Letter from Portsmouth

I've seen more than one newspaper columnist saying that if you thought 2018 was nuts, you wait until you see 2019 but, hold on, you never know. As one whose profit from the bookmakers would have been considerably more in 2016 were it not for the referendum and American election results, I know as well as anybody that politics is ever likely to confound us all.
The odds on a 2019 second referendum and a Remain vote are now nearly down to the 2/1 I was quoting a few weeks ago, so I'm not saying put money on it but I am saying what other possible solutions are there.
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I daren't even look at the review below, done later on the other night. Maybe it's okay, I don't know, but apologies to Ms. Poirier, and all concerned, if it's incoherent.
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It has been a fine midwinter holiday and it isn't over yet. Many thanks to the rail service for at least doing what it said it would when I needed it to, for once.
It is a bookish time, as befits a bookish website, and serious thought and logistical planning might need to go into more bookcases as a new year plan. They surely must go into the second bedroom eventually but it might mean losing the old 'music centre' which can no longer play cassettes and is never asked to play LP's anymore. If I never achieved the original plan of being a librarian, at least I ended up living in a library.
On the subject of which, Larkin's Letters Home is very much the gentle, olde worlde comfort blanket of a read one might expect of it although I won't pre-empt a fuller word on it here. It might just squeeze onto the Larkin shelf in a very tight fit but otherwise it is going to create a crisis of curatorship with not only the individual volumes of poems, two Collecteds, three biographies, three sets of letters, memoirs by others, the two novels, the juvenilia, the photographs, the Oxford anthology, the jazz book, the journalism and interviews and the critiques. Everything but the Complete Poems, which is more complete than it needs to be. And I've said about 'completism' before, it's a hopeless and undesirable project.

So, with Natalie Clein's new disc being something like the programme she played at Wigmore Hall recently, I thought I'd better begin next year with that. One thinks one can listen to Mozart opera forever but maybe even Princess Margaret didn't drink champagne all the time and the world is many and various. While I have several Natalie discs, there is no attempt being made to have them all, the same as when I realized how many Mozart operas there really are, I thought better of pursuing all of them, at least for the time being.
There are too many people to keep abreast of to think one can have all of all of them. I'm slipping behind on Sebastian Faulks, the big push on Julian Barnes has stalled but, reverting to the list obesession, the litany of those one has 'nearly all' of is longer than one thought.
'Complete Work' sets of Buxtehude and Chopin are taken for being what they say they are.
George Eliot, Patrick Hamilton (given the eventual surrender and ordering of Impromptu in Moribundia) and Murakami are an unlikely trio of fiction writers. Oh, yes, and Richard Yates, Salinger and Raymond Carver.
I can't be far off nearly all of Maggi Hambling's published books.
I'm not even convinced I have everything of my own.

T. Rex, The Magnetic Fields, R.E.M.
But, then, of course, the poets, where a Collected or Complete only begs the question of what else they wrote. I won't index this post with all the necessary tages-
Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Chaucer, Eliot, Edward Thomas, Thom Gunn, Larkin, Hughes, Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Sean O'Brien, Roddy Lumsden, Julia Copus, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Keats, Ivor Gurney, Rochester, Ovid, Catullus, Tibullus, several more contemporary people who have by no means finished yet and apologies to those I've forgotten. And, to what end, because owning them all doesn't mean I've read them all. In order to know, or at least think, I have them and thus can list them here, which would appear to be the point.
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But the holiday sporting programme brought its own rewards.
Fulham's now water-tight defence have only conceded once in three outings, which has presaged a march up to 18th place. If they could have sorted out who takes the penalties, I'd have landed the 8/1 about 2-0 v. Huddersfield. Get a grip, lads.
Yesterday's racing was like taking candy from a baby with Champagne Platinum, Lady Buttons and Champ zooming in. My safety-first policy might have saved me from the poor house in the long run but it also denies me access to the rich house when I only lay out that which keeps the year's profit at a modest but satisfactory level and should have piled in. And then the blitzkrieg attack on Taunton today gives half of it back but never mind.
But the highlight was the high risk strategy of putting my treasured 1900+ rating at Chess24 on the line by entering a tournament last night, for which I was no.1 seed on ratings. I was an uneasy favourite, though, and an obvious 'lay' in any betting that might have gone on, not having played for a few days, etc.
Grinding out 3 wins out of 3, that rating was heaved up to 1931 before, tiring and confused after a 150 move game, I crashed and burned in the last two games and slumped to 5th out of 18.
(5th, BorderIncident, with leaders to 2 out, weakened under pressure, found no extra, 7/2 2nd fav, from 5/2)
On a recovery mission this afternoon, though, fiddling a 4-0 result against some German victim, I restored myself to a lovely 1910, that flatters me more than Piers Gaveston ever did Edward II. I don't know if it is regarded as the height of good sportsmanship to play quickly in 10 minute games but rules are rules and wouldn't be rules if they weren't.
One bangs out the familiar openings (Queen's Gambit with white; Sicilian Defence with black), like the 'H Bomb', Nakamura, and gains a time advantage. If one plays accurately enough until the opposition is down to a minute, one can play out a lost position and get the verdict. It's not nice and it's not pretty but it can work.
I had one of those four games won but was lost in probably two but you've only got 10 minutes, Herr Deutschlander, and your time was up.

