Best Poem and Best Collection Shortlists 2014

It is time for the shortlists for my Best Poem and Best Collection of 2014. These awards, which are worthless and bring with them no prize, should really be re-named something like The Year in Review since some other categories have crept in since their inception when the website was intended to be poetry-based.
As has been explained previously, the qualification process is a rigorous one because any work first of all needs to be something I've been aware of and then decided to read/listen to/attend. I'm not a committee, there is only me and it's me that decides (which, I think, is a good thing) but there are, of course, sometimes things that I'm not aware of or don't see until later.
It is time for the shortlists- and the winners will be announced here in mid-December- but in a year packed with wonderful things, there are still more things to come.
I'm not expecting any further poetry titles to be candidates but in the Best Event category, Maggi Hambling's Walls of Water exhibition in the National Gallery might be added after Saturday's visit there. And there are two discs on their way here, either or both of which one always hopes might come into contention. One would hardly have been ordering them otherwise. And it has to be noted that Ton Koopman's boxed set of Buxtehude's Opera Omnia would be a massive favourite had I been sufficiently profligate to spend 300 pounds on it and find the required 60 hours to play it all but, as yet, I haven't.
Some categories are more competitive than others. Best Novel would be a longer list if The Goldfinch had been published in 2014, and, by the same token, I suppose, Middlemarch.
The best two poetry books of the year, for me, were not of new poems and so are similarly inadmissable. I can't set up a whole new category for them. Perhaps I could but I'm not going to. But Neil Astley's edition of the Collected Poems of Rosemary Tonks and Don Paterson's exemplary commentary on Michael Donaghy, in Smith, are both worthy of glorious mentions without portfolio.
But it is the Best Event shortlist that could easily be twice as long, with a number of great concerts left out in the process of making a first step towards deciding which was actually 'best' (which is when one really begins to wonder if and why it matters). It might even have included the Portsmouth Poetry's Society's National Poetry Day reading but it would have to had to come with a salutory 'apart from me' in brackets and one can hardly nominate something that one had a hand in organizing and took part in.
And so, with all those provisos in mind, the shortlists as they stand, are-

Best Poem 

Colette Bryce, Your Grandmother’s House

David Harsent, Fire: a song for Mistress Askew

Michael Longley, Amelia’s Poem

Roddy Lumsden, For Charlotte 

Best Collection 

Colette Bryce, The Whole and Rain-domed Universe (Picador)

John Burnside, All One Breath (Cape)

Roddy Lumsden, Not All Honey (Bloodaxe) 

Best Novel 

Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Harvill Secker)

Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests (Virago)

Best Event 

Florilegium, Portsmouth Third Floor Arts Centre

Alexander Romanovsky/BSO, Shostakovich Piano Concerto no. 2, Portsmouth Guildhall

Southern Countertenors, Portsmouth Cathedral

The Tallis Scholars, Portsmouth Cathedral 

Best CD 

Cappella Amsterdam/Reuss, Carolyn Sampson, Poulenc, Stabat Mater (Harmonia Mundi)

Cuarteto Casals, Haydn, Seven Last Words from the Cross (Harmonia Mundi)

The Sixteen, Handel, Jephtha (Coro)

Colette Bryce - The Whole & Rain-domed Universe

Colette Bryce, The Whole & Rain-domed Universe (Picador)

Rather than have lines running over line-endings, Picador have acommodated Colette Bryce's long lines by producing a book wider than usual. What a good idea. It allows the poems to be as written on the page and not unsatisfactorily folded. It makes a book of non-standard dimensions which is also a good thing when formats and lay-outs can become a little bit orthodox.
There is no great renewal of poetics in Colette Bryce. She quietly and impressively gets on with the job, offering the reader her poems rather than expecting them to do the work. One is grateful to see the relatively simple, but never facile, things done well. It is sensible and sensitive rather than highbrow or high-minded. There is a great deal to like about this new collection, as much as there was to like about her previous ones.
The title comes from the thematically central poem, Derry, which is a long autobiographical piece about her childhood in a large Catholic family, in an atmosphere of religion, the evidence of violence and an inevitable feeling of some oppression.
                            Gerry Adams' mouth
was out of synch in the goldfish bowl
     of the TV screen, our dubious link

with the world.

Colette's sisters 'upped and crossed the water' one by one, as she was to do herself, but this poem, as the scene for most of these poems, provides the background to her own and her generation's formative years there,

The proof that Jesus was a Derry man?
     Thirty-three, unemployed and living with his mother,
the old joke ran.

