The endnotes of the TLS is where the paper is most excruciatingly self-regarding but it's sometimes of interest, too. It often includes an account of a bargain find in a choice bookshop while they were on their flaneur perambulations.
They don't seem to have been to Cosham High Street yet and the High Street would never pretend to have the sort of bookshop that would attract their wide and esoteric taste. But this week in the Heart Foundation charity shop I picked up a copy of Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama, a novel I'd intended to read when it was selling as well as any such fat book translated from the Japanese could expect to. But I didn't. So for £1.50 the deal was readily done and at 700+ pages, that looks like as good value entertainment as one might get. I daresay I'll let you know.
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I found Helen Mort's Rain Twice here, Helen Mort, Rain Twice in Poetry Review. There's always been a lot to like about Helen and her poems and the second part of this was memorable, I thought. So, with my keeping up to date with new poetry rapidly losing touch with the poetry zeitgeist, I noted it down towards the shortlist for Best Poem of the Year. I've no idea what else will turn up but with half the year gone and only Sean O'Brien on my lists, we need to make a game of it.
Now in its tenth year, this website's attempt to review the poetry year through my own tunnel-vision reading might not even be worth the paltry consideration it ever was so this year I might make a shortlist of the best winners of the collection and poem awards, select a Best of the Decade. But you never know.
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The arrival of the King's Singers CD with the Byrd Civitas sancti tui hasn't happened yet but will be an occasion when it does. It prompts thoughts of reviving the TOP 6 feature to do Renaissance Polyphony which is having another renaissance recently in this house. I looked for other recordings of Josquin's Deploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem and was surprised to find no other discs apart frrom the Clerk's Group I already have, only downloads. Either it is a grossly neglected masterpiece or we are now seriously in the age of the download. But when I say 'we', I don't include myself in that as is customary with the first person plural.
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And so with a splendid outcome of the annual blood pressure review completed this morning and a new British, Commonwealth and all-comers record set for one area of work I'm involved in at the office since I was involved in it, one needs to be on one's guard. The pessimist abhors good tidings. Not because they're good but because one doesn't trust them.
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.