I hope my kalanchoe plant (pictured) survives. Picked up from Tesco Express for 30p, on its way out, I extended my People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals compassion to Homeless Houseplants. It was the least I could do.
It is not as instantly gorgeous as the cyclamen I so sadly failed with some time ago but maybe it makes up for that with personality. I've put it more into the natural light, wondering if photosynthesis might help, and it is still trying its best. Maybe if it had its own website or You Tube following, it would feel encouraged.

So, there we are. 2019 may or may not see me finishing with full-time, guaranteed, waged employment and then it's either survive on one's wits, savings and the racing results or the devil and the deep blue sea. But I don't see why Caitlin Moran, Giles and Vicky Coren and all those people should be the only ones knocking out reams of material about what it's like being them if I can't be paid half as much for explaining what it's like being me. There's plenty more where this came from.

Agnes Poirier - Left Bank

Agnes Poirier, Left Bank - Art, Passion and the Re-birth of Paris 1940-1950 (Bloomsbury)

History is documented in various ways. Traditionally by the winners, then by all kinds of revisionists with universities just as full of historian academics in need of a thesis as they are of exponents of literary biography but, the shifting picture being what it is, I prefer the first Elizabethan age, Doctor Johnson and WW1 to be told by Blackadder and the Existentialists to be as represented in the Tony Hancock film, The Rebel. If we can't be flippant, what else is there left to be.

Well, we can be Albert Camus, for a start. Never anything less than the epitome of 'cool' and only that on account of his novels, that he didn't consider anything like his most important work, these are the sort of people widely regarded as 'cool' by their own generation until at least the time I took the course on Existentialism (Russell Keates, who briefly thought I hadn't provided an essay on Kierkegaard, and the black-clad Jane Howarth) at Lancaster circa 1980.

Quite how really cool they were, rather than in any superficial way 'cool' has been judged since,
is how Agnes Poirier, more than once, points out that Jean-Paul Sartre lived up to his own ideal of having 'no possessions' several years ahead of John Lennon trying to imagine what that would be like.

I have nothing but enormous affection and admiration for all of the Beatles, having been just about old enough to have understood the energy and magic of She Loves You, yeah, yeah, yeah and, similarly as a result of the age demographic I am defined by, there is something about Sartre, and even more about Camus, that means I don't want to hear a word against them.

But at university, Philosophy being not my major subject, we just read texts. The Existentialism course might have begun with a passing reference to Socrates as the beginning of Western sceptiscism but from there the heavy artillerry of Kant and Hegel were brought in, as necessary precursors to what one had really signed up for, Being and Nothingness, the hundreds of intense pages of which, for BA (Hons) purposes, we were required to know about only a few of the early chapters.
God only knows what a degree is worth now but it wasn't worth much then, either.

Agnes Poirier, photographed here with Juliette Greco, who was there, most significantly as a Bardot before the fact but with Miles Davis, explains how it all came out of the resistance. The poverty, the jazz, the cafe society, the books, reading, the commitment - of course it did, it was anti-Nazi. But did our lecturers at university tell us that in 1980. I'm not sure they did. They thought it came out of other, previous philosophers.
I don't think it did.
I'd ask for a refund from my university if only I'd had to pay for it in the first place.

Having only a few weeks ago read Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf, in which the Bloomsbury Group, in between finding time to produce some very fine work, can't leave each other alone, these Existentialists are, if anything, worse but at least have the reason that they have survived unspeakable horror and so what else is there to do.

What happens is that, with very little hint of how Camus and Sartre parted company but, gladly, plenty made of how they offered a 'third way' between Gaullism and communism, the seminal decade of 1940's Paris begins with heroic underground resistance and emerges with Brigitte Bardot, Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan and the innate glamour that those of us who voted Remain, and will gladly do again, can't quite do for ourselves but would like to be closer to than we otherwise would be.

I Like Alf

Paul Jones, I Like Alf (Mousehold Press)

Alf Engers was to cycling what Alex Higgins was to snooker, for want of a better comparison. Charismatic, controversial and maverick, he did things his own way, not always to the liking of the sport's governing bodies but was impossible to ignore and a champion in spite of whatever circumstances were put in his way.
It was possible to ignore him for the majority of the public who in the 1960's and 70's had no idea about what was going on in the esoteric sport of cycling, on the road, on the track and in time-trialling. It was not always headline news and a boom sport, it was more like an undercover operation known about by a select few who knew their stuff.
Paul Jones has produced a gripping account of Alf's turbulent career based on recent interviews with the man himself and, as a rider who achieved sub-50 minute times for 25 miles and a talented writer capable of telling the story in the spirit it benefits from being told in, he is well ahead of many such sports books not always as well-placed to do so.
Alf Engers was a baker who worked nights which didn't lend itself to traditional timetables for training and preparation for early morning racing. He was also very much his own man, regularly moving from club to club, and thus dependent on the devoted patronage of those who believed in him but found himself perennially caught between cycling's 'North London Mafia' and those whose scriptures were the RTTC rulebook as interpreted by them,
the RRTC made the Taliban Militia look like Club 18-30 holiday reps.

