Art Saves Us

Art Saves Us
Very good value at £1, donated to the NHS.
Motion and Harsent so far and O'Brien soon, I understand, in the poetry section.

David Harsent - Loss

David Harsent, Loss (Faber)

If some poets' work looks a lot like their other work, then so can some reviewers'. I flatter myself that a rehash of things I've said here before constitute a review. Halfway through Loss I wondered whether I could assay the same sort of bad pastiche that I've taken to doing when Paul Muldoon publishes new poems but whereas Muldoon seems unreviewable to me and imitation is some kind of flattery, perhaps I can at least say something about David Harsent before one day accepting that, like music, one can no more review proper poetry than direct people towards it.
I steadfastly remain immune, even antagonistic, towards the idea of the 'poem sequence'. I don't know exactly why. It's perfectly harmless. Actually I do know why but I can't say. If the blurb here, and David, both say that Loss is a sequence then that's what it is but - stop me if you've heard it all before - such things are generally, if not always, either a long poem in sections or a collection of related poems, that is, The Waste Land or the Stratford man's Sonnets.
As my first piece of evidence, I cite the form of Loss, which is XX poems in the same elaborate but consistent form, viz,
14 lines that look like a prose poem but probably aren't;
a longer, often torrential, couple of pages of short-lined free verse - they vary in length but not by much;
four lines, rhymed abab;
and fractured lines in italics, with the protagonist, the sufferer, looking out of a window through the night.

There is so much unity to these 80 pages that it is as 'tight' a poem as something like The Sunlight on the Garden while still allowing David Harsent's facility to extend further and further into his dark theme. It's no wonder that the cover quotes John Burnside, who is the only one at least as good at doing such a thing. But, indeed, they could stand alone, as they have in magazines, because one is like the other except that one feels that the loss of the 'other', towards the end, transmutes into an awareness of the poet/persona/speaker's own mortality.
It appeared, for all the world, that David had lost his partner and that this was an account of his grief, not unlike those by Douglas Dunn, Christopher Reid or Julian Barnes, but more harrowing and nightmarish. But an internet check suggests that Julia Watson, who appeared in Casualty, is alive and hopefully well. I didn't really want to do that and now better appreciate the olde-worlde dogma we were taught at university 1978-81 that the text is all there is and biographical detail are not relevant.
So this is either some other loss or a work of the imagination and we shouldn't underestimate the powers of the imagination. What we might do is evaluate whether we prefer sincerity, or 'truth', over invention in literature. And the answer might be 'neither' because all you have to do is be any good.
Such concentration on the loss of someone else makes Larkin's fear for his own mortality seem very selfish but the difference is reduced as soon as the pity reverts to the one left behind rather than the one gone.


I didn't read David's Salt because it was reportedly made up of short poems. Yet another of my prejudices is against short poems, that include the briefer of Don Paterson's aphorisms and haiku in English. I could begin to feel like poetry's answer to Tommy Robinson, furious about harmless things, were it not for the rationale that in English one needs more than 17 syllables to get from one place to another. It rarely works.
So, while Fire Songs was a fine thing, I'm left alarmed that Night was 2011. Who knows where the time goes. Night ended with pages and pages, battering and battering us with its gin-drenched Elsewhere, and, apart from the fact it is now whisky and wine, Loss is from the same bloodline, blood being one of its leitmotifs, as well as Christianity, sleeplessness, fear, an abyss that is more terrifying for being white rather than black. There's bad going on out there as well as in here and don't we all know it.
One can admire it immensely but I won't ever be sure I 'like it'. I don't think one is supposed to 'like it' and it's not the sort of poem that would care if you did or not.    

Best Poem and Best Collection 2014

The shortlists have been duly considered, there are no late entrants to be supplemented, and so I can now award my own very personal endorsements for the categories of Best Poem and Best Poetry Collection of 2014, plus the other equally unremunerative and thus uncoveted titles that are added as afterthoughts.

