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.