In Signature, there is the significant moment in growing up when Colette's handwriting has become so like her mother's that she can write her own absence notes to school,

I had become my mother, the flourish
on that sloping B
was as natural to me as it was to my sister and co-forger 

but there is more to it than that in the sister's story, captured in a note left on the door of her flat in that same handwriting. The plain style of Colette's writing gives it a gentle power and memorability.
In Helicopters, the police aircraft are 'high in the night',

where they might resemble

a business of flies
around the head wound of an animal.

There are more of these metaphors than one might at first give the poet credit for, this one in particular packed with associations in a way that makes the calm, down-beat writing extra-ordinary.

In a list of acknowledgements at the end, the book cites a number of poems that echo the opening lines of poems by other poets. It is heart-warming to find August Kleinzahler among them. Mammy Dozes is very much a companion piece to his Portrait of My Mother in January but is aware, in its greater number of lines, of more detail beyond the wind and trees outside and the passive knowledge of 'junk mail, window cleaners, priests' and, perhaps more sinisterly, Deal or No Deal, seems to suggest more potential danger to the vulnerable old lady.
However, the real masterpiece in the book is Your Grandmother's House, a sestina - which is enough of a technical challenge in any circumstances- but here taking Elizabeth Bishop as a model, maintaining a tone of language as it is spoken, achieving a naturalism that disguises the contrivance rather than parades it. There is no other such technical feat, or even attempt, in this book or in countless others. It just turns up and there it is, beautifully and admirably. I imagine it was an exhausting exercise and it is no surprise that nothing similar was essayed in the set. The form itself ensures the internal echoing and, as such, that spreads through the variant uses of the repeated words and the inwardness of a life, a house, in which,
                                                   she frisks the shelf
for the spectacles she might have left in the bar
for goodness sake, but no, sure they are here.

It is a paragon example of a demanding form brilliantly realized.
It is an excellent book, at least as good as it was expected to be, confirming Colette Bryce among the essential poets of her generation.

The Poetry Season

The book reviews in The Observer last week included new novels by Ian McEwan, Ali Smih, Will Self, Sarah Waters, Martin Amis, David Mitchell and more, which goes to show how much this has become publishing season.
But it also applies to poetry on the day I found I'd missed a new recent David Harsent, which will stand in for the delayed Roddy Lumsden, and Colette Bryce arrived. Those, and Poetry Day, and most spectacularly of all, a speedily appearing Collected Rosemary Tonks of which the blurb says,

there is possibly no other poet who has caught with such haughty, self-ironising contempt, the loucheness of the period, or the anger it could touch off in brooding bystanders

which makes it essential. I hoped it meant me and I wish it did but it was never going to.

 

Because there's still so many dreary things being said that a chance to get Rosemary in a new edition not priced as a collector's item is to be jumped at.

For example, here, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/next-generation-20-poets-poetry-book-society-kate-tempest, of the 'Next Generation' poets, it says,

 

Judge and poet Clare Pollard said she had been looking for poets “who were doing something new: tackling fresh subject matter, taking both emotional and literary risks”,

  

I do so wish they wouldn't. If only we could say, 'I like these poets because none of them are doing anything particularly new, they just do it particularly well'

 

And, here, http://toddswift.blogspot.co.uk/ (Sept 8th), some 'fund-raising',

 

For £500 you get dinner with one of our authors in London.

That is a monkey. I'd be expecting a lot of curry and chips for that even at London prices.

So, let's have a great Autumn now that we have Rosemary Tonks in a sensibly-priced edition. For me, she doesn't even have to be that good. She only needs to be who she was. 

Meanwhile, the kindle edition of Re-Read, Selected Poems is in preparation at DG Books. Keep a wary eye out for the few days it will be free to download from Amazon. And then we will perhaps try to get The Last of the Great Dancers out for Christmas and that will be the in-print back catalogue all available on kindles and won't that be a fine thing.

