The other night I did a rare thing and went and picked two CD's off the shelves to play rather than play one of the several more recent purchases or regular favourites that are piled by the computer. Some of those old discs have been there for a decade or more than that without being so much as looked at and some will probably never be played again and so the least they deserve is the random consideration of being given another chance.
The two that I picked (and it could have been almost anything) were The Mighty Diamonds and Hugh Mundell. There was nothing wrong with them at all but they did just slightly disappoint and certainly failed to live up to the opinions I had of them.
It isn't possible to keep listening to and re-reading everything and so there is a vast back catalogue of neglected things that might still be classic, or somehow got even better as they mature in the bottle, or might of course not be quite as good now as one remembers. I don't think you can guess which it will be until you've got them out and given them a try.
The Mighty Diamonds' fine harmonies seemed just less than gorgeous and Hugh Mundell, once a big favourite whose records I went to some lengths to find, just sounded a bit thin now. But perhaps I was expecting too much. The music hasn't changed and so it must be me that has.
On the other hand, the last meeting on the programme of the Portsmouth Poetry Society before the summer recess is on Tony Harrison. It certainly isn't ten years since I last looked at him but 'week collapses into week' and then months have gone by. I needed to choose a couple of things to read at the meeting and was immediately struck by the fact that they had lost nothing in that time. That might be because relatively little has appeared in recent years that was so instantaneously majesterial or it might be that some things are genuinely 'not of an age but for all time'.
What one is left with is only the opinion of work the last time you encountered it and there is no telling how many of those estimations have gone out of date. There isn't time to reconsider everything to revise them all either. So when one thinks that Bowie and Bolan were great, that is safe enough because one still hears them and time has only served to fortify their reputations. I'm waiting for discs of Heinrich Biber and The Eton Choirbook to arrive, relatively new to me in the long view but hundreds of years old and impregnable. But I wonder how well the stories and novels of William Trevor have lasted, who was a big hero of mine in the 1980's. Is that stylised, understated domestic loss and disappointment, the sense of the secrets of the past lurking behind a disconcerting present still as poignant and well done as it seemed then. I would hope that the best of it is but I'm not going to be able to find out just yet because today's deliveries are a fairly recent book of poems by Sue Hubbard and Susan Brigden's biography of Thomas Wyatt, which should keep me amused for a while.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
