The Poetry Premiership

So, is Jo Shapcott Fulham in disguise. If you see what I mean.

With apologies for the infantile preoccupation with list-making, which I do realize isn't the point, I have been wondering for a while which twenty living British poets would constitute the Poetry Premiership.

There will be some who would be disappointed not to be considered a part of it and legions of supporters of others who would claim their heroine or hero is deserving of a place. Well, what I've tried to do here is judge their standing in critical and public esteem as well as lifetime achievement and not pick my own top 20. I'd be delighted to hear suggestions from anyone for amendments but however many names you suggest for inclusion, I do ask that you nominate the same number to be removed from my list.

I might have missed someone completely but this does come from a long list of about 70. They are in some approximation of league positions and so I'd expect more debate about the lower half of the table rather than the top few who, I imagine, are firmly established as Premiership in status.

Do let me know. I am looking for some sort of consensus rather than a controversial blood-letting.

There is a semi-scientific way of working it out without counting prizes, book sales and column inches of coverage in magazines and journals. At any poetry reading, one can usually tell that the biggest name comes on last. We all implicitly sort of know that. It isn't quite headliner plus support acts but it does usually amount to the biggest reputation being the climax of the event with the other names in descending order from there.

One often sees a poet, artist, musician or suchlike described as 'one of the leading' exponents of their art. But this is easy and lazy praise to attribute to anyone unless we know who else is also in the elite group and, more importantly sometimes, who isn't. So, let's see. We can only have twenty. Let me know who else should be in and thus also who left out.

Seamus Heaney

Paul Muldoon

Geoffrey Hill

Tony Harrison

Don Paterson

Sean O'Brien

James Fenton

Derek Mahon

Simon Armitage

David Harsent

Colette Bryce

John Burnside

Carol Ann Duffy

Lachlan MacKinnon

Alice Oswald

Jo Shapcott

Ian Duhig

Roddy Lumsden

Andrew Motion

Michael Longley

And I am aware I've left out Douglas Dunn, Glyn Maxwell, Ruth Padel, Craig Raine, Anne Stevenson, Paul Durcan, Robin Robertson, Ciaran Carson, Kathleen Jamie and many more, which can only show what a competitive league the Championship is these days.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Top 6 - Violin Concertos

One of the highlights of the summer was Lisa Batiashvili, pictured, playing the Shostakovich Violin Concerto at the Proms, so scintillating that the spirit and atmosphere came out of the radio in a way I'd hardly ever experienced before. She was neither a musician I'd heard of before and neither was the piece although I've long stopped being surprised by the variety and greatness of the Shostakovich oeuvre.

But I spent a few quid and a few hours exploring the violin concerto repertoire in somewhat more depth than I so far knew. In the end, it might not have added much to a top 6 as it would have been before and eventually one can tire of yet another virtuoso bravura performance of yet more flamboyance, but it's a rich and rewarding genre if taken in the right quantities.

The Bach Double Concerto would be a certainty for almost any list but in this glorious performance, it is reserved for top place, with Oistrakh and Menuhin providing a paragon example of everything a performance should be from a more demure age. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmmpjziKcFU&feature=related

Tasmin's performance of the Beethoven in Portsmouth Cathedral a couple of years ago would secure another giant of orchestral music a guaranteed place. For some reason, I don't know if it's his portrait or reputation, but Beethoven is never as dark and foreboding as one thinks he might be. Fidelio, the Late Quartets, Missa Solemnis, etc. all turn out to be much easier going than one thought they would be and the Violin Concerto is perfectly charismatic.

Although I'm supposed to be picking concertos rather than performances, Henning Kraggerud's passionate account of the Tchaikovsky at last year's Prom gets it in ahead of several other deserving cases as the long list is ominously too long for the dwindling number of places that remain.

And so with Tasmin's recording of the Sibelius coming in, for me, just ahead the other recordings I have by her, I'm left with only room for a personal soft spot for the much under-rated Mendelssohn, it always seems to me, who is a tremendous composer seemingly overshadowed by too many other Romantic nineteenth-century masters and I'm having his haunting opening over and above a few other very persuasive claims and some big names who, to be honest, didn't make quite as much of a case as I'd expected.

