That said, most anthologists these days are aware of the problem and try to put together something more vigorous and variegated, though realising, too, that tending a garden or a field requires a lot of weeding. And that’s where the tricky part comes in: who is a flower and who is a weed? That is a more brutal question than most editors would entertain, but there is an inevitable whiff of posterity to any anthology – an implicit statement about which poets and poems are likely to last. The explicit statement, however, is generally quite different: it is more celebratory, more in the spirit of a gift, like the bouquet. Here, says the editor, look at the wonderful poems I’ve found. And our proper reply ought to be thanks, especially as the work of an anthologist is usually a pretty thankless task for such a lot of effort. John Leonard, in putting together The Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry is a good case in point. As with his previous anthologies, he has done a splendid job, with the flair of a real professional. Here is some of what’s worth celebrating.

In the first place, the book itself is beautifully produced – no trivial matter with poetry, which exists in the eye as well as the ear. We have a clear text on good paper in a binding that feels like a soft hardcover. The production values tell us that the publisher takes poetry seriously. Second, we have a comprehensive selection, going from the present day back to the early colonial period (though excluding, with one exception, Aboriginal ‘oral poetry’).

From an historical perspective, most of the writers – and a good many of the poems – one would wish to find in an anthology are present. In that sense, it is a responsible and responsive collection, a testament to Leonard’s ongoing reliability and tact. The anthology, in fact, is built upon an earlier one, his Australian Verse: An Oxford anthology (1998), but is quite different in its inclusion of more contemporary work, which is its raison d’être, and its third strength. As Leonard puts it in his lucid introduction, this anthology ‘catches up with an unusually rich period: more than a hundred poems are added from 1999–2009, forming a sizeable survey of the contemporary art’. But this isn’t simply a matter of addition. There has been a significant rethinking about poets and poems throughout. The earlier anthology featured 145 poets, this one 165; but that net gain of twenty is deceptive, because thirty-seven poets have been added, while seventeen have been dropped. The difference is instructive.

Leonard is keen to mark the present moment in Australian poetry by giving us a score of new poets born between 1960 and 1982, some already well known, such as John Mateer and Bronwyn Lea, and some who have recently become prominent: for example, Sarah Holland-Batt, whose début, Aria (2008), caused a stir; Simon West, a brilliant translator, as well, of Guido Cavalcanti; and Lucy Holt, whose Wolf Man Wolf (2007) won the Kenneth Slessor Prize last year. All are represented by winning work.

As founder and commissioning editor of John Leonard Press, which specialises in poetry, Leonard is well aware of who the new poets are and is making a statement about which ones signify now as twenty-first century poets. But he has also gone back to revise his view of twentieth-century work, adding, among others, Vicki Viidikas and Vivian Smith, and, in the nineteenth century, C.J. Dennis. Again, this is not merely a matter of expanding a list; Leonard has, at the same time, altered the selection of poems for almost all the others. There is something attractive in these second thoughts, reflecting not so much a change in taste as in perception. In the preponderance of cases, the changes strike me as felicitous, as with Philip Hodgins, Judith Beveridge, Jan Owen and Oodgeroo Noonuccal, where there is a stronger impression created; a few I am less certain about, as in limiting Alan Wearne to two excerpts from The Lovemakers (2001–2004) or dropping Les Murray’s ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ (particularly as the ‘Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone’, the only Aboriginal translation included, was the model for Murray’s poem), or likewise dropping Francis Macnamara’s superb ‘A Convict’s Tour to Hell’.

There are, inevitably, poets absent that one would wish to see represented, including some who were dropped: Rhyll McMaster, Kris Hemensley, John Foulcher, and Hugh McCrae among them. Others would include Judith Bishop, Lisa Gorton, Tracy Ryan, Craig Sherborne, Gary Catalano, Barry Hill, Antigone Kefala and more, but it’s important to bear in mind that single-editor anthologies are valuable because they depend upon and reflect the sensibility of the editor. This is a fine anthology because Leonard is a fine reader, and he has had to make choices, some of which may have been difficult. We want our editors to be discerning and to exercise independent judgement. The reason we may balk at certain choices or absences is only partly because we demur from the selection itself; we also feel that anthologies, by their nature, are canon-forming instruments with real ramifications. They perform intellectual and cultural work. This sets up a dynamic between taste and authority, whereby the editor accrues cultural capital. Thus we have anthologies that bear prestigious names in their titles, such as ‘Oxford’ or ‘Penguin’ or, in this case, ‘Puncher & Wattmann’, which serve to give sanction to the selection. In the instance of the recent Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, published by the formidable W.W. Norton, you have three prominent underwriters vouching for the standards. Suddenly, it seems as if who’s in and who’s out really is a big deal.