But, as the title does much to suggest, Jones is ultra-sympathetic to the Engers point of view. Those of us interested in sport for sport's sake, rather than administration for administration's sake, always were, too, and one can't come out of reading this book without being even more so but, partisan as it so clearly is, one would just like to hear something from the self-styled apparatchiks of the ruling body to see if, for example, the ban from amatuer competition imposed on Engers after his return from the grey-ish area of 'independent' status was at all justified. It was, after all, a time in which the Olympic Games was for amateurs, as was Rugby Union, while the Soviet Union could train athletes full-time by giving them positions in the army.
Such blurred lines have always benefitted students of the law more than those taking part.

Alf Engers came from school athletics, via the post-war cycle speedway scene, which was the equivalent of skiffle in pop music, and track racing, a world populated by such characters as,
You always knew where you stood with Len Thorpe because he would always let you down.

Famously, a three-man Team Time Trial unit, including Engers and the 'taciturn' John Woodburn, beat the Olympic squad in the run up to the Games but, selection committees knowing who they were selecting anyway, they selected who they were going to select anyway. Alf is forever up against the 'powers that be', sometimes happy to take a sabbatical, whether imposed or not, and return to his angling or, indeed, on that first occasion, to form a skiffle band.
I don't think his mythology was of his own making - his dedication and dedication to detail foresaw SKY's marginal gains theory several decades ahead - but he was capable of living up to it as an idiosyncratic time-triallist who turned up in a fur coat and dark glasses. Talent has its own mystique for the rest of us who don't possess it but, for me, it is in the attitude whereby,
they laughed at things in a sport in which laughing at things was no laughing matter.

It is also about putting the record where nobody else could get to it, for as long as any record can be. The championship 25's, the performances that put more than a minute into the much-vaunted rivals on the day and, less interestingly, the technonology are the point until, aged 38, it is the first sub-50 minute '25', 49.24, the likes of which can be witnessed regularly by now but which, coming so soon after Concorde and the Moon landings, seemed of a piece with them then to those who had any grasp of the matter. It would bear comparison with Roger Bannister if the 4-minute mile hadn't been set up as a team effort with Brasher and Chataway.

Paul Jones has the clubman's lingo, which means that non-cyclists might need to know that a 100 inch gear is very hard to push round and that 'the Comic' means Cycling/Cycling Weekly but it is unlikely that this excellent book will break out of its niche market to become a mainstream best-seller. Would that it were. It might have benefitted from more thoroughgoing sub-editing and, certainly, having been so matter-of-fact thoughout, some readers might find the last four pages of philosophical reflection less than the ideal ending. But the best Christmas present I had, really, was being allowed to read my nephew's present to my dad before he did, while I was there, so I could come home and review it in such short order.
Books on sport are, by necessity, usually either ghost-written by hacks for the inarticulate sportsman in question or by fans more interested in dull statistics and achievements who aren't good enough writers. Paul Jones, possibly showing off a bit, can actually get T.S. Eliot into his text. He is a proper writer and a proper cyclist. Those advantages multiply themselves by each other. 

      
 

Josquin Desprez - Miserere mei Deus

Josquin Desprez,  Miserere mei Deus, Cappella Amsterdam (Harmonia Mundi)

It's always a good thing to forget what one has ordered and then come home to find it's been delivered and you don't know what it is.
Having spent some of the recent turf profit on Mozart operas, the cooling balm of renaissance polyphony makes for a change from the witty orchestration and sheer delightfulness.
This was an essential purchase for having a new version of the Deploration sur la mort d'Ockeghem, as it is billed here, and to hear the other pieces seen fit to programme with it.
With the Clerk's Group's 1993 recording, as an encore to a disc of Ockeghem himself, indelible by now as the definitive version for me, any comment has to be by way of comparision with that. First impressions are that Cappella Amsterdam are softer, perhaps a fraction quicker, quite probably better recorded but not necessarily as poignant, and if this 3.30 setting of the lament by (no less than) Guillaume Cretin is anything, it is the apotheosis of the poignant. As such, I'm not convinced it is sufficiently dirge-like but my familiarity with the earlier version is always going to be in the way of any subsequent recording and by all means, this would be a sensational find if it had been found first, which for some it inevitably will be.
In a quite brilliant bit of cover design, they use a detail from this Van Eyck painting but only the view of the city from the top right corner and none of the adoration going on in the foreground.

Any difference between Cappella Amsterdam and the Tallis Scholars would begin confidently by noticing that there are more of them, 14 listed but more on the photo, but apparently similar resources used for this record. Perhaps they sound more monastic which might be in part due to the recording conditions in de Waalse Kerk, Amsterdam.
It is rarely a complaint, and only a question, when I wonder if music is taken more quickly than is sometimes good for it. This disc passes soon, and gorgeously, enough for its 66 minutes, especially when trying to think of worthwhile things to say about it but would seem, and be, longer if it lingered more, which there would have been room for. For once, when a record had been reprimanded for going too fast (Don Giovanni by Arnold Ostman and The Drottingholm  Court Theatre Orchestra), it didn't worry me, certainly not in the showpiece arias one really wants it for, but eternity's a long, long time and not to be rushed through in these plaintive lamentations.