The Saturday Nap Week 2

Customary tactics for me in selecting horses for investment involve choosing the right sort of race. That is, not handicaps which are so often bookmaker's benefits. Novice hurdles are my favourite.
I certainly couldn't get involved in the Charlie Hall Chase at Wetherby which will be one to watch and the most straightforward race of the day might be Wetherby's 2.15.
However, I am persuaded by the claims of Muirhead in Ascot's 3.40 and, with it being available at at least 6/1 at present, we can do it each way to try to insure our unbeaten record.

The Friday Nap

Just in case there's not a better option on Saturday.

It has to be noted that even though Ruby Walsh has said he will be reducing his appearances in England after the new rules on whip use, he is riding at Wetherby tomorrow and has only one ride booked.

This is Fistral Beach in the 3.20.

These top jockeys don't travel all that way for one ride unless they think it has a good chance. In fact, a top jockey with one ride at a meeting is one of the biggest ticks a horse can have against its name on my card.
But also bearing in mind that Ruby went to Fontwell for a Paul Nicholls trained horse last week, and finished second on it.

Still, I'm on. The 9/2 currently indicated on the Racing Post website would be lovely. And this website will continue to feature books and poetry, as before, just as soon as it can.

The Saturday Nap Week 1

The money for Camelot in the Racing Post Trophy is persuasive and the sort of thing that often persuades me but the effect of it has been to push the other horses who have accomplished more so far out to bigger prices so I'm not getting involved with what might be a false favourite there.


Chepstow's meeting has some interesting races with big stables bringing what might be some bright prospects for early season skirmishes. One notes Tim Vaughan's winners yesterday and that Paul Nicholls would usually start running up multiple winners at this stage of the year but Fingal Bay, Chepstow 3.40, from Philip Hobbs, might be a different class and offers better odds of reward than the Nicholls trained favourites in the first two races so if there's still 5/2 available on Fingal Bay, let's get on.