David Harsent read Fire: a song for Mistress Askew more gently than the poem might be asking for on The Echo Chamber yesterday afternoon but that is his way and it gave the poem a somewhat different aspect to how it seems to come off the page. That didn't affect my decision in either direction in making it the best poem of 2014 for me because the horror and the horror of its voyeurism had already made it an unforgettable poem from his Fire Songs.
The shortlisted Roddy Lumsden poem, considered at slightly greater length somewhere below here, might thus be considered a bit of an unlucky loser but the best poem of 2013 is included in his collection, Not All Honey, and that, along with several other tremendous poems is enough to make it my best collection of 2014. It's a generous book and has plenty in it where the linguistic artfulness is possibly beyond my appreciation but I much prefer to celebrate the good rather than worry too much about how much it's me that is holding me back in enjoying it even more than I do already.
The most deliberation was required in deciding which of the shortlist of two was my favourite novel. I thought Murakami must be a racing certainty at the time but anybody who has been reading The Saturday Nap will understand how uncertain racing certainties can be. Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests was such an impressively detailed account of psychology and period detail, a thriller and pot-boiler of such plausible accuracy, that I could hardly wait to get back to it. And I'm grateful that I was
lent a copy and glad that I found the time to read it when I had several other books to read in a busy, busy autumn. To be preferred ahead of one of Murakami's best is a tribute in itself.
The biggest field lined up for the best event category, in contrast to 2013 when I eventually chose Chic at Glastonbury which I only saw on telly and so really shouldn't have been admissable. The shortlist was brought down to four, all of which would have made worthy winners, but in the end, with a special mention for the Southern Countertenors, it does really have to be The Tallis Scholars in Portsmouth Cathedral with, amomg other things, their Song for Athene, the Jean Mouton and the pre-concert talk with the engaging Peter Phillips.
And, finally, perhaps the easiest decision is to make Cuarteto Casals, Haydn, Seven Last Words from the Cross (Harmonia Mundi) the best CD of the year. I have a lot of time for Haydn but not quite enough when there are many composers from earlier periods whose music I turn to before his but this disc was special from the first time I played it and it remains luminous and extraordinary every time I've played it since. It must be mainly in the musicianship, which I am not the least bit qualified to comment on, but possibly also in the acoustic of the recording or even in Haydn's insistence on bringing light, or defying darkness.
It has been a very good year. Thanks to all those mentioned above for making it so.

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)

David Harsent - Fire Songs

David Harsent, Fire Songs (Faber)

David Harsent's Night was a masterpiece of dislocation, corruption and, mainly, gin. This next collection, if anything, has got darker.
Fire; a song for Mistress Askew opens the set maghnificently, but horribly. It is an unremitting account of the burning of, we assume, one accused of witchcraft,
Some stood....
close enough to hear the shrivel-hiss
of burning hair, to see her sag and slump, to witness
the pucker and slide of her skin, the blister-rash on her eyeballs.

One could begin to wonder whether it doesn't become a bit gratuitous were it not so well done. The only solace seems to be that 'in the fire lies your salvation, Anne'.
If students are still encouraged to identify semantic fields then they will not struggle to list such fire-related waste words as 'scorched', 'ash', 'charred' and the cumulative effect they have of this world as blackened debris. There is a lot of burning in these extended poems, many acknowledged as commissions, but there are other aspects of deadening, dead senses, places beyond human existence or extinction. Another semantic field might be identified around 'ghosts' and 'dreams' which recur often, and 'sleep', 'blindness' and 'silence'.
The poems other than the fiery ones are perhaps the most successful.
Bowland Beth laments the killing of a hen harrier which, in the note, it says, 'is on the verge of extinction in England thanks to systematic, gleeful, illegal persecution' so we can be reassured of where Harsent stands on the issue. She is celebrated,
That her only dream was flight forgotten
moment by moment as she dreamed it

