Best Poem of 2010

I don't read very many poetry magazines these days and also don't think awards and prizes mean much beyond creating a discussion and some publicity so perhaps my award for Best Poem of 2010 actually transcends itself by being the Most Redundant Literary Award of 2010 above and beyond whichever poems it nominates. But I did say earlier in the year that Lachlan Mackinnon's book Small Hours would deserve to win a share of this year's prizes and even though it's been taken on by books from Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Simon Armitage and other somewhat major names, I think it has held on to its position as my favourite book of this year.
Much of the power of Small Hours, however, depends on the long prose poem sequence, The Book of Emma, and it is not a straight contest to put that moving and subtly powerful work up against the general fashion these days for poems that don't expect us to turn over many pages before we get to the end. There are several excellent other poems in the book but none that have made it onto my shortlist.
Last year, in an effort to try to give this award some history, I probably liked Don Paterson's poem The Day best without making Rain the best book of the year. So I'd like the best poem not to have appeared in the best book.
2010 was a year that several celebrity names added new titles to their bibliographies but, Mackinnon apart, few of those new books achieved tremendously much that their authors hadn't showed us already but that isn't to say it wasn't a good year.
I've had a relaxed look through the books I've bought and reviewed here this year, and tried to recall what I've seen and liked in magazines and on the internet and made a shortlist, which has been reduced to these, with no poet allowed more than one poem on it as the sort of arbitrary rule that these sort of shortlists sometimes give themselves.
So,

Derek Mahon, An Aspriring Spirit, from An Autumn Wind
James Sheard, The Strandperle Notebooks, from Dammtor
Paul Muldoon, The Fish Ladder from Maggot
Seamus Heaney, 'The door was open and the house was dark' from Human Chain
Jane Yeh, The Body in the Library,
Kelly Grovier, The Ratio, both from PN Review 195.

I'm honestly not sure which way it's going yet and none would be shortlisted if they didn't have a chance. Having left out some excellent poems to get this far, I'll have to give it some more thought before selecting the winner. I'm sure the poetry world will be on hot bricks in anticipation of my decision.

Pictures of Gregory

Research in old diaries and archaeological excavations of piles of old magazines, programmes, photos and general cultural detritus have established that the date I saw Gregory in Bournemouth was Monday 27th February, 1989 and eventually dug up the pictures I took.

In an unfortunate bit of bad planning, I'd had used up the film before he took his hat off to reveal the full dreadlocks but it was an excellent concert and in pictures like the first one here, I suspect he knew I was there and held the pose for the photo. Or maybe that was just my imagination.

Top 6 Gregory has to begin with my two most memorable, the duets with Dennis Brown, Let Off Sup'm, from Judge Not, and Big All Around from No Contest, with its choice studio effects http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcBzFPBJqHk . Hush Darling and If I Don't Have You represent Lover's Rock where really you can perm as many as you want from the selection without losing out.

Night Nurse is as big a UK hit as there was and so is included for form's sake but there's a wealth of candidates in a vast output that includes classic cuts throughout and a Top 20 or 30 might tell the story better because there aren't necessarily stand-outs in such a high class field. And of course the sometimes novelty sixth selection has to go to Puff the Magic Dragon.

Gregory Isaacs (1951-2010)

My favourite singer died on Monday. I'm not saying that as a tribute or to claim him as mine but if I happen to outlive Al Green, you must come back and check that I don't say the same about him.

I have a heavy pile of vinyl upstairs that establishes my allegiance, something like 35 LP's plus 12 inch singles, and some CD's closer to hand down here, the Live at Brixton Academy album playing right now. But my collection is nowhere near an effort at completism. In the mid-90's there was a review in Q, or it might have been Mojo, entitled 'that difficult 137th album'. Great admirer of his best work though I am, I'm not above thinking that some of those albums were the most perfunctory of contract fulfilment.

The two LP's repackaged as the double album, Lover's Rock, along with the Night Nurse set represented a high point in the reggae chic that Gregory was undisputed champion of. By no means the international icon that Bob Marley was, he had a specialist following in the UK while being a household name and perennial number one in Jamaica and the Caribbean. If Night Nurse crept into the lower ranks of the British hit parade in the original, it was some sort of compensation but not much that Mick Hucknall took the song to a higher position as a cover version.

There was already a considerable oeuvre of bittersweet singer-songwriter material behind him before the 1980's with albums like Red Rose for Gregory and Warning still to come as well as the powerful Judge Not collection with Dennis Brown (and do, please, look up the majesterial duet Let Off Sup'm) and collaborations with Sly and Robbie, the superstar rhythm section of choice. But Papa Gregory also benefitted from a fine backing band in the Roots Radics Band who were just as state of the art.

Equally adept as heartbreaker or heartbroken, the local ladies man, there was also a political strain to his songs in the likes of the rasta hymn Border, and the gorgeously well-judged cover version of Puff the Magic Dragon. His voice was sweet without being sentimental, languid and lyrical. Our first planned trip to see him in London ended in disappointment when called off, reportedly when Gregory was jailed on gun-running charges in the early 1980's but the mythology and rumour was not always easily distilled from the hard facts in those days. I don't know.