The voices blend, the enunciation is careful and we won't ever know if Josquin would have heard his own music done like this or otherwise. 
If we think that the encore here, Musae Jovis by Nicolas Gombert, 45 years Josquin's junior, takes us back to where we came in, that's because it is the companion piece to the Deploration, with the next generation paying their own tribute in similar style,
Cruel and wicked Death,
you who deprive the temples of sweet sounds, 
and the princely courts also  

and if I had been thinking I didn't actually need this record because I have plenty of others like it, no, this is what I bought it to find out about.
Gombert did right by Josquin and the tradition was handed on. 

Murakami - Killing Commendatore

Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore (Harvill Secker)

However strange something purports to be, it's not usually that unusual. The world by now being more many and various than ever it was, being odd and original is ever harder. I'm not even convinced that it is the weirdness that Murakami's worldwide 'cult' following like about him so much. This far along his career, he fits entirely into established traditions, firstly as a 'magic realist' in the same genre as Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie.
If Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki largely dispensed with parallel realities, we are back here with characters who have sprung from a painting, other-worldliness and unlikeliness, back in a world where such things as those in A Wild Sheep Chase are possible.
Our first person narrator is a painter, who makes a living from portrait painting. In order to make him a loner but unthreatening, he leaves his wife and has a casual girlfriend and, being a Murakami character, tells us more than is necessary about the relationship on the safe side of soft porn. Killing Commendatore is a painting he finds in the attic of a house he uses while its owner, the artist, Tomohiko Amada, is dying in a home. It is a scene from Don Giovanni and the commendatore in it comes alive as a 2 ft. tall 'idea' that not everybody can see.
Menshiki lives on the opposite side of the mountain valley. He is like a Jay Gatsby, of immaculate taste, great wealth but little apparent background. He will pay anything to have his portrait painted and then wants a portrait of the young girl, Mariye, who he thinks might be his daughter.
We are lured into a captivating adventure by a mysterious bell that can be heard in the distance in the small hours of the night. I thought the owl found in the attic was going to speak and expected it to do so by page 250 but it doesn't, it's not so much an owl as a red herring.
So, if we have 'magic realism', Gatsby, a painting that has a life of its own like Dorian Gray, adventures in an underworld akin to Hades and the River Styx, a 'lost girl' novel for a few chapters when Mariye goes missing, and tension lifted from Hitchcock films when she is trapped in Menshiki's house, the novel can soon be seen as being made up of themes from elsewhere, with Murakami making his luxcurious, slow progress to 681 easy-going pages by adding further threads to his post-modern tapestry.
Like Hamlet, there is a doubling of the Menshiki-Mariye fathership question when our narrator might possibly be the father of a child his ex-wife is expecting, a child somehow inevitably conceived in a dream.
In its studiedly postmodern way, the novel hints at ways it might be interpreted but one would only do so at one's peril. As soon as a character shows up, their clothing and demeanour are described in meticulous detail, mainly Menshiki, and his sleek Jaguar car, too, which are signifiers of the good taste that immensde wealth can buy, to put alongside the choice collection of opera on vinyl in Amada's house. It all suggests that Murakami, here and elsewhere, is really about semiotics and style over substance but whether that is ironic or simply product placement to keep his readers happy is hard to say.
As with contemporary art, or when, as cricketers, we used to sometimes walk out to have a look at the wicket before a match, it is wise not to offer too much of an opinion, but just look, nod and appear as if one appreciates a range of possibilities, none of which you are prepared to commit to.
There's much to be said for not having definitive interpretations in the way that exam answers used to want us to provide. The best exam answers these days presumably don't offer any judgement on whether Hamlet was mad, not mad, or pretending to be. We surely tend to float around a bit more these days and enjoy the unsecured detachment, like a country in freefall not knowing where it might align itself in only a few weeks' time.
Murakami is still an enormously enjoyable read, sociable and likeable in his translator's easy-going version of what must be easy-going Japanese, laced very sparingly with 'poetic' imagery when he remembers to put some in. I am a loyal adherent and look for the next title as soon as the latest is finished with the same misdirected obsession that led me to read Solzhenitsyn as a teenager when, really, I could have been reading Tolstoy, Dickens, Fielding, Balzac and maybe even Jane Austen. I keep the faith and wouldn't want to miss anything although the lovely but lightweight bookcase that currently houses the not quite complete works of Murakami might thank me one day if it were given over to slim volumes of poetry and these weighty hardbacks allocated elsewhere.
Eventually, with anybody, if they go on long enough, one senses some technique at work and I might have glimpsed a bit of a Murakami formula in this book. Never mind, all that anyone can do is stop before it reveals itself and pass up royalties one might have had or stick at it and cash in, like an ageing football star going to play in China in their mid-thirties.
This is a very enjoyable book but if you haven't read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, IQ84 or South of the Border, West of the Sun (which is where I started), I'd read them first.  

