Header overlay

The Return of Grouse

An upstairs room in a north London public library. I was teaching ‘Introduction to Contemporary Poetry’ to a class of twelve adults, and we’d been going for about twenty minutes. They were all new to poetry, no one wanted to talk, and the atmosphere was sticky. I thumbed Staying Alive – real poems for unreal times, the anthology I use as a set text, and it fell open at Seamus Heaney’s ‘Postscript’. I asked if anyone would like to read it aloud. Doreen mustered her confidence, cleared her throat, and kindly volunteered.

Doreen announced that she had recently got rid of her husband and could now devote all her time to her real interest in life – cows. She was interested in reading poems about cows or that mentioned cows, writing poems about cows and painting portraits of cows, and even though this poem by Mr Heaney didn’t appear to mention a cow she was prepared to read it aloud because no one else had offered.

I immediately dropped Heaney and turned to the section in the anthology called ‘Man and Beast’. There was Selima Hill’s poem ‘Cow’. As Doreen negotiated the opening lines –

I want to be a cow
and not my mother’s daughter.
I want to be a cow
and not in love with you

– her confidence grew, the class warmed, and palpable connections were made.

I’d been teaching poetry for several years, and learned early that masterly swerves like the one above don’t happen without the right set text. I bought Staying Alive when it was first published in 2002. It caused a bit of a hoo-ha in poetry circles because celebrity endorsements appeared on the jacket alongside those from distinguished poets. The actress Mia Farrow’s ‘Truly startling and powerful poems’ rubbed shoulders with Andrew Motion’s ‘Everyone who cares about poetry sh

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

An upstairs room in a north London public library. I was teaching ‘Introduction to Contemporary Poetry’ to a class of twelve adults, and we’d been going for about twenty minutes. They were all new to poetry, no one wanted to talk, and the atmosphere was sticky. I thumbed Staying Alive – real poems for unreal times, the anthology I use as a set text, and it fell open at Seamus Heaney’s ‘Postscript’. I asked if anyone would like to read it aloud. Doreen mustered her confidence, cleared her throat, and kindly volunteered.

Doreen announced that she had recently got rid of her husband and could now devote all her time to her real interest in life – cows. She was interested in reading poems about cows or that mentioned cows, writing poems about cows and painting portraits of cows, and even though this poem by Mr Heaney didn’t appear to mention a cow she was prepared to read it aloud because no one else had offered. I immediately dropped Heaney and turned to the section in the anthology called ‘Man and Beast’. There was Selima Hill’s poem ‘Cow’. As Doreen negotiated the opening lines –

I want to be a cow and not my mother’s daughter. I want to be a cow and not in love with you

– her confidence grew, the class warmed, and palpable connections were made. I’d been teaching poetry for several years, and learned early that masterly swerves like the one above don’t happen without the right set text. I bought Staying Alive when it was first published in 2002. It caused a bit of a hoo-ha in poetry circles because celebrity endorsements appeared on the jacket alongside those from distinguished poets. The actress Mia Farrow’s ‘Truly startling and powerful poems’ rubbed shoulders with Andrew Motion’s ‘Everyone who cares about poetry should own this book.’ Neil Astley – the book’s editor, founder of the poetry publisher Bloodaxe Books and an old hand at editing poetry – has assembled 500 internationally sourced contemporary poems by more than 300 living, and nearly living, poets. Poems chosen, he writes in his introduction, because of the poems themselves, ‘not the critical reputation of the poets’. Nevertheless, he taps into reputations with an authoritative pageful of definitions called ‘Poets on Poetry’. This is very useful because it can be deployed whenever a class discussion is called for. By ‘class discussion’ I mean whenever I lose focus and need a few moments to gather my thoughts. I can simply ask: ‘Is poetry “the best words in the best order”, as Coleridge maintains; or is it, as Christopher Logue states, something that cannot be defined, “only experienced”? What exactly is poetry?’ Inevitably, students will then engage in the kind of sustained philosophical enquiry rarely found outside the beginner poetry class. Astley has organized the book’s content into twelve ‘mini-anthologies’, each with its own heading, such as ‘Growing Up’, ‘War and Peace’ and ‘The Art of Poetry’, each with its own introductory paragraph or two written by Astley himself. Under the heading ‘Dead or Alive’ he writes: ‘I’ve selected poems which contradict one another, and set them side by side, so that poems about hitting rock bottom are immediately followed by others that lift you out of sadness into assertion.’ So, for example, on one page we get the despair of Connie Bensley’s ‘Apologia’, which begins:

My life is too dull and too careful – even I can see that: the orderly bedside table, the spoilt cat.

and ends with a narrator’s plea to dead poets:

Emily Dickinson, help me. Stevie, look up from your Aunt. Some people can stand excitement, some people can’t.

