Staying Human: new poems for Staying Alive

Описание: Nearly 20 years ago Bloodaxe published Neil Astley’s anthology Staying Alive, introducing many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry from around the world. This was followed by two further compilations, Being Alive and Being Human, all three books giving readers hundreds of thoughtful and powerful poems about living in modern times.

Staying Alive was subtitled real poems for unreal times. We are now living in even more unreal times, and many people have being turning to these three anthologies during this time of crisis. A fourth anthology in the series, Staying Human: new poems for Staying Alive, is published on 1 October 2020.

In this video you’ll see and hear some of the poets from the book reading short excerpts from their poems in Staying Human: poems about life, love, family, and the conflicts which challenge us, as well as what we love about our world and about each other, about what makes us human. The sequence starts with Tishani Doshi from India and ends with Jericho Brown from the US, who was first published in the UK in the previous anthology, Being Human.

The poets featured in the film are: Tishani Doshi (extract from ‘Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods’), Wayne Holloway-Smith (from ‘The posh mums are boxing in the square’), Ruth Stone, 1915-2011 (from ‘The Excuse’), Jane Clarke (from ‘Who owns the field?’), Marie Howe (from ‘One day’), Jericho Brown (from ‘As a Human Being’), Elizabeth Alexander (from ‘Smile’), Patricia Smith (from ‘That Chile Emmett in That Casket’), Abigail Parry (from ‘The Quilt’), Louis de Paor (from ‘Marmalade’), Thomas Lux, 1946-2017 (from ‘Refrigerator, 1957’).

For more on Staying Human, please see: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/staying-human-1185