I eventually saw him in Bournemouth circa 1989, just after Red Rose for Gregory and enjoyed every minute, knew every word, even though waiting until midnight before he came on, and drove home to Portsmouth to be in bed by 3 a.m.

His passing marks almost the end of a great tradition of reggae, a genre whose reputation and more recent lurches into darker areas make the bygone age of Dennis Brown, Freddie MacGregor and their like seem really quite old-fashioned.

Hush Darling http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n8old0BNWQ

Great South Run

World class athletics came to Portsmouth on Sunday. Seeing a world champion setting a new course record is quite a moving experience, not as much for the simple anorak feeling of being there to see it but to see just how perfect it looks, the way that whereas for most of us running 10 miles on tarmac would be impossible, joint-breaking or at best a difficult plod, to see World Cross Country Champion, Joseph Ebuya, and Grace Momyani, both Kenya, skim, float across or disdain the ground they cover is entirely 'something else'.

And neither do I have anything but the ultimate respect for those hours behind the planet's most gifted whippets who have trained to take part, find great fulfilment in the achievement and either wave to cameras and crowds in the knowledge that they have only a mile to go and will finish or those who show their suffering, take a bit of a walk or stop to stretch a hurting muscle. Hats off to the dizzying passage of faces and running styles, the courage, determination and unwilling body shapes that they force into the pursuit of achievement. My only suggestion to any but the best of them would be that it is actually easier and more enjoyable on a bicycle.

I found Freya Murray, second in the women's event, as impressive as any on the purely racist grounds that someone from Scotland could be good enough to come second to Grace's prototype distance running. But the main reason I was so impressed is that, somewhat unbelievably now, I did once do something similar as a teenager, up and down the exciting gradients of Churchdown Hill outside Gloucester when I was the merest of schoolboys. It was tough, it was spleen, it was fight and it was guts but, quite honestly, it was a soft option compared to having to play rugby union against the first team of a school that frankly fancied itself at the game and officially outlawed proper football, at which, 15 years old, I was a maverick talent. It was like being an oil painter working among jobbing painters and decorators, or at least I can say that now.

But I'm not sure if the Cross Country title that Ebuya won involved him in climbing over gates or slipping through ankle-deep mud on twilight Gloucestershire November evenings. From what I've seen of Cross Country on the telly, it looks as if they do a few laps of a field with a bit of a slope in it.

So, having not run an inch since finishing a creditable, I thought, 10th, in the Fairford Festival Fun Run of 1995, I was deeply engaged and profoundly impressed by seeing not only what top class distance running now looks like in the flesh- it looks like sprinting for 10 miles- but also how many unsuitable people are giving it a go and getting a huge thrill out of it. You only have to get down to the first of the club runners to begin to see less than perfect running actions but then you notice that they are doing the 10 miles in a time not much longer than I'd take to do it on wheels now. Ebuya running v. Green on bike would nowadays be a bet worth considering although, in my defence, I did do 10 miles in 26.31 in 1995 and so I'd have been hanging around waiting for him at the end in those days when I was fit.

But, absolutely tremendous, all of it, and all of them, and not least the little warm-up sideshow I saw when police jumped on a pickpocket and eventually carted him off. We might find Shakespeare's invention of Autolycus to be a tricksy figure of guile and wonderment in an old play but we don't like crimimal no-marks ruining a lovely Sunday like this when everybody else is having a nice time.

Anthony and the Johnsons - Swanlights

Anthony and the Johnsons, Swanlights (Rough Trade)

Having all but retired from the buying of pop records, it has to be something of considerable promise to get me interested nowadays and the candidates come from a narrow range of taste.

Art-house would be one of them and although it's a big ask, you just can't be sure that Anthony Hegarty won't regain the highpoint of achievement he did with Bird Gerhl.

Such a distinctive voice, though capable of being both powerful and shimmering, has the drawback of always being distinctive. There is no respite from it. Where the I am a Bird Now album seems to build to that final track like a set conceived as a whole, these songs are in various ways contemplative and wondering, in both senses of the word, but the voice sometimes seems to be the point rather than what it is saying.

Three or four plays and greater familiarity make it more enjoyable, the obvious stand-out , The Great White Ocean, being joined by The Spirit Was Gone and Thank You for Your Love as the more successful pieces, and coincidentally perhaps not the most experimental. Bjork guests on Fletta, a duet that could unfold more with further listenings. This wouldn't be the sort of album one would expect to divulge all its secrets first time out and it is deserving of attention, but it doesn't contain anything to compare with his monumental best.

Some of the orchestration might be by Philip Glass, once or twice the voice suggests the phrasing of Marc Bolan, the eclectic possiblities to be heard in reference points and musical ideas are by no means all from pop and rock music but from a wider catalogue of twentieth century music.

