It is good to reflect how accurate one's choice of books and records to buy usually is when one goes astray.
It is necessary, though, to recognize that a reviewer's recommendation isn't always going to mean that another reader will appreciate the same book in the same way. Thus, I had an outright fail by following up a book of poems listed in one of the many Books of the Year features that occur in December.
I'm not going to identify the title as it does nobody any good to issue downright scathing reviews and the book will surely find an appreciative audience in a demographic sample that doesn't include the likes of me.
But poetry that is mainly political in its intention is off to a bad start. Some will say that everything is political, and that's fine, but I'd prefer poetry to be somehow above that and be political more by implication than explicit intention.
Diction also achieves longer-lasting appreciation and integrity if not making internal rhyme and alliteration its primary tactic. Murray Lachlan Young, the subject of a long-gone publicity campaign was a shallow performance poet who came and went a long time ago, a bag of such facile tricks that his poems were never going to sustain much interest.
The book that I regret buying is aimed at the Kate Tempest sector of the market, which could be a good place to sell a few books, but I will be more wary in future. One continues to turn the pages more in trepidation than expectation and soon, with one's fears justified until half way through the book, one has to abandon it.
Luckily, it doesn't happen very often and one can't expect everything to be an unconditional success. That would be dull.
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.
