Best Poem and Best Collection Shortlists 2014

It is time for the shortlists for my Best Poem and Best Collection of 2014. These awards, which are worthless and bring with them no prize, should really be re-named something like The Year in Review since some other categories have crept in since their inception when the website was intended to be poetry-based.
As has been explained previously, the qualification process is a rigorous one because any work first of all needs to be something I've been aware of and then decided to read/listen to/attend. I'm not a committee, there is only me and it's me that decides (which, I think, is a good thing) but there are, of course, sometimes things that I'm not aware of or don't see until later.
It is time for the shortlists- and the winners will be announced here in mid-December- but in a year packed with wonderful things, there are still more things to come.
I'm not expecting any further poetry titles to be candidates but in the Best Event category, Maggi Hambling's Walls of Water exhibition in the National Gallery might be added after Saturday's visit there. And there are two discs on their way here, either or both of which one always hopes might come into contention. One would hardly have been ordering them otherwise. And it has to be noted that Ton Koopman's boxed set of Buxtehude's Opera Omnia would be a massive favourite had I been sufficiently profligate to spend 300 pounds on it and find the required 60 hours to play it all but, as yet, I haven't.
Some categories are more competitive than others. Best Novel would be a longer list if The Goldfinch had been published in 2014, and, by the same token, I suppose, Middlemarch.
The best two poetry books of the year, for me, were not of new poems and so are similarly inadmissable. I can't set up a whole new category for them. Perhaps I could but I'm not going to. But Neil Astley's edition of the Collected Poems of Rosemary Tonks and Don Paterson's exemplary commentary on Michael Donaghy, in Smith, are both worthy of glorious mentions without portfolio.
But it is the Best Event shortlist that could easily be twice as long, with a number of great concerts left out in the process of making a first step towards deciding which was actually 'best' (which is when one really begins to wonder if and why it matters). It might even have included the Portsmouth Poetry's Society's National Poetry Day reading but it would have to had to come with a salutory 'apart from me' in brackets and one can hardly nominate something that one had a hand in organizing and took part in.
And so, with all those provisos in mind, the shortlists as they stand, are-

Best Poem 

Colette Bryce, Your Grandmother’s House

David Harsent, Fire: a song for Mistress Askew

Michael Longley, Amelia’s Poem

Roddy Lumsden, For Charlotte 

Best Collection 

Colette Bryce, The Whole and Rain-domed Universe (Picador)

John Burnside, All One Breath (Cape)

Roddy Lumsden, Not All Honey (Bloodaxe) 

Best Novel 

Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Harvill Secker)

Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests (Virago)

Best Event 

Florilegium, Portsmouth Third Floor Arts Centre

Alexander Romanovsky/BSO, Shostakovich Piano Concerto no. 2, Portsmouth Guildhall

Southern Countertenors, Portsmouth Cathedral

The Tallis Scholars, Portsmouth Cathedral 

Best CD 

Cappella Amsterdam/Reuss, Carolyn Sampson, Poulenc, Stabat Mater (Harmonia Mundi)

Cuarteto Casals, Haydn, Seven Last Words from the Cross (Harmonia Mundi)

The Sixteen, Handel, Jephtha (Coro)