That Special Book

I see that the annual postings count is very much in line with previous years but I'll do this anyway. It's the writing of it I enjoy because it is of little consequence if anybody reads it, then someone reads about themselves here and is kind enough to get in touch but by now I don't know how I'd read a book or listen to a record if I wasn't trying to think of what to say about it.
I remember Colin Lyas, lecturer in Aesthetics, saying in an interview that he wasn't a proper aesthetician because, if asked in his last moments if he'd prefer to think about a work or enjoy it, he would prefer to just enjoy the performance. I may, sadly, have gone the other way.

Ideally I'd do less of this. I never wanted to be a blogger but, as it used to say in the blurb, I have a face that suits me to radio and voice better suited to the internet, and there surely would be less of it if I only wrote when I had something worth saying to say.

But having in short order nominated Best of Year in my chosen genres, and then done the seminal Poem of the Decade, the last thing I ought to have the nerve to do is some sort of Lifetime Achievement.
I know many people have that 'special book', one that they 'live with'. I know someone who does, or at least did, read The Catcher in the Rye every year. I know of someone who reads Dickens, all of him, and then does it all over again. I once heard from someone who said they only ever listened to Handel (and The Magnetic Fields). I remember a contributor to the old Philip Larkin Society Forum - livelier than you might think- who claimed to only read Larkin because he was the best, which did make one wonder how they knew as much.
Somebody on the radio a few years back knew the whole Mozart catalogue by Kochel numbers and the arrival of The New Grove Mozart today, to go with all these operas I'm spending my turf account profit on, made me wonder if I could make it a bedside companion and assimilate a small part of that knowledge because it is that list I mainly bought it for.

But it won't be that. The ultimate record release might well be the Ton Koopman Buxtehude Opera Omnia, if one could only have one, but that's not the question and neither is it the sort of answer that those people give who are so devoted to one book that it doesn't need choosing, it simply is such a thing.

I did once, perhaps still do, have a project on here that might be called The Best Book in the House, which would select two or three from such categories as Poetry, Fiction, Biography, History, Sport, Science, etc. until ending with a shortlist of, say, Dubliners, the copy of Touch signed by Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979, Terry Eagleton's The Gatekeeper and either memoirs by Danny Baker or Stephen Fry or biographies of  John Donne or Jeremy Thorpe, but no, having to invent a process to decide on a 'special book' means there isn't one.
Marriage seems like a similar idea .

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But I feel like adding some kind of Special Admiration Award for Theresa May, for what she's been through if not for what she's achieved. God only knows what her view of human nature must be like by now and yet she's kept up a brave front of smiling, weird fashion icon, odd dancing and devotion to obviously lost causes.
And by now I must abjure any regard for Jacob Rees-Mogg, all of which was based on his paragon example of courtesy, immense grasp of his own version of the facts and when Vicky Coren, chairing Have I Got News for You, said she found him 'strangely attractive'.
The adverb has long taken precedence over the adjective it is qualifying in that off-hand judgement.
Of course, he was always the cringeworthy creep he looked like and any camouflague that made him look anything else has evaporated as he has seen his spurious referendum win come under scrutiny, his goals not quite so achievable and his demeanour less assured.
Getting back to where we were might cost us three Prime Ministers, all the time and words spent on it, not least by another hero, Laura Kuenssberg, whose word count must be uncountable and all obsolete almost as soon as uttered. But we can send the bill to Boris, Jacob and Nigel, and the sinisterly-named European Research Group, whose research had a foregone conclusion, which is not what research is.


Remain can still win this.
Keep Hope Alive.
Don't Give Up On Us, Baby.

Best Poem and Best Collection 2018

The Year In Review

I think we can put this away now, with enough evidence to decide on these minor, minor, minor awards.
We will start with the little extra categories that have grown up around the poetry over the last 10 years.
The Best Event can be picked from a long and impressive shortlist of concerts that includes The Tallis Scholars, who only have to turn up to be considered; Sophie Gent, Trevor Pinnock and friends playing Buxtehude et al at Wigmore Hall; Steven Kovacevich in Chichester Cathedral, and there was plenty more.
With so much top quality live music to pick from, it seems wrong to select a television programme but A Very English Scandal, one of the few political programmes this year not about the referendum fallout although the title fits, and a masterpiece from Hugh Grant, Ben Whishaw, a deep cast of excellent minor characters, Russell T. Davies, Stephen Frears and an absolute very, very, very great success.
The Best Novel can't be the re-issue of Monday Morning by Patrick Hamilton because that was first published in 1925.
Killing Commendatore is engaging but not quite Murakami's best so The Only Story by Julian Barnes doesn't have anything to beat because too many - Seb Faulks, William Boyd, Sally Rooney's much-vaunted Normal People - haven't got as far as being read here. Barnes might brood a little longer than he might but it is profound and true and all it needs to be.
Best Record is a potentially competitive division and the Belcea Quartet with their Shostakovich would have been a worthy winner before the Buxtehude Abendmusik by Vox Luminis, wisely programming the best Trio Sonata where Gent/Pinnock made the next best suffice.  It is, indeed, luminous, is preferred in many ways to the Opera Omnia accounts by Ton Koopman, which are wonderful enough in their own right, and I was very glad to find two of Gramophone's expert reviewers chiming in to make it the only disc selected by more than one person in their survey.

