Rise Like Lions: Poetry for the Many
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By Ben Okri
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In Rise Like Lions, Booker Prize winning writer Ben Okri has compiled a collection of poems that celebrate the many voices of politics, from polemics and rallying cries to lyrics and meditations.
Many of these poems have resonated with readers over lifetimes and through generations, from William Blake to Marvin Gaye.
In exploring the impact political poems have on ideas, vision, protest, change and truth, Okri demonstrates how the need for this strand of poetry is as great as it has ever been, and its inspiration just as powerful.
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This is a diverse and wide ranging anthology which explores the power of poetry through poems on ideas, vision, protest, change and truth, with poems from poets including Shakespeare, William Blake and Shelley to Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Maya Angelou. Each section is introduced by a short preface on power’s relationship to poetry. The emphasis, however, is not on political poetry but on the power of poetry.
As Okri writes:
If in this anthology you hear the thunder of politics first we have failed. You ought first to hear the music of poetry. It is the poetry which makes the political element powerful, never the other way round…..
The power here is when the poetry is the arrow that sends the shaft of the political into the heart.
Overall, the five sections of the anthology worked very well in conveying the music of poetry and exploring the theme of power and there is a very good range of familiar and less familiar poems from a wide range of cultural and historical backgrounds. A lovely anthology and keep and treasure. The last section on truth, however, was the most demanding, perhaps because of the final poem by Shelley, which is much longer than the others and will require deeper reading. The final lines provide the title for the book:
“Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many – they are few”
