Meet the Supremes and other stories

 You can't win them all. Following the New Year's Eve windfall at Newbury I suddenly can't find a winner this year so follow me in on Grey Diamond (Sandown, 1.50) tomorrow at your peril. Take it easy. There's plenty of ammunition left with which to take on 2023 in due course.

Only because of such high expectations, Meet the Supremes was a fraction of a disappointment, too. From 1962, it includes the earliest singles which weren't big hits but it does begin with the gorgeous Your Heart Belongs to Me (Robinson) and follows up with his Who's Lovin' You, great but done better by The Miracles and later by Michael with the Jackson Five. After that, it's a bit more bubblegum but possibly only below par because the immaculate standard was to be set by the Holland-Dozier-Holland years and a bit more sophistication. Still, The Sounds of Detroit remains an essential thing. The Miracles album is a sheer joy, the Contours a bit more raucous and the Marvin Gaye and Marvelettes still to be properly explored.

Any one track from the Miracles album is worth more than all the accumulated long-haired, denim-clad 'rock' of the 70's put together. It is pop genius.

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Tremendous news for the local classical music audience round here, though, is the new series of Portsmouth Menuhin Room Concerts, beginning on Sat 11th February, 12.30, for an hour. It's hard to know which would be the highlights because they probably all will be (although surely that's not what a 'highlight' is) but the Shostakovich Piano Trio with Angela Zanders on April 22, James Lisney playing the Diabelli Variations on June 3 and Danny Driver's Goldberg Variations on July 1 would be the most unmissable for me.

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I watched Reaching for the Moon, the film about Elizabeth Bishop, for the second time recently and so took it to Portsmouth Poetry Society and read The Shampoo, which is featured in it. I wonder sometimes if I should talk about my most favourite things because one might come across as a salesman rather than an admirer who only wants to share their enthusiasm. The Shampoo, I maintained, is such a good thing it's hard to know how to explain it beyond its tight construction, its music and (I don't think I said), its avoidance of all bad practice. Except, only possibly, that first rhyme on rocks/shocks. Poetry is an artificial thing but, certainly in poems like this, wants to look natural. Perhaps it's when poems are obviously artificial but look natural is when they work, if and when they do. If 'rocks/shocks' draws some attention to itself that's a bad thing. But in almost any other poet it might look as if the rhyme scheme was leading the poem, in Elizabeth Bishop it is given the benefit of any doubt.

It might be such esoteric worries as this that prevent me from simply getting on and writing some poems but if they're not good enough I don't want to write them and I would prefer to have an idea that insists on being written. I can't sit in front of a blank sheet of paper and come away later with a poem. The paper would remain blank. I wouldn't sit down - although I'm usually supine during the process - until there was something to write. It's been four months now. It's been that long before. It's not exactly a problem but there is satisfaction to be had when it happens so I hope it happens again sometime.