Scanning the Century...edited by Peter Forbes ...is a documentary anthology which tells the story of the 20th century - its tragedies, its dazzling inventions, its vibrant new lifestyles - through the eyes of its poets. With 370 poems from Britain, Europe, America, Australia, India, and South America it aims to capture the spirit of the century with something like the tang of newsreel and the zest of popular song. Poets featured include Hardy, Yeats, Auden, MacNeice, Brecht, Kipling, Tsvetaeva, Neruda, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Carol Ann Duffy. If you've read Scanning the Century, email your comments to me at |
 Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry, edited by Peter Forbes, was published in paperback by Penguin in February 2000, price £12.99 You can buy it from Amazon |
From Reviews:"Marvellously
readable...[Forbes] is an inspired identifier of good
poems, a widely read and original collector of works
often ignored by more conventional anthologists...it is
an unforecastable flocking of wildly dissimilar poems all
ready and willing to testify at the end of the millennium
to how imaginatively poets have concerned themselves with
the experiences they have lived through." "A plethora of
fin-de-siecle anthologies arrived last year and Forbes's
is almost certainly the best. From the front cover...to
the rear index, which links poems with the events of the
century, it drips readability. This is not a book to
carry into a party or a pub - it will be stolen, as mine
was, three times. "A brilliantly
chosen selection of poems that manage, in the editor's
words, to 'capture the flavour of the century with
something like the tang of newsreel and the zest of
popular song'." "Indispensable, for
both devoted and casual lovers." "An exhilarating
helter skelter through..the age's finest creative
spirits... there's fun and wit in this marvelous
book." "Forbes is
relentless in his avoidance of the old chestnuts, and
insistent on an international outlook...his selection of
songs and poems from the civil rights movement are
unexpected, sharp and moving. It is wonderful to realise,
for example, how strong Lewis Allen's 'Strange Fruit',
made famous by singer Billie Holliday, is as a
poem." |