For a poet who, let’s say, publishes regularly year in and year out and receives substantial recognition, not to be in a highly respected anthology is at best disappointing and at worst a little chilling. I once suggested to a well-known Australian author that we meet at the Strand Bookstore in New York, noted for its miles of used books. He flat out refused: ‘I never go there,’ he said, ‘the futility of it all!’ I understood the reluctance; all those volumes by forgotten authors famous in their time. One gets the same impression in looking at old poetry anthologies. Take, for instance, the 1927 edition of The Oxford Book of American Verse, edited by Bliss Carman, which has one quaint entry for Emily Dickinson, ‘Twenty-one Lyrics from “Life”’, and two poems by Adelaide Crapsey (1878–1914); F.O. Matthiessen’s 1950 edition has twenty-eight poems by Dickinson and none by Crapsey; Richard Ellmann’s 1976 version has seventy poems by Dickinson and none by Crapsey; and David Lehman’s edition (now called The Oxford Book of American Poetry) drops Dickinson to forty-two and brings back Crapsey with five. Along the way, of course, dozens of poets disappear completely, such as Louise Imogen Guiney and Gertrude Hall, both accorded more poems at one point than Robert Frost. The vicissitudes of fortune can be rather sobering. Poets often take stock of these matters, but not, one hopes, while writing. Editors, however, are fully implicated; they have to stand behind their choices.

I know of no anthologist who wished he or she had fewer pages to work with. There are always those poets (and poems) the anthologist regrets not including, but the fact remains that one item displaces another. It is clear that Leonard, in wanting to find room for the more recent poets, had to cut back on the average number of poems allotted throughout. Thus, in the earlier anthology, twenty-one poets received one poem, and forty-one received two poems; whereas in this anthology, forty-one are represented by a single poem, and fifty-two by two. In upstate New York, in the spring, we have to distil about forty gallons of sap from maple trees to make one gallon of maple syrup, and if you want maple candy, you have to then distil the syrup. In the end, one or two pieces of candy are quite enough for most people, but does that hold true for poems? Distilling a poet down to one or two poems is a severe ratio. The real ratio, though, is between inclusion and representation: granted that one or two poems are, in most cases, too few, it’s surely better than leaving someone out altogether. And yet, as we move back in time, the number of poems allotted tends to increase, as we become more certain about which poets are actually constitutive of ‘Australian poetry’. This is true for many anthologies, though not for the more egalitarian The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2009), edited by John Kinsella, where almost everyone gets one poem and ‘major’ poets four; or Les Murray’s ground-breaking The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986), which limited the allotment to three. Suppose, as a thought experiment, you had four hundred pages for an anthology in which the minimum number of poems allowed was five and the maximum ten. At most, you would end up with less than half of Leonard’s 165 poets and possibly a third of Kinsella’s 216. One could object that such a limited book would fail to represent the range and variety of Australian poetry, but it would have the virtue of a substantial commitment to the poets one values most highly. If the readers of Australian Book Review, in this experiment, were to send in their contents lists, none would be the same, but I wonder how much overlap there would be and what that might tell us about the state of the poetry ‘canon’. At the same time, it is important to note that anthologies also function as signposts, pointing us to authors we might otherwise not know about, and as such they lead us to make discoveries and refresh our viewpoint. A good anthology cracks open the canon.

This may be one of the last times when concerns about inclusion and exclusion, and the degree of representation, are germane for poetry anthologies. Up to this point, such books have been defined by an economics of scarcity and scale: the number of pages reflects decisions about costs, distribution and potential sales. The next generation of anthologies, however, will be read on your iPad or some other electronic reading device (or perhaps the poems will be read to you instead). There will still be choices made about whom to include, but the anthologist will have megabytes to deal with, not pages, and there will be layers of poems and commentary and video that the reader will be able to explore almost endlessly (with links, no doubt, to the Internet). But with such an overwhelming amount of material available, there will be an even greater need for editors who can make clear-headed decisions and fine distinctions. Let’s hope John Leonard is already at work on it.