View from the Boundary

The world seems to have been wobbling on a precipice for months now, the global financial meltdown that is just about to happen and has been just about to happen for what is beginning to feel like forever. If you've got a job you're still okay and if your retirement is tidily all wrapped up then no worries but once the whole edifice of world capitalism collapses, then who can say.
Capitalism depends on boom and bust, the regular clear out of failed efforts. It is fuelled by borrowing and debt but they are supposed to last forever except they need to. But the new angle now is that it's China that has all the money. We didn't see that one coming.
It couldn't have been only me that knew that Greece wouldn't meet the repayments on its bail out and yet the markets went into a further tailspin when they realized it wouldn't. I only wish I understood it all well enough to have bet on that. Those in Britain who argued that we should stay out of the Euro were mostly right for the wrong reasons. It wasn't because we fought wars to keep the Queen's head on our currency and don't want our money to be the same as what they use in Italy. But it was a sound decision anyway.
The Conservative argument, under George Osborne, who looks like he clearly can't comprehend what it's like to not be a millionaire, was that the entrepreneureal spirit will create enough jobs to take up all the public service redundancies. But it's not a matter of if or when, it's simply not going to happen. They are as flotsam and jetsam blown about on the tides of world trends and there's nothing they can do about it. His job is just to defend the well off against the inevitable for as long as he can. The permanent look of bemusement on his face is just as worrying as Blair's old Bambi impersonation ever was.
The trouble is that there's no such thing as Economics. It ought to be abolished as a University subject and put into that dubious range of issues like Astrology, Palmistry, Creative Writing or Origami. Economics is no more than getting oneself down to the dog track and sticking it all on trap one except, of course, our dog track in Portsmouth closed some time ago now.
So, let's see if we can't fiddle our way ahead of the withdrawing tide by having a feature called the Saturday nap in which I'll scrutinize the horse racing of a Saturday morning and look where we might put our precious cash. The tip will be posted here by lunchtime and if we're not doing okay by Christmas, we'll admit defeat. The first half of the jumping season is often a good time to bet in my experience and I wish we'd started last week when Ongenstown Lad strolled in at Cheltenham at 5/2. I'm looking at Camelot on the flat at Doncaster tomorrow, who has been well backed in the week, but we'll see about that in the morning.
-But, Sport, otherwise. Who'd have it. Wales were denied their place as beaten finalists in the Rugby World Cup when their captain tried to drill an opponent head first into the ground and, although to much disgruntlement, quite rightly so. Rugby doesn't seem to have many rules and fails as a game because you can't really make up rules for a boisterous scrap between burly, beery men. But then last night, Fulham's prospects of getting through their Europa Cup group were left largely unaffected by the sending off of Dembele who no more than pushed a provactive opponent on the shoulder, who then collapsed as if he'd been shot. So I'm not sure if Rugby's a game played by real men and football by overpaid poseurs but I think the biggest problem with sport might be taking it seriously and the only way to make it matter, if you need it to, is to bet on it.
-Still looking through Lumsden's Best Poetry of 2011 anthology, I'm taking note of Judy Brown's fine poem in there and have ordered her forthcoming collection Loudness. I have high hopes of it on the early evidence and the poetry year is by no means over yet.
-Whereas, somewhat more controversially, I found myself calling last week's reading at Cheltenham a 'Premiership' event and so wondered exactly which twenty British poets would constitute the Premiership. There's no point allowing lazy journalism that says things like ' Smith is one of the top such and such in Britain' unless the writer can say who else is and who in fact isn't. So, one ought to be able to name the Premiership poets. The shortlist extends to maybe 80, which I have in three divisions. 18 so far in the Premiership with a Women's league for the benefit of those who think that Women's poetry is a different field altogether (which I really can't see). I don't know whether to publish my eventual findings here and would welcome nominations. One finds oneself pondering whether Jo Shapcott is Premiership; is Glyn Maxwell top of the next division or whether Craig Raine is now Sheffield Wednesday. It's bound to be wrong but wrong in different ways to everyone who thinks so but it is based on a list I saw, compiled decades ago, by an academic who had counted up the lineage of coverage that poets had been allocated in critical journals and suchlike. Heaney was top and Hughes second. My list, if I ever summon the nerve to publish it, is nowhere near as scientific but is my attempt at judging what the world thinks, or those who have any inclination to be interested. It won't be my top 20. I could make that up any time you like. Surely there's more to enjoy about it than making league tables but I've never grown out of the boyish infatuation with a list, you see.
- Meanwhile, this house is patiently waiting for the arrival of the new Murakami. In some ways, I hope it never comes. Long books are daunting. I read the whole of The Gulag Archipelago, and all of Solzhenitsyn to date, in my teens. I sat in front of Middlemarch and tried to let it pass into me by some sort of osmosis one University summer and reached roughly page 1300 of Proust in my twenties until the bookmark stalled at the place it has remained ever since.
But, Murakami is the Nobel laureate in waiting, a worldwide cult I was trapped into by his easy way of making you think it's fine to crack open a casual beer, talk to a cat and apparently walk into a painting and find yourself involved in something you don't really understand. But if I don't review any more novels this year on here, you'll know why.

The Lepidopterist's Wife

The Lepidopterist’s Wife

He’s up there every evening quietly
pinning his brightly-coloured specimens
to cardboard, their paper wings as fragile
as love, the life gone out of them, no more
than ornaments annotated with dates
on which he trapped them in his net, or where.

I sit beside a photograph of us
on our wedding day, me in my cabbage
white lace dress, ready to flutter around
his bleak, ominous light. I never thought
that it would come to this. I never thought
that I would be the one who would creep out

to meet the man next door who reeks of gin
and loss, who watches horse racing all day
on a wide screen, a penniless mischief
who gives away whatever it might be
that he might have- and some of it to me-
then lets me return back into the night.

Signed Poetry Books - Paul Muldoon

The last time I saw Paul Muldoon was twelve years ago and I didn't have a copy of his latest book to hand then so I got him to make his mark on a piece of paper. Now, much more satisfyingly on a book, I wasn't going to make the same mistake twice.

I wonder if, in his position, I'd be somewhat less gracious and tolerant of minor, starstruck fans like me. You have to admire the way that so many of those at the top of their chosen field deal with all the cumbersome attention.

I think I'd become very bad at it very quickly and I think it's a marvellous thing that so few people require signed books, or any books at all, from me.

