New Year's Eve Party

 It's actually several years since I've been to such a thing but since we should all be in for this one, let's see what we can find. I am joined by poetry critics Hermione Cringe-Harvey and Tarquin Bilge but first, thank you very much to Radio 3 for cheering us all up this morning. I'm not always in favour of them playing jazz when they should be playing Buxtehude but nobody could possibly complain about this,

 

I've done my highlights of the year already but what did you enjoy the most, Hermione?

I was particularly taken with Justin Hype's Inuit Haiku, for instance this one in which he subverts the form and makes it new by putting the title at the bottom,

 

another word for 

snow, another word for snow, 

another word for

Snow 

Thanks. Tarquin, what impressed you in 2020.

Georgia Serpentine's Melodies Heard in a Parchment Attic revealed a perceptive encapsulation of the frantic interludes of silence we all experience in the notional gap that intervenes between lived experience and the word on the page which she achieved memorably and profoundly, as in Lemonade at Suppertime,

but it is not a goddess whispering, 

it is a vegetable dreaming, the crust

of our sesquipedalophobia

berating us for a 

nonchalance we mistook 

for knitwear

Thank you.

--

Racetrack Wiseguy's long road to recovery for 2020 came about with the two runners mentioned here on 27th. When Megan steered Mr. Glass down Doncaster's home straight joy was unconfined here as we went into the plus with a few days to spare and end the year quits with a few quid carried forward so that we are already in front for 2021 and it's job done in the hope I don't have to bet with the circumspection of Boycott for quite so long next time. There really is no greater pleasure that seeing one's investment oozing confidently through a race and coming home easily in front.

On the other hand, seeing a supposed 'good thing' struggling halfway round is a misery. Oddly, when one always imagines oneself on the end of any bad luck that's going, those last few days included Silent Revolution getting up to snatch back a race in a photo when the TV angle made it look like he hadn't and Heross du Seuil might have been beaten had not the horse in front of him fallen at the last so one is grateful for all that comes one way.

--

The good news is finding new titles by Michael Longley (that I'd missed) and Glyn Maxwell (which is very imminent) and so we will have something to look forward to and, in the company of those great warhorses, Kleinzahler, O'Brien and Mahon, one is re-assured that there is poetry worth having if one knows where to look.

--

And so, there we go, a bit less European than some better-intentioned politicians tried to make us but being an island has been a double-edged situation, giving some the aloof idea that we were different and thus somehow better. 

Everybody assumes they are 'better'. That's not something that differentiates us, it's something that makes us the same. But you can't explain that to the likes of Boris or Trump whose vanity is a 'sine qua non'.

It's a long time now since it seemed natural to believe in progress towards a better world. Those days are long gone. We are back on our heads.

So we must be grateful for small mercies, of which there are plenty if one is lucky enough. Make the most of them. For we may not be The Young Ones very long.

Happy New Year.