And on the adjoining page is Rosemary Tonks’s ‘Addiction to an Old Mattress’ which ends with an open-arms policy toward whatever life has to offer:

For this is not my life But theirs, that I am living. And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day after day.

Rosemary Tonks’s wonderful, passionate, let-it-all-hang-out poetry brought her much success and fame. By the early 1970s, however, she’d had enough of the poetry game, thank you very much, stopped publishing poetry and retired from public view. To this day there are speculations as to her well-being and whereabouts. One pundit suggests that since her ‘disappearance’ Rosemary has neither read nor written a single word of poetry. Which is a convenient reminder that staying alive actually might involve keeping clear of the stuff. Sales figures, however, suggest there are plenty who disagree. According to some sources Staying Alive is the biggest selling poetry anthology in Britain (250,000 and counting), while others say it’s the biggest selling anthology of all time. Ever. Another section, ‘The Sound of Poetry’, is very useful for teaching because many readers and students erroneously think poetry and rhyme synonymous, a misconception which greatly hinders the appreciation of poetry and the ability to compose one’s own. Astley writes, ‘rhyme has never been the defining characteristic of poetry . . . The essence of all poetry has always been rhythm.’ Many of us turn to poetry when we need to make sense of something resistant to rational explanation, such as death, the finding and losing of love, etc., and at those times we often seek poems that speak directly to our experience, or poems that speak for us. When Howard Grouse, my old teacher of Physical Education, turned up at my poetry class completely out of the blue, I recognized his gimlet eyes immediately, though he appeared not to recognize me. The last time we’d met was about fifty years ago when he was contacting my backside with an old gym-shoe he endearingly called Henry. Henry often accompanied Grouse on his rounds, tucked, floppy and laceless, under his arm. Back in those days, Grouse was a robust, hirsute and enthusiastic teacher from an ancient generation very distant from my own. Now, he was a bald, stooped, frail-looking man in his eighties and, inexplicably, we appeared to be the same age. But why was that bull-headed lump of machismo attending a poetry class? Did he, who gave Henry an airing because I was fielding silly mid-on with Penguin Modern Poets in my pocket, intend to continue from where he’d left off? For a poem to read aloud he chose Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Less Taken’. You’ll remember that it neatly encapsulates the anxiety many of us feel about ‘life decisions’. To my utter amazement Grouse read it beautifully, his age and frailty greatly adding to its poignant ambiguity. By way of a reminder, here are the last five lines:

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Our eyes met and I fancied, for the briefest moment, that Grouse had sought me out and was trying to say sorry. Half a century had passed but part of me longed for it to be so. With the section ‘Poets on Poetry’ to hand, I quickly deployed a class discussion, and while the heady mists of abstraction whirled about the room, took the opportunity for an internal debate on ‘Hate and the Nature of Forgiveness’. What if Grouse had turned a corner? What if he was seeking atonement, and had found the words he needed in Robert Frost? At the end of the lesson, students came forward to gather round and to ask their questions. I half expected Grouse to offer an outstretched hand and an apology. But he was already leaving the room, Staying Alive tucked under his arm where Henry used to be. In 2004, spurred on by the huge success of Staying Alive, Astley published a sequel volume, Being Alive, which he describes as ‘a “bridge” anthology, a book designed to make its readers want to read more work by the poets it features’. Once again there are wonderful, edgy, surprising and diverse poems, organized into helpful ‘mini-anthologies’ that come with a hint of tabloid excess absent from the earlier volume, for example, ‘Mad World’, ‘Men and Women’, ‘Taste and See’; and once again there are endorsements from celebrities, such as the singer/songwriter Van Morrison who writes, ‘Hopefully, books like this will put poetry back in the mainstream.’ Mia Farrow’s thoughts on this volume are, at present, unknown. Doreen now keeps a small dairy herd in Brittany from where she e-mails copies of newly discovered cow poetry. The motives and whereabouts of Grouse remain a mystery.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 31 © Laurence Scott 2011


About the contributor

Laurence Scott lives and writes in south-west Scotland.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.