A Survey of Contemporary Poetry

I'm not going to attempt such a thing. Good grief, no. I was led to thinking how difficult it would be to undertake, being so close to it, being a small part of a small part of it and not all of it being visible to any individual.
One might begin with the famous names from the big publishing houses, the 'mainstream' poets who we imagine might represent our age in a hundred years' time- Don Paterson, Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean O'Brien, we might think, although posterity sometimes sees things differently. And then there'd be the local groups and activity in London. Oxford and the provinces, as well as the dedicated schools of avant garde manifesto-makers beleaguered in their stolid doctrines, plus the magazines, competitions and, perhaps most important of all, the individual readers and writers doing their own thing to their own satisfaction without troubling anybody else with it.
I wouldn't know where to start but one of my own windows onto this disparate galaxy of far-flung stars and solar sysytems is Clarissa Aykroyd's The Stone and the Star, here, http://thestoneandthestar.blogspot.co.uk/  
and in particular her Blog List from which you can scan the latest posts by those she follows, which I'm gratified to be included in.
Today I followed up Anthony Wilson and his thoughts on his 'Go-to' poets. His list comprises Norman MacCaig, Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Tomas Transtromer as well as quoting Auden on Marianne Moore and it is so immaculate that I thought that any other poet he mentions must be worthwhile by association. I had never heard of Marie Howe but I was immediately off in search of her books. There is not apparently a Selected as yet and so I'll start with the most recent and let you know how it goes.
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Otherwise, a new influx of books is due after a session of indulgent clicking away, irresponsibly just ahead of when I'm asked what I want for my birthday and I have to say I've just ordered a pile of records so I don't know.
I've begun George Gissing's The Nether World in preference to the breeze block that is Ben Pimlott's biography of Harold Wiilson. I can't believe I'll be ploughing through that line by line but it will be one to dip into although sadly the index leads us to not much on Jeremy Thorpe.
These follow the short anthology of memoirs about Joyce in The Joyce We Knew by Ulick O'Connor, which confirms at first hand much of what we thought we knew about the aloof, half-blind genius with a fine tenor voice, and the New Grove North European Baroque Masters for its brief biography and catalogue of works of Buxtehude.
Also on their way, alongside a selection of versions of Couperin's Lecons de Tenebres to compare with the latest new recording, are Elizabeth Foyster's The Trials of the King of Hampshire, Barney Curley's old autobiography finally found cheap enough and George's Ghosts, a biography of Yeats by Brenda Maddox. The Ellman account of Yeats was so unsatisfactory that I thought he deserved another chance. Brenda's book on Nora Barnacle was excellent and so if she can't make Yeats interesting, I'll have to assume it his fault after all.
So, with the Saturday Nap due to take us up to Boxing Day with horse racing advice of the most dubious provenance and the assessments of the Year's Best in all the usual categories, it is worth noting- should you be interested- that I only went away for a couple of weeks and I'm back here like a rearguard action, trying to show that the blog (although I'm old-fashioned and call this a website) is not a thing of the past.