Signed Poetry Books - David Harsent

With this book now looking a very likely candidate for this website's Poetry Collection of the Year award, the only regret for me is that it didn't get the Forward Prize as well or instead because that would have made me a bit richer and its author quite a bit richer than that.

But he's a fine and very welcome addition to the collection and the hand that wrote four episodes of Midsomer Murders has now touched my copy of his exemplary collection of poems.

Harsent, O'Brien, Muldoon at Cheltenham

Cheltenham Literature Festival - David Harsent, Sean O'Brien and Paul Muldoon, October 14, 2011


Jo Shapcott introduced some very top-end Premiership poets as her 'superheroes' in what must have been a poetry event of the year in these islands.
David Harsent is calm and unhurried as a reader, all clarity of expression and diction. His poems of considered, unflamboyant resonance included Ghosts and several of the 'blood-related' poems from Night as well as poems on his loss of faith in Mark Rothko's abstract. I wonder if that's something that happens to you in middle-age. I hope that it doesn't happen to me. But it's taken a long time for the idea of David Harsent to dawn on me and I'm grateful for it. He finished with a new poem commissioned on the subject of 1971, which I hoped might concern Marc Bolan and T. Rex, but was in fact about Mutually Assured Destruction.
Sean O'Brien is by turns darkly political and grimly funny. I was grateful that he did the wonderful Elegy for his mother and it was interesting to hear the background to poems on Marmite and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Jeudi Prochain and Narbonne were other more significant parts of a set that was just right. I don't know if I discerned a somewhat mellower Sean than was evident in the demeanour of the younger model but the fire is by no means fading yet..
As Paul Muldoon remarked on the way to the book signing, one doesn't like poetry readings to go on too long. Well, no, but surely you do more than one poem. To be fair to Muldoon, it was a long poem in eleven parts, Wayside Shrines, and a paragon example of his immaculate music, packed internal rhymes and measured cadence. He is a superb reader to listen to even in comparison with the exalted company here in an hour of genuine class act poetry. Unmissable really in a time that might one day become regarded as The Age of Muldoon.

Top 6 - Pop Singers

Well, I wonder. There's plenty to choose from but the rules are that one can only name six.

So, who's the best one, then. Could it be,

Aretha Franklin, for this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cIWu5m8UmA

Rod Stewart, for this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oX2FSv4Rys&ob=av2n

Dusty Springfield, for this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA48IL6bQQU

Al Green, for this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz7XTbveDBg

Gregory Isaacs, for this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8yaBa7-kwQ

or

David Bowie, for this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbpMpRq6DV4&ob=av2e  

View from the Boundary

Like a Mastermind question master, once I'd started a book, I always used to finish it. Nearly every time. Not in the case of My Childhood by Maxim Gorky that we were given to read at school and not, much later, when I abandoned Proust after about 1300 pages. But mostly I wasn't a quitter.
But I'm afraid I am now, increasingly. I packed in Martin Amis a few months ago as regular readers will remember, I didn't finish Edward Thomas's novel The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans a few years ago and the list is steadily getting longer. Sometimes they're simply no good, or too hard work or I realize that now it's up to me, it's just for my entertainment. There's no course to pass, nothing I really have to know. And so why labour with a book you're not enjoying.
I was really enjoying A.L. Kennedy's The Blue Book, an enterprising and almost ground-breaking fiction writer, especially one sunny Saturday afternoon when I spent a couple of hours with it in the garden. I had made half a page of notes on it towards a review that was going to say, I thought, what a great writer she is. But I came back from a weekend of high excitement somewhere, returned to it and found that I had, literally, lost the plot. I'm sorry, Alison, I think of myself as an admirer, but once that happens, it's too hard to carry on. Maybe next time.
But here are a couple of notes I made,
p. 86, ocean's great grey thought
an essay on contingency and need
p.156, eyes full of sea and want
streams of associative.....

But, if nothing else, I'll make a note to myself to stop using 'contingent' for a while. It's a tremendous word and it sounds great but ever since first coming across it in studying Sartre, I've been well aware that I don't really know what it means.