And so, to the poetry, which hasn't been decided yet but will have been by the end of a few more short paragraphs.
It looked for a long time as if Sean O'Brien had the game to himself with his collection, Europa, and the poem, Goddess, within it. I don't read as much new poetry as I did a few years ago and don't find as many titles that I want to buy as I did.
But then Carol Ann Duffy's Sincerity appeared, entirely convincing as a book if without such a stand-out individual poem.
But then, I was glad to find out about Derek Mahon's Against the Clock just in time, with several great poems in it, among which Stardust is the pick.
Let me just take a minute to re-read Goddess v. Stardust. I honestly don't really believe in competitions or even prizes, only having won a small handful myself, but once we hear ourselves say one thing is good and another isn't, we are halfway to doing it anyway.
....
The quick reminder of Goddess by Sean O'Brien is more than enough to make it far and away Best Poem which means that no horse trading is necessary to make Against the Clock by Derek Mahon the year's Best Collection, from the narrow sample of new poetry I've read this year.

And, because the sample is so narrow, it might be time to call an end to any pretence I might have that me naming anything as portentous in poetry and perhaps next year I might just do The Year In Review, from my own very limited perspective.

Poem of the Decade

Derek Mahon's Against the Clock has finally made a game of this year's 'Best in Poetry' review and we will have to wait in fevered anticipation for that decision.
Meanwhile, however, I can announce the 'Poem of the Decade', that being the 10 years now up in which I've arbitrarily judged the collections and poems I've read.
With apologies to all those I haven't. 
Avid followers will no doubt recall that the shortlist, chosen from the ten winners of 'Best Poem' each year, was,

John Burnside, Mistaken for a Unicorn, from Still Life with Feeding Snake
Julia Copus, Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden, from The World's Two Smallest Humans
Helen Farish, Pastoral, from The Dog of Memory
Roddy Lumsden, Women in Paintings from Not All Honey
Martin Mooney, Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, from The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen
Sean O'Brien, The Beautiful Librarians, from The Beautiful Librarians.

David Harsent's  Night was made 'Best Collection' there and then, the category not seeming quite so competitive, but all six of those poems are very fine things and proper contenders.

Having chosen them from the ten, I read them in a random order and then going up the provisional order I had put them in, trying to discard poems in a 'Devil Take the Hindmost' fashion.
That might make for a suspect process of marginal fault-finding rather than the recognition of excellence but perhaps, and hopefully, it might make for the same result. They are all excellent in their various ways.
Burnside was first to go, partly on account of a facility that the whole book, and Burnside as a whole, became suspected of. While mysterious and magical, I wondered if there was some linguistic trick going on, a way of 'making' a poem that suggested rather than established itself. That might be what poetry is, and the poem had started out as a likely favourite, but up against such stiff opposition, it was the one that least convinced it ought to stay. Possibly a victim of simply being 'too flash'.
It was a similar feeling that soon attached itself to Martin Mooney's masterpiece that I was very much enthralled by at the time, and still am. It's a cruel and tough job to have to do.

The next decisions tried my very hardest not to be made by favouring long-established favourite poets. Sean O'Brien and Roddy Lumsden are two poets whose best work have become canonical for me, echoing through my understanding of what poetry can be like, and has been made like by them. I wouldn't want to side with them only on account of liking them so much but if Roddy's poem is an exquisite 'tour de force' both of and about artistic creation, it might have ended with more than a precis of a Bob Marley chorus. It faltered, didn't even really falter, only ceased to go beyond the language, in its last few words.
Whereas Sean provided a gorgeous elegy for what we perceive as better times, when we were all younger, and did it in his customary knowing way. I convinced a number of other poetry readers of its greatness when the book was published and only had to show it to them to do so. It isn't good enough to hold it against the poem that Sean has been a length or two better previously because he is a classic winner and thoroughbred and, in this form, still magnificent. I had thought The Beautiful Librarians a big contender but there is nothing wrong with coming third in a red-hot contest.

Which left me weighing up the much-loved Julia Copus poem, with its
                                                         sleeplessness
hovering inside you like a planet,

against Helen Farish's vividly alive conjuring of nature in and around Dorchester, written in terza rima.
I've found Julia's poem profoundly moving from the first time I read it and it had long been ante-post favourite for this meaningless award, which has nothing whatsoever to do with how generously she signed my copy of the book at Cheltenham. But it was a choice between the 'profoundly-moving' and the astonishingly well-made poem and then I noticed Julia compiling a list of five things,

mountains, oceans, vineyards, quaysides, gardens

and, although we shouldn't have rules, lists in poems start to get out of hand when they exceed the statuatory three. 
I can't find any such miniscule blemish in Pastoral. It's got the lot. One can read it time and again, as one can listen to perfect music, and enjoy it as much.
The first reading may not be the best because one doesn't know what one is going to find, it's just another poem in a book, but when you know you can go back as many times as you want, it's like a Brandenburg Concerto.

