It's nearly May and there is still nothing of my shortlists for Best Poem and Best Collection of the year. I have addressed this crisis by specifically seeking out what new titles have appeared. It's not as if I'm going to be short of poems to read, having agreed to select poems for a magazine in the summer. Neither is one short of options these days in a market where more poets want to see themselves in print than read the work of others. There could be any number of masterpieces hidden among the lists but how does one know which ones they are.
So, one has to stick with what one knows in the absence of solid recommendations. And that means the admirable Ian Duhig and then the second book by Judy Brown, whose first was enough to make the second something to look forward to.
I have often thought about posting a pastiche review of an imaginary book by a fictitous poet but then realize that I'm better than that and don't need to do it anyway. The sort of review I wanted to lampoon is in plentiful supply in magazines and on the internet. Judy's first book, Loudness, was praised thus,
Her poems wrestle at the interface between self and other and from the
heat of that fight she forges startlingly original imagery .
It is that style of virtually meaningless reviewing that gets poets a reputation for preciousness and self-indulgence and one suspects the reviewer is competing for attention with the poetry itself. I am saddened that the reviewer in this particular case is a poet that I have long admired. I promise that I will try to avoid such pitfalls when I offer any thoughts on the new book soon.
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So that's Cue Card beaten at Punchestown and the healthy wad of cash I brought back from Cheltenham is thus diminished. The Punchestown festival is proving to be one step beyond for some red-hot favourites but I thought that after Yorkhill and Vautour had got beaten, at least one would oblige. I swerved the first two but then still got clobbered. It's like walking down the street, noticing an open manhole cover, avoiding the Motability chair doing 15 mph towards you, thinking, no, nothing's going to catch me out and then walking into a lamp post.
So the Buxtehude Opera Omnia still can't be ordered yet. In the end, I'm just going to think, sod it, I deserve it, I'm having it.
But Ding might help. At first he was touted as a future World Champion, of the Snooker, but this year had to qualify, having not quite delivered on his early promise. I know the wily John Higgins is still in there but, with the carnage in the first two rounds leaving most of the bigger names on the bus home, it's shaping up into a Ding-Selby final and there's been a lot to like about the implacable Chinese. I'm doing the wrong thing in immediately chasing after lost money, it says not to do that in my book, but sometimes it turns out one should have done the wrong thing.