before the economical but harrowing lines on her being shot.
Icefield is the massive, slow movement of Antarctic 'ice over ice, of white over white / and beauty in absences', a colossal abnegation in nature, whereas Trickster Christ with 'the stench of the grave still on him' is a dubious miracle worker returned from the dead, not really of this world but still feeling a 'jolt' and his hand in the dip of Mary's back is 'surely the start' of something really quite earthly.
The Rat poems can't help but bring to mind Crow with their disgust and will to survive but it is in Effaced that there might be a bit more to it all than a further virtuoso run through the macabre dungeon of the imagination. It concerns Dorothy Wordsworth and the 'heavily deleted' account in her journal of how she wore the ring her brother's wife was going to wear on the day before their wedding,
widowed without being wed, feeding the fire, if you want to, with
    reams

of work half-done and left to grow in silence, that precious stack
curling and catching- last love, last light- as you burn whatever
    rhymes.

And so perhaps really the poems are about the removal or denial of identity, sometimes entering into worlds that are not this one, on the edge between them, or simply oblivion. It takes the poems in Night that stage beyond the rather more benign ghosts we met there. It is a dark vision but one that persuades us of its likelihood.
    

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.

  

The Griffin Prize

Congratulations to David Harsent on winning the Griffin Prize. http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/ A wonderful book. as I noted at the time. And comiserations to me, top pundit in two very different genres who gets it exactly right but on the wrong day.
I made Harsent's book, Night, my favourite poetry book of last year and backed it to win the Forward Prize. I mentioned it to him at the Cheltenham (Literature) Festival but he didn't seem to realize my comiserations were real until I told him I'd put money on him. But now he has 65 thousand Canadian dollars to ease his pain and I remain out of pocket.
Anyone, if there was anyone, who followed my series of horse racing tips through the autumn and early winter might remember that I advised we should finesse a modestly successful campaign with Rock On Ruby in the Christmas Hurdle. And there I was, on Boxing Day, in front of the telly, over the last hurdle just in front shouting, 'Go on, Ruby', with admirable economy encouraging both horse and jockey with an Empsonian eighth type of ambiguity, only to see him touched off by that old enemy, Binocular. And then, in March, Rock on Ruby won the Champion Hurdle at the Cheltenham (Horse Racing) Festival with Noel Fehily on board because Ruby Walsh is trailing in third with my cash on Hurricane Fly.
Sometimes, you can be so right and still somehow end up being proved wrong. But, c'est la vie, or, as they say in France - but, ah no, I wouldn't do such an old joke here- they'd also say, 'c'est la vie'.

John Burnside - Black Cat Bone

John Burnside, Black Cat Bone (Cape Poetry)

It's still 2011 on this website. With this book winning both the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes I thought it ought to be looked at. I'm very glad I did. It is an excellent book and a not unworthy winner of the double.

In many ways one can bracket it with the Harsent and O'Brien collections of last year, as part of a middle-aged man syndrome of poetry haunted by loss or demons and darkness. But in the same way that Bach, Handel and, say, Telemann might sound very similar to the uninitiated, attentive listening can differentiate them. Here one might find more possibility or suggestion of redemption in Burnside than O'Brien's unreconciled sense of loss or Harsent's dark side.

The opening poem, The Fair Chase, is full of absence and searching but at least feels an,

infinite kinship, laid down in the blood

against the sway

of accident and weather

It introduces some of the recurrent images in the collection- vellum, billhooks and ice, for examples. 'Vellum' in the first line here is an adjective, suggesting a richness that 'medieval' in On the Fairytale Ending also does, redolent of heraldry and pageantry in,

broken gold

and crimson in the medieval

beechwoods

The collection maintains a steady, measured rhythm and glorious texture throughout. It's not difficult to see how it appealed to two different sets of prize judges.

'Hooks and eyes' recur as a metaphor as tiny binding forces in a world knitted intricately together but with its griefs and breakage a part of it, too.

Loved and Lost is a surprisingly literal title to an outstanding poem among several that is otherwise more allusive, ending brilliantly,

till we admit

that love divulged is barely love at all:

only the slow decay of a second skin

concocted from the tinnitus of longing.

If poetry often takes much of its power from the ability to imply meaning from contradictory ideas, Burnside makes impressive work of sustaining and resilience from the fragility of being and the inevitability of loss.