So, my favourite poem of the last ten years is Pastoral  by Helen Farish, and congratulations to her. It comes as a big surprise to me and not even I would have thought she was a possible winner until, and except that, the poem appeared in the TLS and prompted me to buy the book.
After all my doubts, after all I've said about continuing my subscription to the TLS. It remains worth it if it directs you to poems like this and, anyway, magazines I used to get, like Rover & Wizard, The Beano, The Listener and the NME no longer appear in print.  
  
 

Mozart Mania

What a pity I'm not doing The Saturday Nap this year. It might have been a struggle for most of the year but now the winners are flowing like a river in spate.
This is cash for spending rather than giving back and so the Mozart opera collection is the main beneficiary. Mozart is very much where I came in with 'classical' music and one's first real love stays special.
Reviewing the shelves to see what I might add next, I'm sure there should be a Marriage of Figaro there but I can't find it. I made myself a list, from memory, and thought there might be a dozen or so, adding on a couple to the famous ones.
D'oh. Don't ever check the internet. He was always writing operas early doors and there's more than one could ever find sensible shelf space for. So, never mind, it's another thing not to be completist of.

But, what an outpouring of sublime wonder the boy was. Bach, Buxtehude and Handel, watch out, because he's back on the premises and, anybody outside of the trusty old guard, they should be grateful they got selected before I might decide, no, there's no point ever looking any further.

Derek Mahon - Against the Clock

Derek Mahon, Against the Clock (Gallery Press)

Being the title of the book and the first poem in it, Derek Mahon's idea that, now 77, he is wrriting 'against the clock', is as explicit as it can be made. He is aware of a 'final deadline', admires Sophocles for still writing at 90, the banished Ovid, and a litany of 'exiles' and 'reprobates', knows all too well the doubt in
                                


                           moments when you think
contemporary paper games too daft for you

but resolves to press on, humbly for someone of his esteemed reputation, in spite of his misgivings.

He need hardly worry. In spite of a widespread tide of opinion, among anyone concerned enough to hold any opinion on the subject, that contemporary poetry does itself no favours and my own truism that many poets falter after the age of 60, it doesn't apply to him.
A truism is something truish but robustly unverifiable and thus not 'true' at all. Some might say that even Seamus Heaney began to revisit earlier themes in his later books and that after 40 years or more of invention, anybody might begin to flag. 58 might be a good age for some of us to have at least taken a break, given it some thought, and wonder if it's worth doing any more.

Beginning Against the Clock at the beginning and proceeding page by page, a radical habit I've adopted with poetry books only recently, one is convinced that Derek Mahon hasn't written a bad poem in his life but it's possible he's conceding more than he might to his various rhyme schemes in 5 or 6 line stanzas and not doing a great deal more than being Derek Mahon.
That is a fine enough thing on its own but the Gallery Press have gone to the loving lengths of packaging the paperback in a quality jiffy bag and, inside that, carefully wrapped it in brown paper, too. Books need to deserve such reverence.
It can often be that one poem sets a book alight after which all the others look better and those one had read already improve for being illuminated by light from the other.
Stardust begins with a not unfamilar idea of the light from burnt-out stars only now arriving for us to see.
These were the crucible
before we came in cinders and flying rubble
to this raw shore, to crawl on its warm sands
inventing hope.

It is a brilliant poem, bringing together the awestruck wonder of our relationship with the universe and our perceived paltry investment in it, discomfited by the climate change, error and mismanagement, implying the loss of what might have been something more like paradise.
Derek Mahon's always been too wise to believe that any such thing was really possible and always had his political complaints and edge but here he presents it on the vastest possible scale, and to great effect.
We are failed and insubstantial and, seen from the opposite perspective, from the microscopically small rather than the infinitely enormous, in Thing Theory,
What of atoms? Do they blink
like fish in an aquarium tank
and look out at us looking in

and what they can't help but notice is a wasteful and trivial culture.

If Ms. Duffy's Sincerity included a concerted and verifiably entirely accurate list of epithets applicable to the current President of the United States of America, Mahon provides three sonnets, in Trump Time, that are equally apposite and might be thought to be more considered but, what can you do. You either write poems or you don't.