  

Roddy Lumsden and Colette Bryce

Roddy Lumsden and Colette Bryce, Cheltenham Literature Festival, October 12

Perhaps you can get something for nothing after all. At the very attractive entrance price of free, two most accomplished and distinctive voices were available at tea-time at this great festival.
Colette Bryce is both tough and gentle, a traditional poet in most interpretations of the word, resilient and evocative in describing her childhood in Northern Ireland and unsentimentally involving when moving on to later themes. She is completely convincing as a poet confidently in charge of what she's doing, most memorably for me in the title poem of her latest book, Self Portrait in the Dark with cigarette, about her ex-lover's car that stayed parked outside her house after the relationship ended. Interestingly, the idea that poets don't drive, also mentioned in the Larkin discussion, surfaced again here. I hadn't heard that for some years. A copy of the book will shortly be on its way to my house from one of my regular suppliers.
Roddy Lumsden is a natural talent but also wise and aware enough to know exactly how to temper his potentially pyrotechnic linguistic effects within well-made poems. This is, of course, no more than one should expect of art but Roddy's abundance of tricks and ideas needs more restraining than most and he is respectful enough of form to do so. His is another charming voice to listen to, clear and accurate in expression of his considered phrasing and he has a keen eye for picking up subject material for poems, always diverting and finding ideas worthy of our attention. Here we had, for example, the scientific theory of how ghosts might be possible, the way that San Francisco dive bars have been renovated into theme bars themed on old dive bars and a possible highlight that was probably called Europe After the Rain. The new book next Spring will shame many poets with Lumsden's output not for its prolific volume but its consistency. Serious about his poetry and encyclopedic in his knowledge of everyone else's, few come better to equipped to writing poems and he puts it all to good use.
Both poets would have benefitted from longer, which sounds rich coming from me who was in a hurry to get to the next event, but the audience was attentive and must have had an appetite for more of each. Both were models of the poetry performer's art and could hardly have expressed themselves better. Impressive.

Poetry Live for Haiti

Poetry Live for Haiti, Westminster Central Hall, January 30, 2010

Poetry did its bit for a good cause as Carol Ann Duffy's imagination and position as the tribe's poet-in-chief brought out the great and good and some old troopers to raise a few bob to send to the stricken and needy.

The major surprise guest appearance was Gordon Brown and his wife, Sarah. Mr. Brown made some fairly predictably laudible comments before resorting to default mode and made a political speech, for all the world as if he were at conference or was an embattled Prime Minister. His big announcement was that his government have bought up all the corrugated iron in this country and it is being sent to Haiti by ship. This is a noble and great gesture but not necessarily a vote winner among those of the electorate who make things out of corrugated iron. But he was generously received and he stayed to hear a fine Dannie Abse reading before being ushered off by Ms. Duffy. He has a country to run and needs to keep up with the Raith Rovers score.

At such an event there is bound to be some heartfelt expressions of humanity and some political points made but humanity and politics alone do not great poetry make. Some of these broadsides or specially and hastily written poems looked a bit de trop or too colossally obvious to need saying. At a performance like this, in a large auditorium, it is the 'performers' that become the highlights however fine some of the poets usually are on the page or in more intimate venues. Thus folk recorder-player John Sampson, Carribean old-timer John Agard and Daljit Nagra provided the most memorable performances while I won't be as impolite here as to mention those highly respected names whose poems were not really worthy of being put before such an audience.

For me, on a day useful to see and hear a number of poets one wouldn't have gone as far to see if advertised separately, Maura Dooley and Lachlan MacKinnon were revealed as candidates for further investigation. Owen Sheers is perhaps the one poet that parents would be pleased to have a daughter bring home and introduce to them, as he is very presentable indeed and a very competent poet in the making. Robert Minhinnick came as a big surprise, like a brooding bad boy who looks like he means business. Others with credentials included Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales; Christopher Reid, recent winner of the Costa prize and Roger McGough, whose Chinese-syled excursions supported by Andy Roberts on strummed instrument, followed by Brian Patten, reminded us that the 60's are still in living memory.

I would mention Jo Shapcott, Andrew Motion, Glyn Maxwell, Imtiaz Dharkar, Moniza Alvi, Robin Robertson, Collette Bryce, Elaine Feinstein, Ian Duhig and Grace Nichols, too, but fear this website doesn't carry long pieces very well and I would worry that I'd forgotten someone. All of them appeared for gratis, the hall and administration were given as acts of charity and the communal singing of the Scottish bard's Auld Lang Syne, following the laureate's atmospheric performance accompanied by the charismatic John Sampson, was a moving moment.

To think that all the usual self-promotion of the poetry circuit, the waffle and self-serving of reviews, the internecine 'poetry wars' and the essay writing in pursuit of daft degrees in universities could provide such a great coming together was quite humbling to see. A feelgood factor predicated on unthinkable disaster a long way away, no doubt, but we paid our money, turned up and took some memories away and so it is very hard to pick holes in it even if one wanted to.

Hats off and thanks to Carol Ann Duffy for being the prime mover in such an event, poetry's Live Aid, on a day when poetry for once had reason to feel good about itself. The benefit event will have been of benefit to many, both here and hopefully further across the world.