Phenomenally Canonical

Thinking about 'the canon', as I reluctantly was recently, this week's TLS includes a reference to how Spenser 'canonized' Chaucer. Didn't actually make him a saint but, oh yes, of course, I never made the connection.
In the same review, Bernard O'Donoghue, who I was lucky enough to meet once in Oxford because I was wandering round with an ex-student of his, draws our attention to The Miller's Tale,
He knew nat Catoun, for his wit was rude.
which is a fine example of why I like Chaucer now if not when it might have been more useful at A level. It doesn't mean that the miller was a bit like Roy 'Chubby' Brown but it sounds to me as if it does.
Also in the TLS last week, an article by Clive Wilmer looking suspiciously like a trailer for his long, long, long awaited Selected Thom Gunn, which is due next week, useful above all else for the photograph of Charlotte, the poet's mother. It is not usual these days for the poetry world to be inundated with good-looking poets but most would probably agree that Gunn was handsome and now we can see where he got it from. So the TLS, providing it goes on providing such things, survives as a subscription.

This weekend should see me finish Missing Fay by Adam Thorpe, a novel about which the verdict is likely to stay in the balance until it resolves itself into what is due. Just can't say yet. And then the decks are cleared to take some minor things, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and the Collected Charlotte Mew (to perhaps have a look at the stories) away while I flatter myself that my input is useful as my nephew obliterates the mark I set 22 years ago for 12 Hours of riding a bike. It's likely he will go beyond my 217.888 miles with about an hour to go, which is fine by me. So we had better make sure he does.
It's hard to believe that I ever did such a thing but I was reminded on the radio not long ago that the cells that comprise us are constantly dying off and being replaced by new ones. I think what has happened with me is that the cells that made me do sport, take an interest in the football or cricket scores or even, once, support Bjorn Borg against McEnroe or Jimmy Connors, have been replaced by others that make me want to buy a CD of The Magic Flute for my new great nephew. Maybe none of us are who we used to be and that might be a good thing. It might be disconcerting but it is more interesting than being the same person now that I was 40 years ago. And I'm grateful for that.

Best Poem and Best Collection shortlists

It is plenty early enough to be announcing the shortlists for 2016 with a possible candidate for the Best Event category still to come, which is the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra concert next month, but the lists are always open to late additions and the main action is otherwise mostly done.

The main objective is a review of the year - from my narrow perspective- in poetry but there are the subsidiary categories added in to make an occasion of it. And this year the Best Event category is the most enthralling, given its wide remit and a list of candidates that, even if you think that things within the same genre can be or should be compared in such an arbitrary way, really ought not to be.

So, I'm carrying around four books of poems with me, with no idea which is the best of them.

Best Poem

Judy Brown, After the Discovery of Linear Perspective, from Crowd Sensations
Helen Farish, Pastoral, TLS and The Dog of Memory
Margaret Wilmot, Susannah and Titian, South 54

Best Collection

Judy Brown, Crowd Sensations
Ian Duhig, The Blind Road-Maker
Helen Farish, The Dog of Memory
Bernard O'Donoghue, The Seasons of Cullen Church

Best Novel

Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time
Ian MacEwan, Nutshell
Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

Best CD

Hans Abrahamsen, let me tell you, Barbara Hannigan
Francois Couperin, Lecons de Tenebres, Lucy Crowe and Elizabeth Watts
Errolyn Wallen, Photography

Best Event

Cherltenham races, April, with four winners out of five selections
The Good Old Days, BBC4's generous helping of Leonard Sachs et al from the 1970's
The Spinnaker Tower, Portsmouth, having finally been up it and a new, rewarding perspective on the city
The Shakespeare Twins Theory, finally published, in the TLS, but not for the theory itself (by Curtis-Green), but for the reaction to it, derided on Twitter (by the subsequently ennobled Prof Stanley Wells, Paul Edmondson and Prof Emma Smith) but not refuted
Ulysses' Homecoming, English Touring Opera

There are two of the above categories where I'm fairly sure which is my favourite but there's more thinking to do before dishing out these awards, where it is highly unlikely that the winners will even be aware that they've won.