Elsewhere, as we approach the 'review of the year' season, I can name only one pop music record that came out this year. And it came out this week, I think. Cliff Richard and Freda Payne, Saving a Life. It's introduced here by that renowned musicologist and novelist, Alan Titchmarsh http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXuetVC1Qv8&feature=related&noredirect=1 .
It's so easy to pick fault with Cliff that I choose not to, and I do genuinely like this record. For sure, it will drive me insane the next time I hear a pop song in which the singer claims to be 'driven insane'. But I'm sure I've written lyrics like that more than once. Heaven knows what Cliff is wearing, my sister wouldn't risk her great reputation as shirt buyer to me with a chancey outfit like that. And Cliff, duetting on his latest album with legends like Freda, Candi Staton, The Temptations, Roberta Flack and Percy Sledge, risks being the second best voice on every track. But Candi Staton's a wonderful singer and you'd never turn her down. Previews of the album suggest it's more MOTR than the 'soul' of the title, though. The phrase 'return to form' needs to be outlawed, only suggesting that the artist in question has been terrible recently but this isn't one, it's just Cliff providing the only pop record I could actually name from 2011. But it's one I will remember.
But, returning to performance, if not to 'form', it was an enjoyable gig (did I really say 'gig') on National Poetry Day in Southsea last week. An audience of 17 with one or two more that came or went is not to be derided when one considers the readings in The Poetry Bookshop, related in the recent Edward Thomas biography, at which Rupert Brooke and W.B.Yeats read to small groups. But you'll have to catch me when you can. I'm not thinking of making a habit of it or trolling round the festival circuit. I'll leave that to Harsent, O'Brien and Muldoon, who I hope all turn up and give us the reading of their lives in Cheltenham on Friday. Professional poetry. It must be the hardest game in the world. Or not.

Sasha Dugdale - Red House

Sasha Dugdale, Red House (Carcanet)

I'm not going to hazard a guess at the significance or symbolism of the red house in the title of this collection. It is a series of seven poems in the book and quick internet research suggests it is taken from a painting of 1932 by Kazimir Malevich. In the poems, a variety of vulnerable or dispossessed humanity and animals come and go, there are lines of rare music, like the vowel sounds in,

And the nestlings peep and pip at intervals, heard in rooms throughout

By the day-sick and the unfit for work

and one is aware of elsewheres whether spiritual, emotional or of geographical belonging.

I like poets who can do different things equally well, like Thom Gunn's ability to move between strict metre, syllabics and free verse. If Red House is not easy poetry, it is worth the effort, whereas in the same book, a poem like Prince's, nostalgic for a bygone way of life with the closing of a landmark shop, could hardly be more straightforward and yet is no less satisfying.

In Out of Town, a poem redolent of the waste land of Sean O'Brien and David Harsent's books this year, a derelict world is haunted by spirits, or are we them already, 'where no-man's-land might be an honest place.'

Beauty comes out of dross and horror can lie beneath beauty. In Dawn Chorus,

How they sing: as if each had pecked up a smouldering coal

Their throats singed and swollen with song

In dissonance as befits the dark world

Where only travellers and the sleepless belong

There is plenty more to like and admire. Shepherds, 'Perhaps Akhmatova was right', as well as poems responding to Keats, Auden and others. It is warmer and less desolate than other books this year that have inhabited similar territory and one could have done with more of it. I had thought that my shortlists for this year's best collections and poems were just about settled but I am reminded that it is only October and it isn't over until this gifted lady has sung.

Portsmouth Poetry Society on National Poetry Day

National Poetry Day with Portsmouth Poetry Society in Southsea Library.

And ole red eyes is back, doo-be-doo-be-doo, putting in a performance that would surely be the definition of cool except, please could someone remind me in future not to write poems with the word 'extinguishing' in them, or, if I do, then don't try to read them in public. Never mind. I got over that fence at the third attempt.

Team photo. Back row, left to right, David Green, Pauline Hawkesworth, Denise Bennett. Front row, Cliff Yates, Doris Bealing, Margaret Banks.

Thanks to Dave Moxham for taking these pictures.

