It's those subsidiary categories that are giving me so much trouble.
It takes no time at all to announce Graham Swift as the best novel of the year for Mothering Sunday, even in a year in which Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan were supposedly in contention. They never really were, not even them.
I would love to make the reaction to the Curtis-Green letter to the TLS on the subject of Shakespeare's twins the Best Event of the Year for its steadfast refusal to provide any reason why this 10 year old but newly published theory could be inadmissable. But the stalwarts of the Birthplace Trust, along with a Professor from Oxford University, were only able to disparage the idea via Twitter rather than apologize in writing for their inability to dismiss it any more convincingly. That doesn't deserve an award, it is only worthy of approbation and despair at the current state of Shakespeare Studies. The ball remains in their court whenever Mr. Curtis and I decide to play again. So, I can't in all conscience give it to Wells, Edmondson and Smith.
Neither can I decide between at least 5 sensational discs or even set a method by which I could decide. If I make it that I must say which I would keep if I had to throw the others away, I might have to discard the Couperin in order to keep Errolyn Wallen's Cello Concerto, but it is hardly their fault that I have several other versions of the Lecons de Tenebres.
It is, however, a problem with that disc that the Couperin is interrupted with extraneous sonatas. It is as fussy as that when Errolyn's disc ends with her wondrous reinvention of Purcell in the style of David Bowie in his Berlin period. And that's betting without the Telemann or Mozart. I just need to give the decisions more time to emerge.
But they did emerge very clearly in some furthrer reading of the poetry shortlists.
Pastoral by Helen Farish was definitely the best new poem I saw this year.
And if the rest of her collection that it came from had all been as perfect as that, it would have been beyond belief. There is no such poet that would write poems like that all the time.It took a long time to decide between Helen's book, for including a couple of sensational poems; Ian Duhig, who has to do no more than be Ian Duhig to make any such shortlist, and Bernard O'Donoghue, whose collection one wouldn't ever want to put down except that it might just be too relaxing, not quite jumping up and arresting the reader poem and poem. Which is exactly what Judy Brown does in Crowd Sensations.
I don't know now why there was ever any question about it, it is a thrillingly good book, deep and rich time and again. Only her second book, when the first was very good, too, I no longer think we should be looking to the likes of Paul Muldoon for invention and wizardry- that might have had its day- Judy Brown is attaching words to experience, densely and with charm. She wins my vote all day long.