It is said to be a happier album than his previous and you might guess that from reading the song titles but it's not quite as simple as that. Thoughtful, relaxed for the most part and warm.

It is rewarding, attractive music that will be worth staying with for some time.

Signed Poetry Books - John Betjeman

The most expensive acquisition in my collection of signed poetry books is a 1977 facsimile edition of Continual Dew.

I'm sure there are better examples of the Beteman signature on a book.

Signed Poetry Books - Anthony Thwaite

How very remiss of me to not have scanned my Thwaite signed book in earlier. But now I've got a new scanner, that will the least of it.

However, having had one for some time, I've now got two as I sneaked my Amazon purchase into the Waterstone's tent at Cheltenham.

Philip Larkin - Letters to Monica

Philip Larkin, ed. Anthony Thwaite, Letters to Monica (Faber)

I was grateful to Anthony Thwaite at the Cheltenham Festival event for his reassurance that it was alright to read a book like this. He would say that, wouldn't he, but he points out that it was only the diaries that Larkin said should be destroyed, that he appointed two literary executors and that some of the letters mention the posterity that they now belong to, so he was well aware that we would be reading these letters over Monica's shoulder. So that's alright, then.

The primary justification for reading the private letters of a writer must be the background and context they provide to the primary texts. After that, some biographical detail might shed further light on the work and after that we descend into mere voyeurism as we are fed more detail on what it might have been like being Philip Larkin. And indeed, we do get plenty of first-hand commentary by Larkin about what he's reading, off the cuff opinions of his contemporaries and what he most likes (Hardy and Handel, by some way). But, as the years go by, the relationship with Monica comes under greater scrutiny, we see him ineffectual, indecisive and treating her quite badly and, as far as insight into their relationship goes, we might have been spared such letters as that on page 339, which I'm not going to quote here.

If these letters had been published before the Selected Letters (1992), the outcry at his misanthropy, racism, misogyny and Thatcherism might not have been so shrill. First impressions often do count for a lot, though, and many who used the evidence of those letters to damn Larkin are unlikely to rush to this book to find evidence of a more likeable man to balance them. He is kindly, unassuming, dithering really, and loves Beatrix Potter's books, almost to the extent of becoming an animal rights campaigner and good for him. It's nearly a charming, Pooter sort of life in the library, going home to listen to jazz or Handel and write to his girlfriend, well into his fifties. He listens to the test match, goes for a bicycle ride on Sunday and reads avidly.

But if likeable in that sense, one might have found him infuriating in person. Monica comes across as almost a saint in tolerating his lack of commitment and feeble apologies. It's not only marriage he can't commit to. The highlight of the book for me could be the anxiety that hiring a radio set caused him in 1955,

I felt terrified in the shop, just at the prospect of signing an agreement.

You can't see Hughes or Gunn struggling with that for long.

When viewing a flat he gets the people downstairs to put their radio on at normal volume to check if he can hear it. Which is a good idea, but fussy.

His backward-looking aesthetic is captured in the letters he writes while editing the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. He doesn't really want to include anybody born after 1930 as well as wanting to exclude a list of Fuller, Day Lewis, Grigson, Gascoyne, Barker while he twice quotes Frances Cornford with admiration. A side of modern jazz 'sounded like a ferry boat trying to get out of a piano factory'.

The book confirms more of the received impression of Larkin than it does to alter it. He is genuinely happier on his own and forever under pressure from women, whether it be his mother 'a bottomless jar in which to pour sympathy, common-sense, & understanding', Monica or one of his other girlfriends, about who he is not really very apologetic.

Monica's letters might have been more impressive, apparently stretching to twenty pages on occasions, and she does seem to need him, but there must come a time when the scrutiny of a quiet, stammering man's inadequacies has gone on long enough and as much added in and around the frugal poetic output to satisfy anybody's curiosity. This book does contain entertaining and enlightening writing and is as essential to the Larkin admirer as the two biographies, the other letters and the juvenilia. What has often looked like scraping the barrel in the past has generally come to be regarded as worthy of our attention. Some of our gratitude goes to Anthony Thwaite for the fine scholarship in five year's working on this volume but we owe as much to Betty Mackereth, the secretary who shredded the diaries.

Competition Time Answer

There was no winner of the recent competition set here recently.

No disrespect, I think, to the James Sheard book offered as a prize but more likely due to the low audience figures of a small time website like this.

However, it was still a thought-provoking exercise to decide the answer.

The preview of Rory Kinnear's Hamlet had a chance to set the standard but even though subsequent reviews of the real first night have been very positive, it ran below expectations when we saw it and was off the pace in a competitive field.
National Poetry Day was enjoyable and with a genuine feelgood factor, and took an early lead even if I wasn't in the target audience for all of it.
The Larkin event at Cheltenham ran up to form and perhaps proved even better than that and took up the running with two events still poised to challenge. Lumsden and Bryce together were immaculate and put in a bold bid before Hambling ran slightly below form and in a close finish didn't quite get there.
It might not be the best way to judge such a prize but there's inevitably a kind of handicap system involved in which performances are judged against expectations, so the favourites had more to live up to. However, my decision is final and the terms of the competition stated that it depended on which I enjoyed the most, so the result is-

1. Philip Larkin 4/1
2. Lumsden and Bryce 7/1
3. Maggi Hambling 6/4 Fav.

5 ran

Cheltenham Literature Festival - Maggi Hambling

Maggi Hambling, Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, October 12.

