It will soon be time to review the year and decide on the shortlists for my own personal, private awards for Best Poem and Best Collection of 2014. These are monumentally insignificant awards, with no actual prize, but I like to do it to give me something to think about.
But there are a few other categories that have grown up around them, like Best Event, Best New Novel and Best New CD, and there are still at least the BSO doing Shostakovich and Maggi Hambling's new paintings at the National Gallery to come, so the shortlists will probably be here in the first week of December.
There is a theme emerging in the Best Poem category already as I look back through the (nowhere near as many as there ought to be) new volumes of poems I read this year. Several are dedicated to, addressed to or on the subject of female figures - of all ages it has to be said.
The more one looks at Roddy Lumsden's Not All Honey, the more the love poems emerge as somehow thematic and thus the chronic ambivalences, the elusive phrases and The Bells of Hope become more telling. There is no telling if this was one relationship or more. That is hardly relevant since this is not autobiography and I don't believe that John Donne, for example, was quite the ladies' man that his poems would have us believe.
But although Lumsden devotes a few pages to Bella, it is For Charlotte that I have returned to more often, which almost catches the Lumsden linguistic jamboree with its guard down, in a minor key and touchingly tender.
Some might say that for all Picasso's swagger and bravado, it was still in the pink and blue periods that he did much of his best work. The difficulty with clever work, or things that stretch the parameters of their genre, is that the cleverness can often outweigh the emotional charge. We can admire Paul Muldoon without him moving us enough to make us love him but then he writes perhaps the most devastasting poem of his generation in Incantata.
Those of us from the early 1970's admire David Bowie as if pop music might as well not have bothered without him but plenty of us love Marc Bolan more. And so it sometimes is with Lumsden.
The very best of his poems are those that aren't quite so demanding and show that he can relax into a gentler way and is, of course, brilliant at it.
I don't know if For Charlotte means to echo Marvell in its references to running or Auden where,
I'll be elsewhere, others will be darning, caroling,
hanging washing.
(Does anybody still do darning.)
At first I didn't think the insistently short sentences amounted to much but I'm soon over that.
The poem is so convincing, from its 'uncunningly beautiful' addressee, a phrase worthy of an essay of 'close reading' implications all of its own, through the meditation on unknowing and back to the 'pitchy day', the hopes of potential to be fulfilled and the poet's regret that he might not be there to see it, which may or may not be a little bit more or less ingenuous than it might be..
Or, that is at least some of where I think I am with this poem at present. It wouldn't be the first time if I was massively impressed by something only to find later that it really means something else entirely. Not that it has to mean anything at all.
Another poem in the book, Women in Paintings, was given a similar, brief eulogy here last year after I read it in a magazine- it's not often I take the time to do such things- and it went on to be last year's Best Poem. And so, For Charlotte is clearly the one to beat this year but there is a month of looking and looking again to go yet.
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.
