Inspired by the best of motives

Robert Nye, The Scotsman, Saturday 29th October 2005

"I suddenly wondered one day why on earth there were no selections made by poets' wives or muses and how wonderful it would be to have, say, Mrs Shakespeare's or Mrs Wordsworth's choices." So says Anthony Astbury, the guiding spirit behind a very unusual anthology.

Astbury, a publisher as well as a poet, approached the women in the lives of various modern poets and had them make personal selections which he published in a series of elegant little chapbooks.

Those 13 pamphlets, originally issued by Astbury's GreviIle Press, have been brought together by Carcanet to make a handsome book. It keeps all the simple apparatus favoured from the start - photographs of the poets and their muses, plus brief notes of introduction, in most cases made by the muses themselves.

The poets arc George Barker, Thomas Blackburn, Lawrence Durrell, David Gascoyne, WS Graham, Robert Graves, Harold Pinter, Anne Ridler, CH Sisson, Elizabeth Smart, Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas and David Wright. The emphasis is on poets whose reputations were made in the first half of the 20th century, in particular on poets of a somewhat maverick or Romantic cast, outside the academies, poets who went their own ways. Most of them belong to the generation before Astbury's, so the book can also be seen as a tribute to the founding fathers and mothers of modern Romanticism, though the austere figure of Charles Sisson stands in opposition to that tendency.

Saying as much, though, points up one of the revelations of this book, because Mona Sisson's selection of her husband's work brings out all the gentleness and tenderness that was undoubtedly there below its neo-classical surface. She goes for all the poems in which Sisson spoke his heart with the authority of one who never wore that article upon his sleeve. Beryl Graves provides a similar service for her husband Robert, while modestly prefacing her selection with the first line of one of his poems in which it is observed that "Every choice is always the wrong choice". It is interesting that she tends to favour her husband's later work, dating even from the period when his behaviour in pursuit of younger muses must have left her miserable and alone. So it goes on, each choice telling us about the poet, about the muse, and about how it must have been between them. It's no surprise that Nessie Dunsmuir includes Sydney Graham's beautiful lines, "To My Wife At Midnight":

Where we each reach,
Sleeping alone together,
Nobody can touch.

Nor that Aeronwy Thomas, daughter of Dylan, was converted to her father's work by having to read aloud his elegiac rhapsody of lost childhood, "Fern Hill", to a Welsh audience.

But another poet's daughter, Myfanwy, child of Edward Thomas, tells us things about her father and his work which nobody else could have known or guessed. And Judy Gascoyne's account of how she met and married David Gascoyne when he was a patient in a nursing home, being treated for clinical depression, is similarly moving.

It might be objected that some of this concentration upon domestic affection is cloying, possibly reductive. Not so. Poetry requires that close quality of attention which only love gives. As Robert Graves meant when he insisted that his truest work was always done "in love" and not for "love of art", love between man and woman is at the root of all that we call reality.

Whatever your view of such matters, if you love poetry, and if you have ever been in love, you are sure to get pleasure from The Tenth Muse. It contains some of the best English-language poems of the 20th century, chosen by the very people who inspired them, and if that is not interesting then I don't know what is.