If we are going to trust anyone to pick the best poems of the last 12 months, then Sasha Dugdale with Roddy Lumsden helping suit me very well.
However it isn't long before the introduction is bogged down in discussion of 'gender balance'. What a shame.
It is true that there was an imbalance, of perhaps 97% to 3% in favour of the male, throughout the canonical history of English poetry until quite recently. But Sasha seems to want it both ways here, congratulating herself on not even knowing who wrote the poems and unaware of their gender while also marking the slight majority of females in her selection.
Along with her championing of 'non-English' voices, which here includes Romani and Shetlandic, this anthology is still as determinedly politically correct as last year's and we won't be making progress towards the falling away of these barriers while we insist on letting them rule our thinking. Yes, the Poet Laureate, the Director of the Poetry Sociey and the editors of several of the most highly-respected poertry magazines are all female. And that's fine. Let it be.
Having never regularly bought the equivalent Forward book of the year's verse, I might start next year. Although Salt's selection is useful and brings to light a number of poems one hasn't seen (well, nearly all of them), it's hard not to wonder how many of them would have made one's own selection if time had been allowed to spend days and days in the Poetry Library. Quite possibly none of these poems will make my own shortlist, a mere handful, for Best Poem 2012.
That is not to say that Gillian Clarke's Swans isn't an excellent piece; Rory Waterman will be a first collection to look out for next year; Jane Flett is an unqualified success here; Graham Mort and Greta Stoddart are both picked for fine poems about the dead.
The longer I persevered with the poems, the more of them gradually revealed more than I had first found in them but afer a while it becomes subject to the law of diminshing returns and one suspects that one has found as much as is there for you. What I am most grateful for is that Vahni Capildeo's Four Departures from 'Wulf and Eadwacer' sent me back to the original when quite possibly a female poet wrote the Best Poem of one of the years between perhaps 960 and 990.
