Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

Looking down the list of previous novels by Sebastian Faulks in Where My Heart Used To Beat, it looked as if I had them all bar the pastiche books and the early rarity, Trick of the Light. I went upstairs to admire them, found them all lined up and remembered that I did actually tidy up a bit a while ago. But Human Traces wasn't there, the one about the origins of psychiatry that I abandoned some years ago. It wasn't to be found anywhere and the Faulks collection suddenly looked sadly incomplete without it. I wonder if it was among those titles I gave away to a second hand shop once. It didn't seem like such a mistake then, a novel I hadn't got on with at all, but now I miss it. It's very rare for me to dispose of books and then when I do, look what happens. I will be more careful in future.
Where My Heart Used To Beat is compsite Faulks in a way, apparently some war, going back to the Anzio of A Fool's Alphabet, and then some psychiatry but cosummately readable with that inobtrusive perfect pitch that demands so little but provides so much and some magnificent writing on love, the loss of it and the desperate inner core of isolation inside us all. I haven't finished it yet because another job became more urgent and so I'm sure the ending will provide some profound emotional truth but it remains true that there is no more reliable novelist in England than Sebastian Faulks. Even if you give his books away in a careless moment, you miss them eventually.
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The job that took precedence was selecting the poems for South 54. Over 350 poems from which I and another Portsmouth poet will choose the 50 or 60 to go in the Autumn edition. It's too early to say anything conclusive yet but two evenings going forwards and then back through the poems was several hours to provoke some reflection.
I haven't read that many poems quite so quickly before. None of the few editing jobs I've ever done were on such a scale.There are some to admire; there is plenty to like but it's not always realized in the finished poem and one feels sympathy, more than anything else, that the technique fell just short of what was intended; there are equally poems that didn't look as if they were ambitious enough but were convincing and I liked them the more for that, and there will always be those poets who have an idea of what 'poetry' ought to be like and aspire to that condition when they'd do better to just write without preconceptions. But I won't be saying any such thing or prescribe what I think a poem should be like because they all succeed or fail on their own terms.
Poetry in such large volumes becomes generic. Three poems had the same title and a number of themes recurred throughout, as the big themes of literature do. There are no set criteria by which to establish what makes a 'good' poem and so, having listed the ones I like, I'll compare my list with that of my co-selector and hope that what we like is what the readers of the magazine like, too.
Inevitably, 300 poems will be 'rejected' and we've all had that happen to us. It is not the end of the world. The poets were happy enough with their own work to send it in. They should be just as happy with it if it isn't selected. The same magazine once rejected a poem of mine that subsequently won a competition. There is no accounting for taste. 
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In the meantime, the agency that administers subscriptions to the TLS messed up my trial of 12 issues for 12 quid and they didn't start arriving until last week. I had hoped to use such an offer to monitor reaction to our Letter to the Editor in the April 29 edition but by the time they started delivering the paper, whatever desultory reaction it generated appears to have evaporated.
On Twitter, Stanley Wells, his sidekick, Paul Edmondson and others were quick to deride the idea that the twins Hamnet and Judith might have been fathered by Hamnet Sadler but Twitter is no place for a thesis, it's the sort of medium Boris Johnson might use.
We are made well aware that certain established persons in the Shakespeare industry don't like the idea but we are none the wiser as to how they would refute it. None have so far seen fit to respond through the medium in which the idea was first widely published.
It doesn't seem to me a minor detail of the biography that warrants so little addressing since whole books have appeared on such issues as when Shakespeare was a mere witness to somebody else's divorce.
There is more to come on the subject from Curtis-Green but we are somewhat at a loss as to what to do with it because it looks as though Prof Wells and his friends were happy enough to congratulate themselves on their Alternative Biography but were nowhere near quite alternative enough.
Perhaps soon, the TLS will be provided with a reply and we might even find out what Profs. Bate, Greer, Shapiro and anybody else thinks.
We said we were surprised that nobody had thought of it before. I'm even more surprised how little reaction it has generated. I'm still waiting to find out why it isn't worthy of a fuller answer.