Richard Cork introduced Maggi Hambling in a conversation centred around her Scallop sculpture at Aldeburgh and, perhaps more to the point, the new book she has written about it.
Cork was a genial and enthusiastic straight man and it can't always be an easy job but his laughter and appetite for the subject didn't immediately carry the audience with him. Maggi, apparently sipping water, was possibly a fraction under-fuelled and the discussion took a little time to warm up.
Never short of high camp retorts or imperious opinions, Maggi's best early shot here was almost an aside, talking about Benjamin Britten's swimming in the North Sea at Aldeburgh every day of the year,'What,' asked Cork, 'even in December?'. 'He was never out of it.'
Frinton, Aldeburgh and Saffron Walden were places selected for satire, mostly on account of their attitudes to art and other such enjoyable frivolity. We heard about the new wave sculpture now in private hands, anecdotes of George Melly and some brief notes on the Hambling works of the past but it was mainly a history of the Scallop, from its conception, through manufacture to its controversial life since.
It was conceived as a tribute to Britten when unfounded rumours suggested that Maggi was to do a figure of the composer. After that, it took some time for the local contractors, Pegg's, to progress from the model to the full-size realization and the cost of course surpassed original estimates and achieved £110k. Disapproval and protest began at the planning permission stage, ran through the opening ceremony and continues with vandalism and graffiti although it develops in reacting with sea air chemically to develop a new patina and is now in fact further from the sea than when it started because the sea has rearranged some beach from further up the shore.
Never less than enchanting, Maggi remains completely the genuine article, saying she does what she does, not a part of any movement or school, which anybody authentically involved in their work would surely say, and pursuing it with energy and passion. The book is £13 on Amazon, not the marked £20 that you would have been asked for here with the chance to get it signed. After all, even though the Cheltenham Festival is a top class and wonderful jamboree with as much in it as one could manage, it is also a marketing exercise and these people have a living to make. At least they don't apologize for that.

Roddy Lumsden and Colette Bryce

Roddy Lumsden and Colette Bryce, Cheltenham Literature Festival, October 12

Perhaps you can get something for nothing after all. At the very attractive entrance price of free, two most accomplished and distinctive voices were available at tea-time at this great festival.
Colette Bryce is both tough and gentle, a traditional poet in most interpretations of the word, resilient and evocative in describing her childhood in Northern Ireland and unsentimentally involving when moving on to later themes. She is completely convincing as a poet confidently in charge of what she's doing, most memorably for me in the title poem of her latest book, Self Portrait in the Dark with cigarette, about her ex-lover's car that stayed parked outside her house after the relationship ended. Interestingly, the idea that poets don't drive, also mentioned in the Larkin discussion, surfaced again here. I hadn't heard that for some years. A copy of the book will shortly be on its way to my house from one of my regular suppliers.
Roddy Lumsden is a natural talent but also wise and aware enough to know exactly how to temper his potentially pyrotechnic linguistic effects within well-made poems. This is, of course, no more than one should expect of art but Roddy's abundance of tricks and ideas needs more restraining than most and he is respectful enough of form to do so. His is another charming voice to listen to, clear and accurate in expression of his considered phrasing and he has a keen eye for picking up subject material for poems, always diverting and finding ideas worthy of our attention. Here we had, for example, the scientific theory of how ghosts might be possible, the way that San Francisco dive bars have been renovated into theme bars themed on old dive bars and a possible highlight that was probably called Europe After the Rain. The new book next Spring will shame many poets with Lumsden's output not for its prolific volume but its consistency. Serious about his poetry and encyclopedic in his knowledge of everyone else's, few come better to equipped to writing poems and he puts it all to good use.
Both poets would have benefitted from longer, which sounds rich coming from me who was in a hurry to get to the next event, but the audience was attentive and must have had an appetite for more of each. Both were models of the poetry performer's art and could hardly have expressed themselves better. Impressive.

Signed Poetry Books - Ian Duhig

Rushed out by Picador to meet the event, this might be one of the very first signed Pandorama's. According to Amazon, you won't get it until next month from them.

Ian's message isn't at first easy to decipher but if it says what I think it says then it might be by way of apology for that.

Thanks, Ian, great to see you.

Ian Duhig - Pandorama

Ian Duhig, Pandorama (Picador)

Ian Duhig seems to me the acceptable face of 'political' poetry, being literary as well, not simply polemical and his politics very much a part of his wider, general view.

He is on the side of the underdog, the misfit and the disenfranchised from his indulgent poem of admiration to goths that begins this book, through sympathy with the working class, folk customs and a humane generosity of spirit, to more subversive spirits like Wilde, surrealists or Peter Didsbury.

