It was once inconceivable that the first time my name appeared on a pop record, if ever, it would be in the Country genre but that's fine. Genre is neither here nor there and my only preference would be to be in no genre at all.
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Regular readers might be awaiting my review or article on Rory Waterman's poems and those of his father, Andrew. That might be still to come but the pace is slackening at DG Books and the necessity of passing comment here on anything and everything that I come across is less imperative than it was.
Both of the Watermen are fine poets and to be admired but if the TLS review of Rory's Sarajevo Roses led me to believe he might be added to the super league of living poets whose books are essential, maybe he's not quite that. Enjoyable, sympathetic and admirable though the poems consistently are.
But it did prompt the question of which living poets are 'essential' to me, then. Who can't publish a book without me having to order a copy.
Admired but not essential are major names like Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion and Simon Armitage, a list that includes the last two Poets Laureate and the next.
But those whose books will be ordered unquestioningly until further notice, in no particular order, are Don Paterson, Julia Copus, Derek Mahon, August Kleinzahler (although the latest two titles look suspiciously like re-packaged Selecteds), Martin Mooney, Caitriona O'Reilly and, I dare say, the two Kathryns, Gray and Simmonds, plus Sean O'Brien and Roddy Lumsden. I said it was 'in no particular order'. But that doesn't mean they are the essential poets currently writing, they are just those that, in Facebook terms, I'm following.
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But there is such a thing as a kind of post-natal depression, a need to blank it all out, after finishing a 'book', however minor it is. Thom Gunn said he couldn't start writing poems again after publishing a book and so put the finished book away and continued writing before going to press.
It sounds almighty precious to say I can't follow up The Perfect Book but writing a poem is the last thing on my mind since editing that to a standstill and then still finding things in it I should have addressed.
What was the point. Readers have been very kind about it, it would be impolite to be otherwise and, yes, they are generous to say it is better than what went before but I still quite like several things from many years ago. Moving determindely into harder irony doesn't always make for better poetry. Maybe it's not just that, then.
It's all very well but, really, is that all there is to it. Where does it go from there. Having tried to write poems that embraced cliché rather than try to avoid it but fall into it anyway, the only way to transcend anything properly is to leave it behind, like I did with sport.
But it would be far too grandiose to announce any such thing. I'm sure there will be another poem along one day and I'll be there for the JDB if ever they want a song idea. I am forever in their debt for using my words once.
Meanwhile, it's not as if the world is over with yet. The shame of not finishing last Saturday's Times crossword means that next weekend, the effort must be re-doubled. I'll sit on very respectable chess ratings at Chess24 and hope to carefully plot my way through the summer horse racing by avoiding the so-called big issues of flat racing, an industry so boxed-off by cartels that it's more a subject for players of Monoploy than sport. The Skeltons are likely to be helping themselves in some low-wattage summer jump racing, Dan will be leading the jockey's table in September and all one has to do is be on a good percentage of those winners that put him there.
