To that inevitable social gathering/getting-to-know-one-another question, “What do you do?” Lisa Russ Spaar has more than one answer at her disposal. “I’m an English professor at UVA,” is a sure-fire choice. And here’s a good backup: “I’m a poet.” Not too many people find that vocation odd these days. But let’s hope that at least once, just to see the look on the questioner’s face, she’s said, “I’m an anthologist.”
All That Mighty Heart, an anthology of London poems, is her follow-up to Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems (1999). It’s no wonder she’s convinced that there’s a reading public hungry for this genre. Easing into a single concept, while at the same time feverishly trying to anticipate the nuances and personality behind each new variation, is like being a clairvoyant who still enjoys surprises.
The concept of All That Mighty Heart is not simply London, but human minds bent on embracing or subsuming or fathoming or overcoming or rendering or delineating a human place—and somewhere in all that mighty effort and mighty irony lies the heart of what it means to be alive.
Speaking of effort, Spaar made some deft decisions about which poems to include, as well as found a way to assemble them into a coherent whole.
The book has four sections named for the four elements: water, fire, earth and air. “Water” begins with William Wordsworth’s “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge” (where the anthology title comes from), and then soon morphs into a lyricism bordering on ferocious, courtesy of Ted Hughes’ anti-Romantic “On Westminster Bridge.” “Earth” ranges from Robert Lowell’s grimly amusing sonnet “Living In London,” to Gertrude Stein’s cryptic-as-cryptic-can-be “Threadneedle Street,” to Amy Clampitt and Arthur Rimbaud exposing details of Chelsea and Covent Garden and the London Underground to the opulence of their imaginations.
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“Fire” offers up William Blake’s “London,” still electrifying after all these years, and also brims with unexpected twists and turns. Dame Edith Sitwell’s direct and incantatory “Still Falls The Rain,” written during the London Blitz, is as powerful as Yiddish poet Avram Nochum Stencl’s oblique and plain spoken “A Linden Tree in a Whitechapel Street.” “Air” is no less bewitching than the other sections. One moment it’s Mary Coleridge’s Victorian lucidity, and the next it’s Jorge Luis Borges’ modernist daring, each as if transfixed by London’s timelessness.
If the book has a weakness, it’s that the several excerpts from longer poems don’t always come across well. The 17 lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” look lonely and pale, and the small section from H.D.’s monumental “Trilogy” may not draw more readers to that neglected masterpiece.
But such a quibble doesn’t do justice to Spaar’s skill as an editor. In the end, the anthology feels like one grand poem, with nary a word left out.