It is decision time.
I kept reading all the new books of poems I bought this year and some gained in stature while others stayed roughly where they had been from the start.
Sue Hubbard's book was always one to return to as it impressed more and more. Michael Symmons Roberts already has the Forward Prize to his name for a book that surely extended his achievement so far and then after I had picked shortlists for Best Poem and Best Collection, Helen Mort came late into the reckoning and was added to the Best Collection list.
Any of the Best Poem shortlist would be a worthy winner and one of Helen's could be added in there but I won't go to those lengths and I'm glad I don't nominate a runner-up in these awards because that would be too difficult but a clear winner is Roddy Lumsden's Women in Paintings, http://edinburgh-review.com/extracts/poetry-women-in-paintings-roddy-lumsden/
I have already made special mention of it here in the summer. It does all I want a poem to do and perhaps that bit more and makes one look forward to a new volume from Roddy whenever that might be.
One can see why Symmons Roberts is already a prize-winner in 2013. Drysalter is a sustained technical achievement and continues to lure one into its meditations. I've been looking at Helen Mort's book ever since I recently got it and, as I said only a few days ago here, it is a debut collection. I'm not sure how many years it is since a first book made quite such an impression. One might have expected some experimental initial efforts before a poet produced anything quite so assured.
For a while I wondered if it ranked alongside my long established favourite, August Kleinzahler,'s book and thought about making it a shared Best Collection this year but the whole point is that I'm supposed to make decisions here and must do so if I can.
And so my Best Collection of 2013 was August Kleinzahler's Hotel Oneira, for its tender machismo, sense of loss and transience done in a way that I think is all his own.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