Bernard O'Donoghue - The Seasons of Cullen Church

Bernard O'Donoghue, The Seasons of Cullen Church (Faber)

This would not be a book for students to go searching in for 'poetry' as is meant by rhyme schemes, assonance, alliteration, mystification, playfulness or any of the other devices that they are encouraged to identify. It flies by those nets and reflects in calm, restrained lines on place, characters and events from the past. It is measured, unsentimental, honest, humane and thus admirable. It is closer to Michael Longley's similar meditations, without being quite so dependent on his sense of 'home', than Seamus Heaney's altogether more ambitious and magnificent achievement. But there's nothing that anybody has to apologize for in not being Heaney.
Bernard O'Donoghue's poems here achieve their lasting effects through low-key, prosaic lines (some might say) but they leave more behind than ever seemed to be happening as they unfolded.
The Dark Room compares those attending a 'Poetic Seminary' (and our hearts must go out to them) with bees creating honey,
intent in their darkness

and that is as concentrated as the language ever gets.

The poems achieve their rare beauty almost unnoticed, self-effacingly, and might need to be returned to before one sees quite how much was meant by such low-voltage sentences,

so, packed in ice, we can retain whatever
it was we once must have meant by love
and the kind frost that stopped it going off.

That might remind us of Prince Charles' remark about 'love, whatever that is', which I have some sympathy with, but it is not O'Donoghue's point. He knows what it is, he's just quietly celebrating its remarkable survival.
There are a number of translations from classical or Early texts here, each pertinent in their themes of mortality when in memoriam or close to the book's sense of itself and within its own civilized decorum. Having once met the poet briefly in the street in Oxford, him on his bike, that is entirely in keeping with the considered, deep intelligence that two or three minutes of chat with him and one of his ex-students that one would expect. And would expect no less than.
It is not a book that is going to thrill and excite on first reading but I strongly suspect that by avoiding quite such ready gratification, it will offer more and more as one appreciates all the things it doesn't do in favour of those things it leaves us with.
   
         

Prizes

Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the title of course echoing Raymond Carver, is a companionable memoir, mainly about his marathon exploits. In an age when some take more of an interest in the writer than the writing, it is gentle, open and accessible compared to some of his more opaque and mystifying novels. But apart from his obsessional nature as writer, extreme athlete and record collector (all of which are laudible enterprises), he comes across as a very sensible bloke.
And sensible, too, in the view that he doesn't want a Nobel Prize although the link sent by my Japanese correspondent is in Japanese so I'm going to take her word for what it says. Neither would I, although I am a bit further down the list of likely recipients, although the cheque that comes with it is admittedly generous. But apparently, you can't turn it down, you can just not turn up.
Bob Dylan, at the time of writing, doesn't seem all that excited about it either. Why would you be. It's nice to be listed alongside James Joyce, Sartre, Camus, Heaney and suchlike but I'd prefer to have just written The Changing of the Guards, the Street Legal album, in among everything else, and enjoy having done so than get a prize for it. No amount of celebrity, gongs and acclamation can be as good as having such a thing. It's the words. There isn't anything else.
So I simply don't have a view on whether Dylan worked in a genre that qualified him for the Nobel Prize. It doesn't make his word sound any better. And questions such as 'what is literature?' can be left to the likes of Terry Eagleton to publish books on which will no doubt be diverting but risk leaving you none the wiser. Or, perhaps wiser but still not sure of the answer.
But perhaps this derision of prize-giving is a bit rich coming from me. Not because I've been happy enough to accept some very minor ones but because this week I did look at the shortlist for the T.S. Eliot Prize to widen the coverage of my own Best Collection and Best Poem of the Year meditations.
It's getting late and my list of poems only has three on it and while Judy Brown and Ian Duhig's collections are admirable, it is not the most competitive shortlist I've ever had.
I haven't read much new poetry this year. I've read a few reviews but not been tempted by many of them and perhaps, as one gets older, the activities of those a few decades younger don't seem quite so relevant. Some of the elderly are either fearful or uncomprehending of their successors.
And so I've ordered Bernard O'Donoghue's new book, picked from the Eliot Prize list, and hope for great things. I met him in the street in Oxford once. I was with an-ex student of his and he was on his bike, and I'd say you'd hardly wish to meet a more congenial man.
But if prizes just provide reading lists, we could just call them reading lists.