The Year in Review

 There was a time I handed out the most meagre of garlands in various categories here at this time of year. While that has fallen into abeyance for the most part, it still seems worthwhile to give some thought to it.

The major highlight was a return to live music which I did like never before, especially since September. All of them are reviewed here, they were all great and I'm not going to pick out any as being better than any others. I was glad of them all. With that came the new association with the Music in Portsmouth website that I hope will continue barring disaster, controversy or me being rumbled as a maverick dilletante disguising his lack of real appreciation under a haze of formulaic phrasing. It's possible I might reach a point at which I've run out of anything new to say and a robot could write what I say by which time I ought to abandon the mission but until then it's enjoyable enough to keep trying.

I've seen enough of Paul Muldoon by now to think something similar about his poems and so I declined to invest in Howdie-Skelp which left John Burnside's Learning to Sleep with a walkover in any Best Poetry Collection award I might make. However, having thought that Sebastian Faulks's Snow Country was the only new novel I'd read from 2021, I now realize that Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun was this year, too. Sometimes it seems like time flies but then at others the summer seems a long time ago. Both are fine books but, going against type, the Ishiguro was perhaps the more convincing even if it might be called science fiction. It would have been in the 1970's but by now time has caught up and it's a real rather than fantasy issue but a machine became emotional, for us at least who credit them as such in some anthropomorphic way.

I never used to do Sports Personality previously but it's of interest here, immediately dispensing with the BBC's limited shortlist. I didn't think the Mark Cavendish revival would be bettered, only getting a ride in the Tour de France at the last minute and then proceeding to take four stage wins to equal Eddy Merckx's long-standing record only to fail to go ahead on the Champs Elysees. Then Emma Raducanu was immaculate in the US Open final and became the most obvious nation's sweetheart since Vera Lynn. She might never win anything again but that night was tremendous. And then Bryony Frost, the most positive role model in any role, continued to win big races in her inspiring, jolly way, possibly outpointing even the wonderful Rachael Blackmore and winning an upsetting case of bullying and harrassment into the bargain, showing herself to be a fine ambassador at least in a sport that struggles to cover itself in glory. Tyson Fury's not a candidate for me because I don't regard beating people up as a sport. It has to be Emma, doesn't it, with the other two ladies highly commended.

I suspect that the disc of the year might have been one I didn't buy, with vol 2 of Arcangelo's Buxtehude Trio Sonatas and the recent Steven Isserlis release featuring music I have already, sometimes more than once. Looking through this year's reviews, the most memorable also include pieces I already had whether it be Monteverdi, Josquin des Prez or Renaldo Hahn.  The Laurenzi disc wasn't new this year so I think the answer is Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma's Beethoven Cello Sonatas.

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Bargain of the Year was my recent move in the market to capture 19 back issues of About Larkin magazine, including that modest career highpoint when Picadilly Dusk and the possibly disownable, by now, The Cathedrals of Liverpool. I still think it's one of my better poems and I wouldn't disown it on account of A.N. Wilson's derision of Paddy's Wigwam but it does implicitly approve of something about Catholicism which has come to seem wrong. Sorry.

But the Larkin magazines never cease to find more to say even if Larkin's poems aren't among those that require much explaining. Reproducing papers from their academic conferences gives access to some lively thinking that would otherwise be hard to come by. I've found two echoes of what I thought already which makes me worry that it's too hard to have thoughts that others haven't had before.

In issue 9, from April 2000, that doyen of provocateurs, Terry Eagelton, offers,

A poem is no more a reflectioon of its author, than a chair is a reflection of a carpenter.

The carpenter analogy is a favourite of mine, not only in the comparison with a poet 'crafting', if we're lucky, poems from words like a carpenter crafts items from wood but also, notwithstanding the mistranslation in the Bible of the Greek, 'tecton', that humanity stands in the same relation to whaever caused them to exist as a table or chair does to the carpenter, which is that it's not in a position to know.

Trevor Tolley also impresses with a parallel when writing, in issue 18, that finding himself older in 2004 than many readers of contemporary poetry, he  feels,

at times like an old Bolshevik sitting in on seminars on the continuity of Russian politics.

And that is how it feels as the poets one is still interested become elder statespersons or are transferred from the category of 'living poets' to 'not living but much missed'. In the same way that I'm incapable of believing that there'll be another Hunky Dory, Electric Warrior or Diana Ross & the Supremes, I don't think I'm going to be capable of appreciating poems written by anybody born after the 1970's. That is almost certainly the wrong attitude but at least the late, great Prof. Tolley has put it into a form of words.

 

I can't have many complaints about 2021, with special thanks to the Portsmouth Library Service. If 2022 is as good, that'll be fine.

I dare say I'll be back again before the holiday season but, if not, Be Good.