It is both a local erudition, often taking us back to Leeds, and a wide-ranging internationalist temperament ranging across cultures and at the same time sophisticated in its language and deliberately 'rough' in its vernacular, knockabout wit and ballad forms.

More than anything else, it is the enjoyable rhyming that make the book memorable, particularly in Charivari and Braque's Drum, a poem as jolly in its banter as a Music Hall artiste but on a cerebral aesthetic theme, illustrating quite conveniently how Duhig's mind works with all kinds of interesting ideas matching themselves up.

Charivari is a celebration of that 'rough music' of cutlery, trays and dustbin lids,

Because the beautiful can prove untrue,

you sometimes need to heed Tom, Dick and Harry.

We're here to drum that message into you,

and that's the message of the charivari.

Duhig's sympathies are with the likes of festival goers, juggling, making their own entertainment, outside of the corporate domain of influence, a self-sufficient, shared ethos of the folk festival, WOMAD and passive counter-culture, like the those in goths that 'dance macabre at gigs like the Dracula Spectacular'. But he is still a poet of long traditions, not only the ballads, but Ovid, too, as he recounts Baucis and Philemon in a poem in memorial to a friend, in Flooding Back,

as if the Aire became that element

it sounded always destined to become,

a change to take the breath away from men.

As was recognized by Ruth Padel judging the Forward Prize, it's been a bit of a year for poetry books and a competitive one for would-be prize winners. Although possibly a little slight on the page per pound value for money ratio, that's never a real concern, and if the use of low vernacular was good enough for Larkin, it's not for me to be all effete about it and so Pandorama would be welcome on any short list of mine. But the Forward Prize having somewhat dispiritingly if predictably gone to Heaney, my preference is possibly still with the Lachlan MacKinnon but I'm glad that it's not really a matter of winners and otherwise.

Cheltenham Literature Festival - Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin, with Anthony Thwaite, Andrew Motion and Martin Amis, Cheltenham Town Hall, October 10.

It must have been 1976, or maybe 77, the last time I went to Cheltenham Town Hall and the occasion would have been Racing Cars (They Shoot Horses, Don't They) or The Kursaal Flyers (Little Does She Know). Although I didn't know it at the time, Philip Larkin was writing his last great poem, Aubade; Andrew Motion was winning the Newdigate Prize at Oxford; Martin Amis had not long ago published Dead Babies and Anthony Thwaite was literary editor at The New Statesman. And now they were all here.

You couldn't find a more appropriate triumvirate of urbane commentators on the occasion of the publication of Thwaite's edition of the Letters to Monica and Cheltenham is the top drawer sort of festival that can put on any number of such choice events.

Illustrated with readings from the letters by Oliver Ford Davies, this was a well-planned run through some of the most memorable passages of the book and possible views of the life and relationship they cast further light on. The circumstances of the discovery of these letters was roughly where we came in, Monica Jones living a a state of some disarray and 'squalor', they were spread about her house in Northumberland and recovered by Motion only just before burglars returned a second time to empty the place completely. However, it might have made the Police's job easier if they had let them take the letters, too, because they would only have to have waited for the culprits to edit and publish this volume themselves before arresting them.

Amis, a brooding presence made just a bit vulnerable these days by the onset of age and- it looked like- a cold, reflected that such a talented poet as Larkin had so little talent for life, that he always seemed 'daunted by effort' but a pattern began to emerge in which Amis's criticisms of Larkin's 'appalling' life and limited scope for enjoyment were parried and defended by Thwaite, somewhat more patrician than I remember him before and certainly not ready to be gainsaid. In the first instance, Larkin's life had been poisoned by his parents.

A certain 'homosexual' aspect to the relationship was noted with Larkin in some ways taking a womanly role and Monica, who 'writes at the top of her voice', more masculine. But it was suggested that the inhibited life suited Larkin and might even have allowed the production of his poetry.

Amis made further incursions into Larkin's lack of adventure, telling an anecdote of when the poet had learnt to drive - Amis making up a general rule that poets don't drive- and had suggested to him that he could now take further steps such as moving to London and getting a life. Suggestions that were not welcomed. But Motion, debonair and considered as ever, countered that Larkin was actually the funniest person that he'd ever met and Thwaite concurrred that he was very good company.

The allegation that Larkin turned a face to Monica that was 'not his most alive' might have been tellingly true but this idea that someone puts on a different persona for each person they engage with is not new, almost inevitable for most of us and certainly not specific to Larkin. Motion was prepared to accept that he worked within an area that was easy to inhabit.

Further crimes of the poet were a feeling of ill will towards Kingsley Amis developing out of envy at the success of Lucky Jim but Amis junior was as ready to praise the poet in Larkin as he was to find fault with the personality, judging that his literary reputation is back to where it was after the 'high noon' of political correctness. Literary criticism can't separate the good from the not so good but Larkin's poems are 'mnemogenic', looking good in the memory. The attempt to downgrade him failed.

