Since the announcement of my shortlists for the Best Poetry of 2015 last week I have been taking my responsibilities very seriously. The Isserlis/BSO Shostakovich was immediately supplemented to the Best Event shortlist and wouldn't have been were it not a very serious contender. The Best Poem category has been pretty much a forgone conclusion for months. But the Best Collection decision is a very difficult one to make.
It is my usual practice to read the shortlist again to make sure of my choice so on Sunday night I collected the four titles together to keep them by the bedside for ongoing consideration. The Don Paterson and Kate Bingham books were there already so I just had to add the O'Brien and O'Reilly. They were not by the bedside so must be downstairs. Not by the computer, not on the table, not in the executive attache case I take to poetry redings or meetings. So, they must have been upstairs. Move the bed, no, they haven't fallen down the side, no, not here, not in the drawers. Back downstairs, emptying the bookcase which is double stacked with poetry books, from time to time realigning the Derek Mahons together, putting Lachlan MacKinnon back next to Wendy Cope, re-uniting the Muldoons. Systematically taking out handfuls of books and replacing them in a different order each time. No sign of the two fugitive volumes. Upstairs again, then downstairs again. Sunday night is gradually deepening towards late but by now I know I won't sleep if I don't find them. I sit down and think.
Oh, yes, that spare shelf on the big bookcase between the Larkin shelf and the Gunn shelf. I 'tidied up' by moving a pile of miscellaneous books and put them on there. And there they were.
But, having found them hasn't yet helped me towards a decision. Usually, a few bits of re-reading arrives one at a decision without the need of defining what 'Best' means but this year it's so close that I am having to decide how to decide.
They all have some excellent poems in them but merely counting or measuring their greatness isn't satisfactory. How much is it to the detriment of a book if it contains some less good pieces. Does one rate technical excellence above personal preference. Is there one aspect of any book that really should put it ahead of the others. No approach provides an obvious answer and the decision could conceivably still go any one of four ways. This year, Muldoon and Lumsden didn't make the shortlist but that hasn't made it much easier. It is the closest heat of this underwhelmingly disregarded award since its inauguration, and there have been some very competitive years. I imagine the offices of the LRB are lively with debate on the issue. However, it will be decided by finally closing the books and meditating for a while on which book is the most memorable for the overall impression it leaves of its attitude, world view but, mainly, of course, its words.
The winners will be announced in mid December.
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Meanwhile, Romola has been embarked upon in this, my year of George Eliot, which will mean I'll have read all bar the already-read Middlemarch this year. It wasn't a promising start with its 'proem' and first chapter but then began telling its story and we were back in the wonderful land of George Eliot prose. The atmosphere of C15th Florence and references back to classical culture with some outrageous scholarship in evidence give her the office to indulge in even more gilded fine prose than ever and one can see common themes surfacing that make this less of an outlying curio among her stories than it first seemed to be. It's early days but the sheet I insert into each novel to make notes as I go is already filling up, and my biggest worry is how, when I come to trying to compile some sort of essay on the novels, I am going to see them all at once when each has supplanted the last in the memory and it is now thus a while since Scenes from Clerical Life made such a promising debut.
It is one thing that has impressed me with academics, how they can apparently retain so many books to talk about at any given time, if indeed they all can. But, in a pre-academic age, George divides the creative artists from the commentators in words given to Bardo,
'It is enough to overlay human hope and enterprise with an eternal frost to think that the ground which was trodden by phiolosophers and poets is crawled over by those insect-swarms of besotted fanatics or howling hypocrites.'
and you wonder whose review of which of her books prompted her to write that.
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I could never have been an academic. It seems in the end a dreary world and I inhabited an equally dreary one for what has been most of my paid employment except for how hilarity and absurdity cheered it up. However I was very tempted by a notice in Betfred's window yesterday to consider seeing out my last few years in a bookmaker's. I have weighed the options very seriously, which include the advantage of not having to take Cheltenham Festival week off because it will be on at work. But I've got this far by taking few risks and, even in these difficult times, it might be best to stick with that tried and so far successful policy. I can see how living in a bookies these days might not be all about horse racing but about servicing the clientele who are more or less paying your wages via their unfortunate habit. I feel more Methodist about it than I thought I would but I'll keep the idea in mind.