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.