The Year in Review

It was a wise decision to announce this time last year that after 10 years of making the most dubious and least-coveted awards in poetry and an extended set of categories that I would stop.
I haven't read very much new poetry at all this year. If I had any flimsy authority a few years ago to nominate what I considered the Best Poem or Best Collection of the year, I'd struggle to name even a few new books that were published this year.
I don't think I read any new novels in 2019 but Best Book would have to be Daisy Dunn's In the Shadow of Vesuvius, ahead of Julian Barnes.
Best Event was Wincanton races on 17th October as I marked my 60th successful orbit of the Sun with some choice company and the authoritative win by Sebastopol that was flagged up in these pages.
On a higher brow it was Isata Kanneh-Mason's recital at Turner Sims, Southampton, with her mostly Clara Schumann with the rest of the shortlist having been Chichester Cathedral concerts.
I was gratified to see the Anamorfosi album by Le Poeme Harmonique nominated as best disc of the year in Gramophone by Alexandra Coghlan on which the instability of the text was highlighted by a new Allegri Miserere but having had two Gramophone experts agree with my selection last year, I'm not going with that because it is too much altogether and I can't play it all in one go so Isata takes that as well because her debut album was as perfect as you can get without going to see her play it.

I read the best book I've ever read in Ian Bostridge's Winter Journey but the two I am reading at present, which won't take long, are excellent, too.
Rosemary Tonks's last novel, The Halt During the Chase, is not a disappointment. It could have been because expectations were high so the fact that it isn't makes it great, and a bargain at nearly £150 cheaper than the other available copy.
Marjorie MacNeill's Norman MacCaig, a Study of his Life and Work is as lucid and admirable as its subject and so looking like a huge success.
They should both be read, appreciated and carefully filed before Christmas, some of which will be spent looking at what I bought for others. Stanley Middleton's poems will be of interest, as will Laura Cummings's On Chapel Sands and the new Beryl Burton biography. I'll have to purloin them later if I can't finish them in the allotted time. Last Christmas I was inconsiderate enough to read the Alf Engers biography before its rightful owner.

So, that's it. I'm glad to see the number of 'postings' this year is well down on previous years so I must have been doing something more productive.
Happy Christmas, etc.