Without immediately re-reading Mahon's books of the last decade or more, I suspect this is the sort of 'return to form' artists can sometimes be praised for that is somehow ahead of a few of its immediate predecessors when there should be no implication that there had been anything like a significant dip in form in the meantime. But rather than provide an unconditional eulogy for a poet whose books I'll always buy, and I'm not quite sure why I'm a couple of months late finding out about this one,
I might ask if the lines in Rising Late,
Best skies at first light, but I don't do dawn
no more. The enchantment has already gone

really wanted to be
The best skies are at first light, but I don't do dawn
anymore. The enchantment has already gone

but metrical/syllabic constraints have needs must compacted it. It isn't quite right, for me, and so one of Derek Mahon, his editor or me have a minor bit of explaining to do.
But, otherwise, this is a wonderful book from one of the stalwarts of that generation of fine Irish poets that made 'English' poetry, which might have been becoming too 'English' in places, less 'English', for which we remain very grateful.
It is crucial how a book is ordered, its organisation being able to take us from one place to another irrespective of the chronology of when the poems were written, which can be an idea but can be a bad one.
Perhaps we are building towards something as poems about place, or domesticity, gather in the last few pages before ending on Woodpigeons at the Grove, giving voice to them,
    the serere ones, dopey and content
to roost on the cool edge of a continent 

that, having ruminated to nearly two pages in length, beyond the sometimes alarming facility of poems to fit on one page in suspiciously designer fashion, ends,
                                      we're prosaic 
creatures, neither heroic nor archaic
but worldly, self-confined to safety zones,
still dreaming of our once infinite horizons.

And that'll do, that'll do fine, not only as poetry but as a manifesto in a world that might have gone beyond its limits and not all of us can, or want to, see what happens next. Possibly not even in poetry.

Always grateful for anything less than chaos

Although how I was expected to get Lope de Vega and 'neonate' in Saturday's Times crossword, I don't know. But I did, with a little help from my friend, the internet.

A few weeks ago, an e-mail questionnaire arrived from Virgin media asking in no uncertain terms 'what is the most we could charge you without you leaving us'. Not bloody much was the answer since my 12-months fixed price had already been put up, which brings into question their definition of 'fixed'.
I have since, though, found channel 198, which is You Tube. Yes, I have the internet on the computer and I dare say with the right wires that could be displayed on the telly but I won't be bothering to do that. But what I can do now is type in Mozart Piano Sonatas and there are five hours plus-worth of the whole shebang to accompany, quite fittingly, reading Murakami. Haydn Piano Trios have made for good company, too, but this does threaten the future of the CD.
Why would one buy such music when it can be whistled up for free. Well, because one still wants to, I hope, but it is almost the paradise one dreamed of aged about 13. Just about all the music you can think of in one convenient machine, from obscure 70's long-hairs like Alquin or Jack the Lad to Josquin Des Prez, Pergolesi and, looked up following the feature in Gramophone, a quite glorious La Cenerentola by Rossini, which needs to be watched, not just listened to.
But, no, Virgin, I'll keep paying but I've only just dragged myself into turf investment profit for the year and I don't intend to have earned it just to pass it on to you.
--

Although, still with Gramophone, I am waiting for Cappella Amsterdam's Josquin- Motets and Deplorations in the hope of finding anything to compare with the lament on the death of Ockeghem, I was most gratified to find the only disc to be nominated more than once as their disc of the year by their reviewers (by Lindsay Kemp and David Vickers) was the Vox Luminis/Buxtehude Abendmusik, which is imminently expected to see off the Belcea Quartet's wonderful Shostakovich and all other comers to be mine, too. I'm not sure if Gramophone's reputation is enhanced by this coalescence of opinion, or mine. But I don't believe in coincidences.
--
More than halfway through Killing Commendatore by now, I am looking forward to reading some short books, this having followed Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf, but fear Larkin's letters to his mother and a biography of Tennyson coming at Christmas won't be those. I'm wondering if I can see off Saturday Night at the Greyhound by John Hampson in my spare time.

The Gallery Press have promptly furnished my order for the belatedly-discovered Against the Clock by Derek Mahon, taking the loving care to not only use a jiffy bag but wrap it very neatly in brown paper within. It is an indication of the care some sellers take over their product and reminds me of once, in the late 80's in Winchester, buying a local magazine of poems and short stories for a couple of quid and watching in awe as the vendor did the same, like a sommelier decanting a bottle of Pauillac. But it means that the O'Brien walkover in the year's poetry awards, with Duffy and Mahon to make a game of it, is no done deal. And, with Murakami and Josquin to review before Christmas, the awards might have to wait until the new year. We will see.

That shortlist, however, does reflect back on the recurrent discussion of what a state contemporary poetry is in.
It might not be for the likes of Jeremy Paxman or even Stephen Fry to say so but others have been saying so, too. And I'm sure it has ever been thus.
My shortlist of O'Brien, Duffy and probably Mahon represents my age group, being someone whose pop music doesn't penetrate far into the C21st and whose radio listening consists of R3, R5, I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue on R4 and Johnnie Walker on R2.
It is possible that, for poets and poetry readers (if there is any difference) under 40, there are young poets that represent a new golden age and it's not for me to say they don't any more than I'd prefer the hit parade to still be full of T. Rex and Tamla Motown.
Time often does us no favours but I will be amazed if any new poet, or pop artist, turns up between now and kingdom come that does it for me like the old ones did.
Poetry does not look to me to be in a healthy condition but I remember objecting profoundly in a first year seminar when a young lecturer announced in 1979 we wouldn't be reading anything after Auden and promptly went to the admin office, claimed to have a timetable clash with a philosophy lecture and changed my seminar group.
We've all been there, what goes round comes around, etc.