Amis went as far as to say that, in Larkin's career trajectory, each subsequent volume was 'ten times' better than the previous one. I wouldn't say that. Not at all, but at least he was as keen to enthuse about the poetry as he was to condemn the lifestyle.

On the one hand, Larkin's love of the commonplace could have been because he didn't know anything else but, on the other, the poems seek a way out of 'being Philip Larkin' and soar and seek the sky.

An hour could hardly have been better put to use in exploring this new book and if and how it affects our view of Larkin. The discussion flowed quite naturally though obviously structured through a set of reference points and themes, but these are seasoned professionals and performers with more than enough know-how to knock out a top quality event like this.

Always relevant and making points worth making, it was a pleasure to have made the trip on a fine Autumn Sunday afternoon and one could be forgiven for thinking that, in fact, everything is in order and fine as long as one is in Cheltenham on a Larkin expedition.

I'm about a third of the way through the book. Do tune in again next week for a closer look at the letters themselves.

Paul Muldoon - Maggot

Paul Muldoon, Maggot (Faber)

.

It might seem contradictory that a book ostensibly with a theme of rot and decay pursues it with such celebrated verve and display.

In his new book, Muldoon extends his already outlandish wordplay and inventiveness over 118 pages of poems, many of them 'sequences' (terrible word, I'm sorry. I don't like it either) in which forms are carried through several incarnations in line patterns, stanza forms or, in the title poem, a whole stanza repeated in all nine sections. It's 'form' in just as idiosyncratic a way as the rest of his idiom is.

Often, ready-made colloquial or slang phrases are used alongside the most abstruse or esoteric references as well as elements carried over from the end of one part to the next, insistent associations and apparently endless linguistic effects. It is what his End of the Poem lectures found to an astonishing degree in the poems of others and here, perhaps more than ever before, he demonstrates the workings of an almost infinitely over-active mind in his own work.

While in Incantata, this was very moving and in Hay it was haunting and clever and in Milkweed and Monarch its economy was rewarded with memorable echoes, it is now taken to such lengths and more spelt out that it is becoming overwhelming and surfeits more than it satisfies. I feel as if I'm lagging so far behind that I've lost sight of him and I'm not convinced that it's my lack of fitness that's entirely to blame.

But that is not to say there isn't plenty to enjoy here. As can sometimes be the case, these poems would be better heard than read and Muldoon is one of the great voices among living poets. With his delivery in mind one can hear the rhymes dropping into place and they are much more often brilliant than forced. He would land on them astutely and pin them in your memory.

The poems I like best at first here, and of course it will be a book that others will spend more time on and find much more in, look back on childhood. The Fish Ladder is beautiful in its peculiar way, and a great insight, a sophisticated idea that ends,

Just look at how two ferries

have gone down within plain sight of the pier

but only one tatterdemalion wave

has managed to stumble ashore.

And it has to be admired how, in the three parts of Sandro Botticelli: The Adoration of the Magi, recollections of Christmasses past, the rhymes on the same word are the same word with different meanings. Another form of Muldoon rhyme, perhaps clever for the sake of it, but my hat comes off to it.

He also brings in Baudelaire in a poem that is just about tremendous enough, then Beckett and Byron and, it could be worse than use the @ on the keyboard to muse upon awhile but when he dedicates a poem to John Ashbery, I'm ready for him.

I'm glad of the opportunity to be able to quote Neil Powell in the latest PNR who in turn is quoting P. J. Kavanagh on Ashbery on his 'sleep-inducing' quality, 'I may be wrong about the poetry but I'm not wrong about the sleep.'

If Muldoon, in many ways one of the greatest poets of our time, wants to line up with Ashbery, another whose brilliance is something entirely of his own devising, then he might find himself on the end of a similar charge. Not that he sends one to sleep. On the contrary, he threatens to keep us awake too long, and in the process I felt exhausted. That wouldn't usually be what I want from poetry, though.

