The year's best in non-poetry were announced last month with the shortlists because conclusions looked foregone but since then the Portsmouth Choral Union's Belshazzar has come and done Carolyn Sampson's Wigmore recital on the line. You can't miss with Handel but still have to do it with some panache and, with Southern Pro Musica and the soloists as good as ever, I was entirely convinced. Carolyn won't mind - she has the Best CD award anyway and will undoubtedly have far too many prizes to collect for mine to make any difference.
But I'm only playing for time and avoiding the knotty problem of how to decide about the poems.
There were seven poems on the shortlist that qualified through the chancy early rounds of me being aware of them, then reading them and then being impressed enough to put them in the notebook with a view to making the shortlist. There are quite possibly reams of tremendous poems that my limited reading can take account of. Well, not reams, but probably a few more. Excellent work by Clive James, Douglas Dunn, Derek Mahon and Kathryn Gray was memorable but it has come down to three candidates to consider for the Best Poem.
John Burnside's Mistaken for a Unicorn set a high standard early doors and it was getting late in the year before the shortlist blossomed to seven. A Roddy Lumsden book rarely appears without it or something from it shouldering its way into the queue but then the title poem from James Sheard's The Abandoned Settlements was deep, resonant and derelict and insisted on being given the utmost of attention.
They are very different poems - Burnside capturing something sublime sublimely, Lumsden very astutely and inimitably (however hard anybody else wants to try) nailing something more wordly and Sheard somewhere in between. Something has to give, though, and very reluctantly, because I admire the poem devoutly, it's The Abandoned Settlements on account of the phrase 'the utter transformation of our lives', which somehow just has the air of a mindfulness workshop about it but it's a cruel world and I'm heartbroken to see it go.
And then I just wonder if John Burnside amazed me a little bit more than Roddy Lumsden. I couldn't write anything nearly as good as either poem but I might get closer to Work Crush than Mistaken for a Unicorn. So John Burnside it is.
But don't let that be a reason to pile all the last-minute cash onto John for Best Collection. While the two categories are independent of each other and there is no reason why they should both go to the same poet, If it looks like there's a bit of horse trading going on here, perhaps there is. Burnside, a bit like Lumsden, is a prolific poet as well as a brilliant one but such facility makes me suspicious. Has he just struck on a linguistic formula that means he can reel off pages of this stuff that looks good. Eventually one wonders if it all means as much as it looks as if it does. Mistaken for a Unicorn might just be where any legerdemain has kept its trick more deviously hidden than elsewhere, I don't know. The great thing about the best poems is that one doesn't really want everything explained as if for top marks in an essay, one would prefer to enjoy them for their own sake.
Although Work Crush was the only Lumsden poem on the shortlist it was Elba that was first put in the notebook from So Glad I'm Me. So, with two poems noted down, one might say that So Glad I'm Me by Roddy Lumsden has the best claim on Best Collection. I'd rather have two Best Poems, or even three, this year and forego a Best Collection but what can you do. Perhaps Still Life with Feeding Snake is the more profound and genuine achievement but I've gone and done it now and am only left with the feeling that James Sheard was robbed.
That makes Roddy Lumsden the first to be given that haphazard honour twice but Julia Copus did the double with Poem and Collection in 2012. Next year will be the tenth that the Best Poem question has been attempted here (Best Collection seems to have followed the year after) and so, if you can stand the excitement, next year's winners will be included in a celebration of a decade of maundering on like a drifting barge about poetry by putting all the winners together in a bag and see who gets pulled out as the one I really, really liked.
I don't think I could have done it this year without the sharpener of the very acceptable Zinfandel (and heaven knows, do Fetzer still produce such wine and, if so, where can you get it) so I don't know what I'll need to pick between all of the winners.
