Customer Reviews

Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry

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Peter Forbes' Scanning the Century meets the editor's objective of capturing 'this century's flavor "with something like the tang of newsreel and the zest of popular song."' Forbes selects from a wide range of contemporary poets, from those standards of the British educational curriculum, such as Auden and Hardy, to poets in translation, who are perhaps unknown to English-speakers, such as Toge Sankichi writing on Hiroshima or Goran Simic on the Yugoslav conflict. Forbes manages to stitch together such British school favourites as 'Naming of Parts' by Henry Reed, with poems by black Glaswegian poet Jackie Kay and by Nigerian Wole Soyinka, successfully scanning the century in terms of time as well as geography.

If I have a problem with this anthology, it is that Forbes meets his objective a touch too well. Whilst poetry can always match 'the zest of a popular song', it sits uneasily in newsreel format. As though he is providing us with tasters, Forbes frequently uses extracts rather than including whole poems. It may be that he had problems with copyright, or that at 596 pages in paperback he didn't have the space to include all the text he would have liked. Nevertheless, in some cases he would have used little more space in including the whole poem. (See, for example, Tony Harrison's four verse extract from 'Long Distance' - the whole poem is only eight stanzas long!) And in other cases, he only makes the slightest of gestures towards a great work. For example, he only includes a few stanzas from 'The Fire Sermon' in the case of Eliot's landmark work, The Waste Land. At the same time, Forbes cuts Eliot's 'Preludes' in half. It would have cost him no more space, would have allowed him to showcase Eliot's achievements in modernism and would have allowed the reader to feel satisfied in one full poem, had he used the whole of `Preludes' and left The Waste Land out. At least then, the reader would have had the satisfaction of reading `Preludes' as Eliot published the work, and wouldn't be wondering what had been omitted from this Reader's Digest version of Eliot's works. If you know the poem, you feel shortchanged by the edited version; if you don't know it, you can't help wondering what it might be like in full. And that means you have to use Scanning the Century as a springboard to other poetry books.

The second difficulty with Forbes' editorial choices is that the glibness of some of his section headings hovers between puncturing poetic pomposity (alliteration accidental) and sending up the subject matter of the poems grouped under those headings. Some of these headings have a distinctly postmodern, tongue-in-cheek flavour, though Forbes dismisses postmodernism with scary ease. He reduces postmodernism to a preoccupation with the nature of reality, then shoves it aside, as a matter for philosophers. Against postmodernism's scepticism with respect to absolute truth, Forbes argues that science and history (if we refrain from interpreting the latter) provide us with indisputable truths, which, he implies, proves the case for sidelining postmodernism! Hmm.

Despite these quibbles, if you are looking for a book to mark the passing of the century, and a means of savouring the flavour of our times, whilst notching up the major events and movements of the past hundred years' history, Scanning the Century will meet your requirements.