Poems by Stuart Henson can also be found in Bloodaxe’s best-selling Staying Alive and its 2011 companion Being Human.
‘Staying Alive is a magnificent anthology. The last time I was so excited, engaged and enthralled by a collection of poems was when I first encountered The Rattle Bag. I can’t think of any other anthology that casts its net so widely, or one that has introduced me to so many vivid and memorable poems’ – Philip Pullman
Sarah Crown, writing in The Guardian, defines Being Human as ‘rich and rewarding’… edited by ‘one of the most sensitive and thoughtful curators in the businesss’. A ‘staggering array of voices and nationalities’ which ‘expands our definition of greatness’ and ‘introduces poetry to new readers and new poets to seasoned readers’ (Bernadine Evaristo, The Times)
Light Unlocked
Look out, too, for poems in Enitharmon’s Christmas collection Light Unlocked…
‘This sparkling anthology consists of poems sent by their authors, many of them well-known contemporary writers, as Christmas cards… Rowan Williams celebrates Christ’s coming, Wendy Cope welcomes ‘the Christmas life into the house, Seamus Heaney remembers holly-gathering, Gillian Clarke cradles a new-born lamb, Edwin Morgan tabulates a computer’s Christmas card… Here are eighty poems which together sound a whole variety of notes—hopeful, cautionary, joyous, full of wonder.’
…and in the 2003 Enitharmon anthology London in Poetry & Prose Edited by Anna Adams.
A selection of Stuart Henson’s work can be found in Oxford Poets 2002, edited by David Constantine, Hermione Lee & Bernard O’Donoghue.
Oxford Poets
The third of the Oxford Poets anthologies, which ‘introduces a number of new poets and provides in-depth access to the ongoing work of some established writers’, also showcases poems by Anne Berkeley, Roy Blackman, Sasha Dugdale, Martha Kapos, Hugh McMillan and Richard Meier.
Stuart Henson’s contributions include excerpts from a longer sequence, Mountain Time, which doesn’t appear in any of his other books.
Boot Hill
We knew how to live –
in the canyon
and in the whore-house
We knew how to duck
before we saw
the smoking forty-five
Rock-fall Treachery Sclerosis Syphilis
We gambled high
and we laughed at the grocers
the storekeepers then
with their nagging wives
The wind sighs here like pleasure
and the gap-toothed peaks
that we measured ourselves against
still ring us round
In the summer the earth
is dry and warm under needle-fall
We never claimed to be God-fearing men
There are worse places to be
than under the ground
STUART HENSON (from ‘Mountain Time’, Oxford Poets 2002)
More recently, ‘The Price’ has appeared in William Sieghart’s popular Poetry Pharmacy and its American companion The Poetry Remedy. Listen to Jacob Isaacs reading the poem on the Power of Poetry podcast (at 30.15)
