It must be nearly time to make up the shortlists for our annual review of the year. There might be more to come in the additional categories but I might have read all the new poetry books I'm going to see this year. So, let's have a look in the book.
Best Poem
Having been concerned that it was getting late in the year and there wasn't much on this list, recent weeks have filled it out to a respectable length. There might have been more than one candidate in some collections but I've kept it to one from each poet.
John Burnside, Mistaken for a Unicorn, from Still-Life with Feeding Snake
Douglas Dunn, The Nothing But, The Noise of a Fly
Kathryn Gray, Bournemouth, Flowers
Clive James, Anchorage International, TLS
Roddy Lumsden, Work Crush, So Glad I'm Me
Derek Mahon, Howe Strand, TLS
James Sheard, The Abandoned Settlements, The Abandoned Settlements
Best Collection
The Best Collection list is nowhere near as long because everything listed needs to be a potential winner and if I knew already there would be no point in a shortlist. Thus, although Simon Armitage, Douglas Dunn and others put in worthy performances, and I haven't even seen David Harsent's book even though I am a great admirer - a long book made of short poems, some only one line long isn't selling itself to me- it does come down to two titles.
John Burnside, Still Life with Feeding Snake
Roddy Lumsden, So Glad I'm Me
Novel
Arundhati Roy and Alan Hollinghurst put in good performances that suffered under high expectations and so, unfairly perhaps, were slightly disappointing. I don't think I'll be reading another new novel this year and so provisionally we can give it to,
Adam Thorpe, Missing Fay
even if the missing girl theme has become a cliche and because Murakami's Men Without Women was short stories, on which grounds I wouldn't have left it out, but has stayed in the memory less vividly.
CD
It is tempting to shortlist the Bacewicz String Quartets by the Silesian Quartet because it is clearly an immense record but even though there are more discs on the way this year, including Carolyn Sampson's duets with Iestyn Davies, it is highly unlikely that
Carolyn Sampson, Bach Cantatas for Soprano
can be bettered by very much which, after last year's wide-open heat, comes as a bit of a surprise to be calling the winner quite so far from the finish but I think we can.
I would feel like an even bigger fraud than usual if I pretended I enjoyed the Bacewicz, or anything else, more than that.
Event
It was announced at the time that nothing was going to be a better event than the Welsh Championship 12 Hour, in which my nephew inherited my long lapsed role of family marathon bike rider.
Everything went to plan, which it ought to considering the expertise in all areas of planning, riding and catering for such a ride that the family brought to the occasion and the lad delivered exactly the great debut that I astutely predicted for him. Although we still don't know yet if my first runner in a time trial as a trainer won the novice prize for best first attempt at the discipline. But it was tremendous to see it all come together quite so convincingly. Top marks to Chris and all of his entourage.
But if the award were limited to arts events (which it quite clearly isn't), we are back with Carolyn Sampson and her lunchtime concert at the Wigmore Hall in March. There is at least one more concert to come but it won't be Carolyn, whose year it has been this year - and that could continue indefinitely - and it won't be the Wigmore Hall in which one instinctively feels everything is right.
So, it is largely foregone conclusions apart from the poetry. Tune in mid-December to see what further reading of the poems brings about because we know about the Eliot Prize, those people at Forward and all the other jamborees that go on but this is the one that nobody's heard of or cares about and so is the one that, if I were them, I'd be most pleased to accidentally find out I'd got.