National Poetry Day Live

National Poetry Day Live, Royal Festival Hall, Oct 7

Thank you very much indeed to the Poetry Society and South Bank Centre for putting on a fine show for Poetry Day, and for free, too, which means it would be a bit ungrateful to find fault with it. However, there's no need to because the positive heavily outweighs any reservations.
Dalgit Nagra is an ideal opening act, lively, rousing and a natural performer. Jo Shapcott is a friendly and welcoming presence, perhaps more shocking than expected to an old prude like me when finishing on a high note- more literally than you think I mean- with her hyperbole on a water closet theme. Simon Armitage showed that Seeing Stars sounds like poetry even if it doesn't look like it on the page and turned in the classy, understated performance than one knows and loves him for. From the 'slam' scene, it wouldn't be usual for me to be overly enthused about Joelle Taylor but she was impressive in what she did, and top marks for that on a day that one wasn't looking to raise objections, before introducing the emerging and impossibly young star of their world, Aisling Fahey.
The Pick a Poem feature on the Poetry Society stand was a lucky dip in which you helped yourself to an unmarked brown envelope with a poem in it. Some were said to be signed by the author and, to prove it, mine was, so now I'm the proud owner of a signed Fiona Sampson. I wonder if my luck will hold long enough to steam into Zenyatta in the Breeders Cup Classic.
Jane Draycott was very enjoyable, Lemn Sissay energetic and powerful reading from the Ancient Mariner but if Luke Kennard was a bit confident of his own abilities and it might have been the beer in him, the highlight of the second session was Jay Bernard, something of a revelation, heartfelt, passionate and proof if it were needed that there is always yet more in this game to be discovered even if you thought you knew it all. And I certainly never thought that.
There was an opportunity to go into 'the box' to have a one-to-one reading from a poet but I thought that might be a bit much for me and you don't know who you're going to get. You can't have a go on all the rides at the fair so I sat and filled in enough answers in the quiz to get a pass mark .
The final session included more Armitage, the admirable Ian Duhig, Robin Robertson somewhat dour but serious, Caroline Bird and a big party finish from Ross Sutherland, who is actually more of a poet than the stand-up comic that first might meet the eye.
Ian Duhig's new book, Pandorama, was rushed out to meet the occasion so I was happy to be one of the first to get a signed one. Proper poet, charming man. Tune in here again soon to find out what it's like. Well, it's good, obviously, from what I read on the train home but I'll take a few more words to say how and why next week.
What a big success and what a nice day. A wide range of poets, everybody in a good mood. It makes it all worthwhile. Thanks again to those who put it all the work. It is appreciated.

Sebastian Faulks - A Week in December

Sebastian Faulks, A Week in December (Vintage)

Fulham FC contribute to Eng Lit in a useful way here as we immediately note Roy Hodgson among the acknowledgements as one of the several that Sebastian Faulks consulted as part of his background research. Being well-read, especially for a football man, I'm sure Roy was delighted to help and Sebastian's interviewing was obviously assiduous and widespread as he spoke to a variety of people in the lives he writes about here.

It still reads like research, though. It's football, finance, tube driver, young druggie, internet addict and barrister as seen through the gauze of a Faulks novel. The parts we probably find most convincing are those of the vindictive rivalry in the literary world, of which we assume Sebastian has seen plenty at first hand.

The novel uses the device of a dinner party to bring together a topical cast of characters who one wouldn't necessarily expect to be all at the same party and hangs on this structure a sweeping survey of contemporary culture, fairly specific to London, but recognizable to many of us, I'm sure, as a 'state of the nation'.

He's had a fine, old time making up suitable names for stock market traders, radicalized Islamic converts, Premiership footballers, and well-to-do Londoners and one is sure that if he needed a Northern club comic then he'd have called him Alf Barraclough or a trendy hairdresser would have been Justin Wellbeloved. He's also re-named everything in the zeitgeist to give it a transparent fictionality, like the reality TV show, the imaginary life internet site, the banks, the networks, the forums, and the media. It must have been great fun and if it doesn't ever achieve the laugh out loud level of recognition, then it is all very well observed and accurate in its critique. What worried me most, though, was the thought that we can all enjoy the satire, say to each other what a fine book it is, what an awful condition we have allowed ourselves to drift into, congratulate Sebastian on describing it so well and then we will all carry on with it, apparently unwilling or unable to do anything about it. It would have made us angry once and there would have been riots but now we just nod in compliant acknowledgement and let the powers that be continue to run us ragged.

One of the many fine insights is provided when the tube driver shows her avatar existence in the ether to the barrister sent to interview her as part of the legal case taken up on behalf of the suicide attempt that jumped in front of her train. There is an internet in this virtual world and she is asked if her alter ego can create a further imaginary character in that world. When he is told, 'don't be silly', I think we have a well-made point.

This is what life is like now. What happens is that many of the cast are led to confront the demeaning ways that they have been led into by the way the world controls us now, not least the potential terrorist who nearly gets knocked over on his way to go and blow himself up. But, in a well-made ending that you might have thought was leading to one pointless tragedy, it leaves us with possibly an even more sinister one. John Veals has been exploiting markets for the mere acquisition of millions he has no interest in spending, no use for whatsoever beyond its mere accumulation. And the point is spelt out that the vast majority of us little people are being made to pay for it as he coldly enjoys his joyless success. Faulks has done well to show why the promises of the Koran have led the would-be suicide bomber to regard the fallen nature of our culture as so imperfect and I, for one, was made more sympathetic to its agenda as far as it went. It's perhaps no more than an updating of what George Orwell said made socialism so attractive to any intelligent sixteen year old.

Sebastian Faulks' trilogy of war novels seemed to bridge the gap between literary excellence and best-sellerism, easily enough to make him both very well-off and widely admired even for those who have only read Birdsong. I had trouble with a couple of his titles before Engleby somehow scared the hell out of me and now after the James Bond pastiche, he's doing what he should be doing again.

Having provided his survey of the life that many of us seem to be living now, he leaves us with an ominous truth and a difficult prospect. It's entertaining, a fine analysis and a polemical novel. But just reading it and saying how true it all is isn't really going to improve the situation much.

