On a disappointing anthology
Review of "The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse. 101 Poets on the Divine", edited by Kaveh Akbar
What makes for a good anthology? This review of Kaveh Akbar, The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse. 101 Poets on the Divine first appeared in The Friday Poem back in November 2023. On the whole the book is a disappointment, but perhaps it’s helpful to be reminded that good anthologies only look like they were easy to put together. I make some counter-recommendations of particularly rewarding anthologies at the end of the piece.
I think anthologies are the most important type of poetry publishing there is. Anthologies are how I started to read widely and seriously in poetry as a teenager, and I’m sure that’s true of most new readers, whatever their age. If your local library or bookshop has just a single poetry shelf, it’s likely to have more anthologies than anything else. Anthologies are also how more experienced readers expand their range: I still buy and read anthologies regularly — especially old ones, second-hand — for the pleasure of discovering work that is new to me.
So a new Penguin anthology, which will be stocked very widely even on all those single shelves, is a big deal. This one, though, seems very unsure of what it is doing. Let’s start with the title: “spiritual” verse sounds a bit like they wanted to avoid putting the word “religion” on the front cover. “Verse” suggests to me, not unreasonably I think, a collection containing verse, not prose, though in fact quite a few of the extracts are translations of prose, not verse (albeit, perhaps, ‘poetic prose’), and a very large number were no doubt verse in the original but have been translated into lineated prose.
And then the subtitle: 101 poets on the “divine”. If these are all poems about the divine, why not just say ‘religious’ or even ‘devotional’? Perhaps because, in practice, both ‘spiritual’ and ‘divine’ have been interpreted very loosely. A lot of these extracts are not obviously in either of these categories. Around a core of recognisably religious (or, OK, ‘spiritual’) verse — from a fascinatingly wide range of traditions — we find many examples of more generally mythological material, some moralising or meditative extracts, quite a lot of erotic verse with no obvious spiritual application (justified in the introduction by the observation that ‘divine and erotic’ loves are often associated with each other, and that sex can be a kind of transcendence) and a great deal that we might call sort of generally “profound”, like this three-liner translated from the seventeenth-century Japanese of Bashō by Jane Hirshfield:
Death-sick on my journey
My dreams run out ahead of me
Across the empty field
I rather like this, but is it really ‘spiritual’ verse? Perhaps: it could be, for instance, that the original Japanese for ‘empty field’ activates the full spiritual and philosophical force of the Buddhist idea of emptiness, śūnyatā.1 But without any contextual information to that effect — the very brief note tells us only that Bashō was one of Japan’s ‘haiku masters’ — I don’t think most readers would take this to be a specifically ‘spiritual’ poem at all, unless we are prepared to admit that essentially all ‘serious’ poetry is also ‘spiritual’.
