These are poems that you have to take time to, make time to read. I began by leafing through this Bloodaxe anthology – subtitled “Nourishing Poems of Hope and Light” – and thinking, these are all too optimistic, these are not my cup of tea. And then I found one that spoke to me – ‘Fabrications’, by Denis O’Driscoll, with its opening lines: “God is dead to the world. // But he still keeps up / appearances.”

O’Driscoll lists the goods on offer … “a fragrant bed of moist cut-grass … a misty-eyed moon … a blister pack of stars.”  Yes, there are also more “cryptic clues”, such as a baby battling with acute leukaemia. But “every pulsing star will live / according to his lights, / individually illumined, / nimbus visible to the eye.”  

Jorge Luis Borges observes that “used by the years my memory loses its grip on words”, but finds consolation that “beyond my anxiety and beyond this writing / the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting”. (‘Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf’). On the opposite page is Peter Sirr’s moving response to the Borges poem.

I didn’t necessarily expect to come across Rosemary Tonks, a highly regarded 60s poet who found religion and became a recluse, but here she is (‘Addiction to an Old Mattress’). John McCullough cheerily accepts a chaotic world (‘Watermelon Man’), while Jack Gilbert’s advice to smile even though people are suffering elsewhere in the world makes you pause (‘A Brief for the Defense’).

Joan Margarit’s ‘Love Is a Place’, translated from the Catalan by Anna Crowe, begins with the view from a train and concludes about love: “It endures beyond everything: from there we come.” In another train, American poet Vincent Katz celebrates ‘This Beautiful Bubble’  and the optimistic possibilities of travel. At the airport Naomi Shihab Nye concludes that “not everything is lost” after befriending a Palestinian woman in distress at ‘Gate A-4’.

There are affectionate and celebratory poems about old age, such as Kerry Hardie’s ‘Flesh’, and Alyson Hallett’s ‘Suddenly Everything’, about a dying man belatedly discovering the beauty of clouds. Four separate poems by different poets share the same title, ‘Hope’. And the final poem is the popular ‘Everything Is Going To Be All Right’ by Irish poet Derek Mahon, which was much quoted when he died in 2020.  

This Bloodaxe anthology, edited by Neil Astley and Pamela Robertson-Pearce, is the companion to the previous Soul Food compilation. Dip into it. Maybe you can only take so much serenity at one sitting. If you have too many other things to do, this is not the book for you. Or then again, perhaps it is. It would certainly make a perfect Christmas present for someone you’re fond of.

Soul Feast, ed. Neil Astley and Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Bloodaxe, £12