Hamlet National Theatre

Hamlet, Olivier Theatre, Oct 1.

No Hamlet ever seems complete or definitive. There are so many aspects to the character- the melancholy, the passion, the mad, the noble or the studious- that any account can hardly embrace them all without looking incoherent but only emphasizes some at the risk of underplaying others.

Rory Kinnear's Hamlet makes a creditable effort at covering all the angles and he gathers some power in the soliloquies but, spending so much time dressed in t-shirt, trackie bottoms and trainers and smoking a fag, he does remind one of Wayne Rooney and so might stay in my mind as the chav Hamlet. More thoughtful than Rooney, admittedly, but nonetheless somehow representative of our times. With Alex Lanipekun's Laertes bearing a passing resemblance to Nicholas Anelka, the sword fight might have been lifted from any recent Man. United v. Chelsea match except the football authorities have so far missed the trick of allowing players to carry swords.

Not everything added up. Certainly the surveillance culture that we saw as use of CCTV in last year's RSC production has been brought forward in the form of suited henchmen keeping watch, wearing a wire and hanging round in doorways but I struggled to find what other themes Nicholas Hytner was pursuing in this renewal.

I'm afraid Patrick Malahide's Claudius was non-descript and lack-lustre and could have been a stand-in for someone unavailable who could inhabit the part. It wasn't credible that he could fire up Laertes to do his dirty work for him and despatch the turbulent prince. Neither did he generate any lewdness or libido with his new wife, certainly not enough to upset Hamlet's view of female sexuality.

Clare Higgins as Gertrude was well portrayed as past her prime and usually within reaching distance of a bottle of spirits, falling apart, but Claudius didn't add much to the impression of a dissolute Danish court. He didn't look as if he'd ever had the statesmanship, bearing or charisma to make the loss of them a significant thing.

So it is a rather underwhelming verdict to say that this preview performance has scope for Rory to grow further into the part and that the lighting was one of its more memorable elements, like the leg byes and no balls contributing a useful part of a cricket score.

An engaging, enthralling Hamlet can, and obviously often has, compensated for doubts that less successful productions allow one to realize. This year I've seen respected Shakespearean authorities, like Profs. Wells and Bate, nominate their favourite Shakespeare plays without mentioning Hamlet. Much to my surprise and even consternation as I have long assumed, as Barry Humphries says in today's Times, that it is 'the greatest play ever written'. Ever written, perhaps, but perhaps not staged, then. It can't be just pedantry to notice that Hamlet describes death as 'the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns' not long after seeing his father's ghost. We are also asked to accept that Hamlet 'was likely, had he been put on, To have proved most royally;' although we have just watched him paralysed to inaction by traumatic events, acted daft in the face of it and treated his girlfriend rather abominably. We might have a Prince who is thought to be a bit like that in our country at the moment but few are suggesting that he's going to make a good king, not even his mother.

And so, not only does the question arise whether Hamlet is the best play ever written, or even Shakespeare's, but whether my mate and I, having seen 20 or more productions each of it, are still quite as enthused as we were about continuing to take every opportunity to see yet more.

I think I construct my ideal Hamlet from bits and pieces of various versions, a bit of Olivier's film in the flashback sequences, Ken Dodd as Yorick in Branagh's, superb touches locally by Southsea Shakespeare Actors like the burning of boats during 'To be or not to be', Ophelia appearing in Polonius's clothes in her mad scene or Fran Lewis who I remember and praise at every opportunity. But I can't think which was most coherent on its own.

The language is sublime, obviously, and will never be in doubt, but once expectation has been dented, doubts flood in, not single spies but in battalions.

I'm sure this production will benefit from these preview outings, in the same way that pre-season friendlies can be inconclusive affairs before a team goes unbeaten well into October in the league. And some things can be as interesting for their imperfections as for their excellence but I'm afraid you don't get rave notices for that. But, as it stood, this was in danger of being a play of shreds and patches.

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Note. I am grateful to the teenage boy who sat next to me in the front row of the circle on Friday night who desisted from playing with his empty plastic beer vessel once I had decided that I had to suggest it might be time to put it down. He apologized and that's fine. It ceased immediately. But unfortunately I'm not the sort of pro-active, Alpha-male who enjoys making such points to strangers in a public place and it took more courage to do than I thought I had.

Hamlet is a long play and I do understand that teenagers now suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder but in the same way that one shouldn't have a mobile phone switched on and, like I have to, one tries to only cough when there's a loud bit in the performance to cover it, you shouldn't be in the audience if you feel the need to fiddle irritatingly with a bit of plastic whenever 10 boring minutes pass without anybody on stage being zapped.

You don't know, spotty kid, how close you were to being the next casualty in an unscripted addition to the evening's entertainment but you desisted and apologized when asked and I wish you success in all your ongoing studies and adventures in theatre and Eng Lit.

I hope you get as much out of it all as I like to think I have.