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As the condensation of meaning in the single title word of this anthology of poetry testifies, Generations is poetic man's and, in preponderance, twentieth century poetic man's concentration upon connectedness, the narrow vein of meaning that shapes us, that is, our ‘generation’ from one another, and how we come, in the fine detail of poetry, to experience it. It is also the poetry written by one generation to another. It is of and by generations, and produces ‘generations’, that is, poems.
The result is a new form, as the editors suggest in their fine introduction, ‘the huge increase in the volume of work (this century) which speaks directly of parent or child’ (p. xiii), a new seed or seeds that can now grow from such generation, and the editors speak of this, their creation, their anthology of this particular parent and child verse, as ‘almost like witnessing the birth of a new poetic genre’ (p. xiii).
In one way, it may be described as a distortion of these individual poets and their breadth of output to select the ‘generational’ themes of their poetic discourse. And yet in another way, in my view, a more profound way, it is a celebration of a particular truth about creativity and generation. It is a wonderful point of reference. For all creators, conceivers, generators derive from and out of that which lies most intimately and, paradoxically, most unknowingly beside them. That human intercourse at its height, enabled by the intimacy and closeness offered by birth, living alongside death, that with which we are most ‘familiar’, that this can be the source of poetry, the subject of creativity, for me indicates the paradox of estrangement and distance and exclusion that lies at the heart of all that connects us.
If when we are at our closest we are also, simultaneously, at our furthest point, one from the other as, inevitably, poets, by choosing to write of and out of their own love and ‘at handedness’ suggest, then do our great artists thus plead on our behalf for c