It has taken more thinking about than usual to arrive at a decision about which was the Best New Poetry Collection I read in 2015. The shortlist of four titles posted here a few weeks ago would all have been very worthy winners, which is what being on the shortlist means, but it has taken from then until now to decide because it was by no means obvious.
Most of the subsidiary honours I augment these two main titles with were awarded at the shortlist stage but since then Steven Isserlis's performance of the Shostakovich Cello Concerto has been supplemented to the Best Event category. It has to be admitted that I've not been to very many spectacular events this year compared to others but it is unlucky for Index Cantorum, the choir whose lunchtime concert in Winchester Cathedral in September, with its Tavener, Monteverdi and MacMillan, that Portsmouth ought to be bloody grateful that Isserlis comes here and it's almost beginning to look as if some of us pick our Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra concerts on the basis of whether or not Shostakovich is on the programme. But, what can you do, it was quite clearly the best thing I've been to all year, although very difficult to compare in any meaningful way with my nephew's first bike race.
There were the usual small handful of tremendous poems that will remain in the memory as long as the memory remains. Kate Bingham's Open was shortlisted previously when I first saw it and is now included in her book, Infragreen, but it can't really be shortlisted as 'new' twice; in any other year, I'm sure Caitriona O'Reilly's The Airship Era, or perhaps also The Servant Question, from Geis, would have been the best poem I'd seen but Sean O'Brien's The Beautiful Librarians was an instant classic, bringing with it its own 'realms of gold' to inhabit. It was compared in Poetry Review to Larkin's At Grass for its nostalgia, and perhaps there is the vaguest similarity. But there is no danger of Tom Paulin mistaking Sean's tribute for a lament for the loss of empire because, of course, it is subtly political not so much in its adoration of the librarians and the books but in its lament for the ongoing closure of the libraries. It isn't just the best poem of this year but one of the greatest poems of the century so far.
But it wasn't quite so easy to decide which collection to say was best and I had to first wonder how to decide before deciding, although no strict set of rules can be made to work. Eventually, one has to just know.
The first two or three poems in Don Paterson's 40 Sonnets had me thinking that, if this continues, this is going to be the best book of poems I've ever read. But the facility, the cleverness, the understandable impulse to stretch the limits of the 'sonnet' perhaps counted against it in the end.
Kate Bingham is a wonderful poet and will always be one to seek out for her beautifully made pieces. Infragreen is her best book yet and only, I think, her third, so she's likely to be considered here for as long as such considerations take place.
And it is much to my chagrin that Prof. O'Brien, 'majesty', had not been awarded a Best in the now seven years I've been undertaking these deliberations until the paragraph above because he is a long-standing poetry hero of mine, in his best poems.
But the book that does the most with 'poetry', has the most range and has the deepest, most resonant effect -even if it explores further into the lexicon than some might think necessary and possibly fancies itself more than is good for it- is Caitriona O'Reilly's Geis, mainly for the two poems mentioned above but, then again, for its ambition because although ambition can often be a bad thing, one can't achieve much without it.
It wasn't easy to arrive at the decision but once I had, I was happy with it.
The cheques are not in the post to the winners because the prize is only what recognition I can add to the poets, which isn't much more than they already have, but it comes with my thanks for having done what they did. Poetry is a dubious enterprise nowadays and possibly always was but it is the likes of these admirable highlights that make it all worthwhile.
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.