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape)

Tony Webster, the character through which Julian Barnes tells this story isn't really to blame and he's not really the 'unreliable narrator' of so much contemporary fiction either. Something that he has forgotten he ever said comes to be horribly prophetic and we share in his awkward state of not knowing until he finds out how the past has unravelled behind him.

Whereas in Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach the discomfiture comes early and gradually recedes into a wide angle ending in which the difficulties have diminished with time, in The Sense of an Ending it has been kept out of our sight until the gaucheness of the climax.

It is an elegant composition, compact but beautifully expressed. It gives the effect of being much longer than its novella length. It might seem a little unfair on Alan Hollinghurst whose equally well-written novel this year was spread over 500 pages and was dropped from the Booker Prize running at the longlist stage while Barnes is now red hot at 6/4 favourite but that's the way it goes. Perhaps Giles Coren, writing in The Times, will prove top Booker tipster again this year and be glad to be proved wrong that Barnes isn't too good to win it.

That his first girlfriend, Veronica, might not be the 'fruitcake' he took her for might not be Webster's fault but his experience as her ingenue suitor is profoundly observed with its assumptions, naivetes and ironic little episodes. After their relationship ends,

The next day, I took a milk jug she'd given me down to the Oxfam Shop. I hoped she'd see it in the window. But when I stopped to check, there was something else on show instead: a small coloured lithograph of Chislehurst I'd given her for Christmas.

Alongside the even shorter stories of Pulse earlier this year, Barnes provides evidence enough here to suggest he's at the top of his game and among the league leaders of current British fiction. This is a consummately well-made book that only needs to be longer in order to prolong the enjoyment of it.

The Best British Poetry 2011

The Best British Poetry 2011, edited by Roddy Lumsden (Salt)

You don't expect to find the most startling line of a poetry anthology in the introduction but here Roddy Lumsden advises us that,

around a quarter of the poets here are under 30, representing a coming generation that I believe to be the strongest ever in UK poetry

It's a lavish claim, not one that can be verified for a while yet and not one that all of us will necessarily be around long enough to see proven or otherwise. But, who can say. Maybe we are on the brink of the finest Golden Age that will outshine, say, the 1590's, 1820's or 1910's (and, please, add your own choice of generation in here, too).

This title has been welcomed as the overdue equivalent to a similar, long-established American one. Whether Britain needs everything that America has just because they have it is another thing one might wonder about. We got the credit crisis from them as well as gangsta rap. And, as Roddy readily anticipates, there are inevitable problems with proclaiming the 'best' and we shouldn't take that title too seriously. Whereas The Forward anthology picks out highlights from new books as well as magazines, this book is like an uber-magazine, not much more expensive that an issue of any one of them but selected from a wide range of them so someone like me who no longer has subscriptions to any can have a look at some recommended poems.

One never expects to like a very high percentage of poems in a magazine and so it's to this books credit that it contains a satisfactory quotient of things one is glad to have seen. While one can be confident that Ian Duhig and Sasha Dugdale are going to be worth having, I was pleasantly surprised by Deryn Rees-Jones and, a new name to me, Lizzi Thistlethwayte. Every poet has a biographical note that contains their own comments on their featured poem. These divide broadly equally, it seems, between those who appear to have had a very clear idea of exactly what their poem was going to do and those who only found out during its making or are perhaps not even quite sure yet.

For me the mystery goes on surrounding the industry darling, Ahren Warner, whose meta-narratives refer us through, here, a Baudelairean transaction within comparative linguistic approaches. It is clearly me that is the loser in having not the faintest idea of what it means or why it's so admired and my main regret is that I won't be anywhere in the vicinity when the time comes to register whether such poems take their place in the long and glorious history of poetry in English or are making their way sublimely into a cul-de-sac.

As so often, anthologies are unsatisfactory in being able to allow so few examples of each individual's work- and here it is only one each. The composite impression of poetry in 2011 is unfulfilling and half a dozen poems by much fewer poets would make a better book, with more chance of appreciating the talents that are in it, although would not meet Roddy's purpose. Which is why I think roughly the same amount of money spent on Sasha Dugdale's collection was the better spent.

I'm well aware that it is entirely my fault that far too much of this book passes me by but at least I tried, fed money into the machine, and I keep on trying while realizing that for me the real thrills of poetry are elsewhere.