‘Poems can help us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves’

Neil Astley and Meryl Streep signing copies of Staying Alive for one another at the book’s New York launch in 2003. 

The 3ebptc organisers are delighted to welcome influential poetry editor and publisher Neil Astley as a keynote speaker at our conference in October. Neil has revolutionised the face of contemporary poetry publishing since he launched the publishing firm Bloodaxe Books 48 years ago, and introduced thousands of people to ‘life-affirming’ poetry.

Neil founded Bloodaxe Books in Newcastle as a single-handed venture in 1978 and set about democratising an industry he deemed to be dominated by male, elitist London-based publishing houses. Over the last half-century he has championed outstanding working-class, and women writers, as well as poets from a wide range of ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. Bloodaxe has served as a platform for emerging and established, international and unconventional writers – many of whom have gone on to win major literary awards.

For those working in the field of biblio/poetry therapy, however, it is the ground-breaking publication of Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (2002) and the following series of three anthologies that will chime as Neil’s most significant contribution to the poetry landscape. 

The Staying Alive anthology of ‘life-affirming’ poems, which to date has sold 250,000 copies and remains one of the UK’s most popular poetry books, is considered a landmark in literary publishing for dramatically broadening the appeal of contemporary poetry and gifting readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about how it is to live in the modern world.

Ensuing anthologies have also sold thousands of copies and made a still wider range of poetry available, introducing readers in particular to poets from around the world, much of it in translation. Each subsequent anthology also included poems suggested by readers of the previous ones. 

‘An Arts Council report published in 1999 showed that modern poetry had an image problem with the general public – it had a reputation with for being obscure, difficult, dull, boring or pretentious,’ says Neil. ‘People thought it was irrelevant and incomprehensible.’

‘So Staying Alive was a response to those depressing findings: my attempt to show all those people who love literature and language and traditional poetry that contemporary poetry is relevant, that much of it is lively, imaginative, versatile and accessible to intelligent readers who’ve never given it much of a chance before.’

Being Alive, a sequel published two years later, included more poems that ‘touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit’ and a companion anthology Being Human (2011) added poems ‘about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder’ reflecting the concerns of readers from all walks of life. Staying Human, the fourth book in the series published in 2020, puts a strong focus on the human side of living in the 21st century in poems relating to migration, oppression, alienation and the individual’s struggle to hold on, stay connected and find meaning in an increasingly polarised world.  

Two smaller pocket-sized anthologies Soul Food and Soul Feast are collaborations between Neil and his wife, filmmaker Pamela Robertson-Pearce. While the Staying Alive series feature modern poetry, the poems selected draw on many traditions ranging from Rumi, Kabir and Blake, to Rilke, Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan, as well as contemporary poets.  

Neil, a novelist and poet himself, set up the publishing house after a near death experience in Australia which inspired him to move to Newcastle and study literature. He says that the poems in the anthologies are chosen for their life-affirming qualities and ‘fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow’.

‘They’re poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations with our humanity, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. Such poems can be so valuable to us that they become personal mantras, poems to be committed to memory and taken fully to heart,’ he says.

In his speech to the conference Neil is hoping that he will be able to extend the range of poetry that people use in their work. ‘I’m not from the world of poetry therapy, but as an editor, publisher and anthologist I’ve seen how the books I’ve published have been picked up by people who work in that field, and how they’ve been helpful to readers in weathering the trials and tribulations of life.

‘I don’t think I will need to spend time trying to persuade anyone present that poetry can help us, so I will take that as a given. What I’d like to try to do is to help expand everyone’s “toolkit” of poems which feed into the conference’s guiding metaphors, with a little help from my friends, the poets.’