New Year Spree

I wonder if there's a cure for clickomania, the affliction by which one habitually buys anything one wants on the internet. I justify it by the fact that it's been a good year for the horses but winning £10 can be used to excuse expenditure of 30. I'm not a shopaholic but there are some things one sees that simply must be had.

Although I play pop music discs very rarely, this house can't go on being my house any longer without having The Marvelettes in it. Then, replacing two Dee Dee Bridgewater LPs with a box of 4 discs was the least I could do. Then it was impossible to resist The Sounds Of Detroit, a 5-disc set of early Motown albums by The Supremes, The Miracles, Marvin Gaye, more Marvelettes and the Contours. How could I not have Smokey's Shop Around,

 The supplier of a disc of Barbara Hannigan singing Erik Satie can't fulfil my order so I'll find it elsewhere. That will make 11 new discs, more than 12 hours, to listen to, which will put a stop to the big return to the Well-Tempered Klavier but there is a sense in which I just want those items to be here as much as listen to them.

Dr. Zhivago is living up to all its billing as one of the great Russian novels, in a competitive field. I generally struggle with novels with so many characters but let's concentrate on Lara and we'll get it back to the library before its renewal date. Dr. Johnson's Selected Letters will get in ahead of Rasselas and The Complete English Poems which are likely to have to wait a while. But, also due are two books that may or may not revive my flagging enthusiasm for contemporary poetry. 

I'm especially not enamoured of the subsidiary industry that grows up around saying what poetry is, isn't, should or shouldn't be and advice on how to write it.  Salt provide 50 items of advice, sometimes amusingly, Salt Poetry Advice, but a lot of them are quite good, like,

An aside, if someone talks to you about finding your “voice,” they’re trying to sell you snake oil,

so they're excused and they are only trying to reduce the avalanche of hapless, hopeless manuscripts they get sent, I'm sure.

I've resisted Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry for years because I don't want to hear any more on the subject but he's a good lad, a fine practitioner of an art that does well to avoid excess and so I'll give it a chance now for less than a fiver. But my regular monitoring of the index at Clarissa Aykroyd's The Stone and the Star provided some hope with Josephine Corcoran's End of Year Books in which she features  Kathryn Simmonds who had a new book out in 2022. I'm glad I found out about that because she is a 'voice' ( !!! ) that has been sound and worth hearing before and so it's up to her to restore my faith in the art form as it proceeds. There was a time when the Poetry Society compiled a monthly list of new titles on which one could look out for names one liked but, like Juke Box Jury, Face the Music, the art quiz Gallery and Orpheus Records in Southsea it's a thing of the past that we now have to manage without.

So, along with a return to lunchtime concerts which are likely to begin with the Ivory Duo in Portsmouth Cathedral on Jan 12, that's the agenda for next month if you want to come back and find out what happened.