poems

by Anthony Wilson (Editor)

Inspired by a remark of Seamus Heaney, Lifesaving Poems began life as notebook, then a blog. How many poems, Heaney wondered, was it possible to recall responding to, over a lifetime? Was it ten, he asked, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or more? Lifesaving Poems is a way of trying to answer that question. Giving himself the constraint of choosing no more than one poem per poet, Anthony began copying poems out, one at a time, as it were for safekeeping. He asked himself: was the poem one he could recall being moved by the moment he first read it? And: could he live without it? Then he posted each poem on his blog and said why he liked it. Word spread and soon his blog had thousands of followers, everyone reading and responding to the poems he talked about - and sharing his posts. Now Lifesaving Poems has turned into an anthology, not one designed to be a perfect list of 'the great and the good', but a gathering of poems he happens to feel passionate about, according to his tastes. As Billy Collins says: 'Good poems are poems that I like'. Anthony's popular personal commentaries are included with the poems. There are Lifesaving Poems by John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Raymond Carver, Carol Ann Duffy, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Marie Howe, Jaan Kaplinski, Brendan Kennelly, Jane Kenyon, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Norman MacCaig, Ian McMillan, Derek Mahon, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Jo Shapcott, Tomas Transtromer, Wislawa Szymborska, and many, many others.

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Paperback

First published June 25, 2015

About the author

I am a lecturer, poet and writing tutor. I work in teacher and medical education at the University of Exeter. My anthology Lifesaving Poems, based on the blog of the same name, is available from Bloodaxe Books. Love for Now, my memoir of cancer, is published by Impress Books. Deck Shoes, a book of prose memoir and criticism, and The Afterlife, my fifth book of poems, are available now from Impress Books and Worple Press. My current research project is Young Poets' Stories: https://youngpoetsstories.com/. I blog about poetry, illness, mental health, mindfulness and education. My blog is archived by the British Library.

Reviews

[Michelle (Fluttering Butterflies) · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me awhile to get into this book but in the end I really enjoyed it.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this over the course of two years—very slowly as I wanted to savour it. I liked the poems and personal essay combination. They felt like framing that helped one absorb the poem better. I also liked discovering new to me authors and I might look into getting more books mentioned here.

[Odie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One never really finishes reading a book of poetry, it's like a little bible; you come back to it again and again, looking for verses of light between the pages. Wilson's Lifesaving Poems is teeming with light. Inspired by something Seamus Heaney said concerning a poem's influence in an individuals life, Wilson gathers here poems that have grown with him through his beginnings as a boy, still dipping his toe in the water, to a teen, determined to dive in and give his life to poetry, and as a father, a teacher and a cancer patient, dare I say "survivor".

Wilson's collection, I think, is a step up from Astely's Staying Alive collection because Wilson is so present. In the latter collection the poems are divided into themes (Life, Death, Love, War, etc.) and there is a brief introduction from Astley on these themes, but after that we're pretty much left alone with these strange, and sometimes familiar, but always wonderful, voices, like a party of mutual acquaintances, all connected to an absent host.

Wilson starts with the poem, let's you experience it and be either baffled or bored, then offers his own testimony: where or when he first heard it, at what point it came into his world, and how it has remained with him thus far. Regardless of the poem, one is always aware of Wilson's abundant adoration of poems and the feelings they conjure, and, in turn, this adoration is passed on from one reader to the next. I don't enjoy all the poems in this book, but I find myself returning to many of them, they're like ear worms, especially's Gunn's Autobiography ('longing so hard to make / inclusions that the longing / has become in memory / an inclusion') or Elizabeth Jenning's Letter to Peter Levi, a poem which feels so recent but didn't impress me much until I discovered it was written in 1969, which of course changes everything.

Some poems have been so awe-inspiring that I've immediately purchased the books they come from (Robert Rehder, Ian McMillan, John Ash, Thom Gunn). This is a book for those who are beyond the introductory stage of poetry and want to explore further, to see the power it can have on an individual, I recommend one compliments this with Wilson's Blog, which has the same name as his book (his most recent post as of May 9th 2018 is about his brother) and is filled with even more insight, I also recommend his own poetry, especially Riddance, which is mostly about his relationship with and his life after and during cancer.

[S.B. Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

In some ways this book is a very personal collection of poetry, an anthology for one. Lifesaving Poems was a notebook that then turned into a popular blog.

Anthony Wilson’s inspiration came from a Seamus Heaney quote questioning how many poems a person can recall responding to over a lifetime.

Answering that question, as this book does for Wilson, is going to make for a very select and subjective collection of poems. What the success of the blog showed though was that this didn’t seem to matter.

Lifesaving Poems presents each of the selected poems that Wilson recalls having an impact on him followed by a page or more of commentary. What I liked about the commentary was that it wasn’t academic analysis. Sure Wilson may have directed the reader to technical proficiency but overall I found the commentary clear, concise, conversational and engaging.

Indeed, while some of the poems did not inspire a response in my own reading, a thoroughly enjoyed all the commentary. Sometimes that commentary caused me to review what I’d read and develop a new understanding.

A side effect of reading Lifesaving Poems was of course being exposed to some UK poets who I hadn’t heard of. I did experience some frustration upon discovering (and getting excited about) new UK poets only to find that their works were only out in short print runs or from small publishers whose operational costs were high and priced the works out of the market for me.

But Lifesaving Poems might just be my favourite poetry book of the year. It’s approach to discussing poetry doing much more for me in terms of developing understanding and taste than the standard approach to reviewing and critiquing poetry.

If you’d like to sample some of the commentary go here. The commentary text is similar if not the same to that in the book, though the formatting is different.

A worthwhile spend for lovers of poetry whether poets or readers.