Another disconcerting title, Oh No, Not My Baby, knowingly lifted from the Goffin and King standard pop song, has not the potency of such relatively cheap music but the loving and moving sincerity of something more profound done with disarming fluency.

Neoclassical might be where we think we are reading Sean O'Brien except that closer reading finds a somewhat gentler mood in it somewhere, just fractionally, in the accumulation of something like acceptance or not quite acquiescence but not resistance either.

This is a beautiful book, fully deserving of its awards and I have to urge you to read it as a paragon example of what is best about poetry at the moment. 2011 produced some very fine books of poems. I won't revise my choice of the Harsent as being my favourite but the selection would have been even more difficult to make if I had read this book in time. I don't know what 2012 has in store - I believe we are promised the Collected O'Brien which will be a useful career restrospective- but when I notice this year getting underway, I'll let you know.

Best Poetry 2011

Good evening, Ladies & Gentlemen, and welcome to this gala night at David Green Books for the announcement of my awards for Best Poem and Best Collection of 2011. The prestige of these awards is underlined by the fact that they are not accompanied by large amounts of prize money but are chosen and recorded solely for artistic purposes when tacky five figure cheques would only spoil the Parnassian spirit in which they are intended. The gin & the tonic are mixed and settled, clean and spritely in the glass and the murmur of expectation is growing. I'm joined here by Gervase Madstrangler, editor of Lokomotiv Salamander magazine, and Melody Nice, author of the collection Wednesday Ribbon Dance.

Gervase, what do you make of the shortlist for Best Poem.

Well, the list has been kept sensibly short. There aren't any obvious poems one could rule out as a worthy winner.

And do you have any ideas about which poem will win.

Anybody who wants to know will probably know already as I think there have been enough clues if you knew where to look.

Melody, there are even fewer titles on the Best Collection short list. What do you make of them.

As a woman I'm bound to point out that the list consists of three men and, as a poet under 40, I also notice that they are all over 40.

But, apart from that. Are they good books.

Well, I'd have picked a different three if I only had three choices.

Thanks. Well, I think we are ready for the announcements.

2011 has been a good year. In fact, it still isn't over because one last trip to London is planned to see Geoffrey Hill and a big performance from him could change one's perspective quite drastically but he wasn't in place when the shortlists were drawn up and so that would just be hard luck. The year began with a grand battle in prospect, titles from Lumsden, Mooney and O'Brien, all established favourites, being in the presses. Then David Harsent came from the ranks of the previously unconsidered and during the summer both prizes were very much wide open. Then in the Autumn, Sasha Dugdale attached herself to the leading group.

Although it would be easy enough to give the Best Poem prize to Harsent, O'Brien or either of the other short-listed poems, it has been marked out for Martin Mooney's Dream of the Fisherman's Wife for a long time now and nothing else has quite made a big enough impression to shift it.

The Harsent book grew and grew throughout the year and was the collection I returned to most often, with poems like Spatchcock, and the series of garden poems impressing themselves on one's consciousness as well as the very fine Ghosts, which was the pick of a tremendous set and so Night by David Harsent wins the Best Collection award.

Congratulations to the winners and shortlisted poets and thanks to all the other poets who have contributed to make 2011 a satisfying year for poetry in these islands.

The Shortlists - Best Poem and Best Collection 2011

I don't see many more things happening between now and Christmas that will affect this website's very sincerely considered but hopelessly disregarded awards for Best Poem and Best Poetry Collection of 2011. It's not as if I read everything and so such books as the Geoffrey Hill or Carol Ann Duffy were deselected without being given a fair chance, it has to be said.
We could add in further mentions for Best Event and Best Novel. In which case Tasmin Little's Naked Violin recital in Portsmouth in the summer wins a helluva classy affair for Best Event, holding on in a compelling battle with the Glyndebourne Rinaldo at the Proms and Natalie Clein's Cadogan Hall Prom as well as Muldoon, O'Brien and Harsent at Cheltenham. But one appeciates what a good year it must have been when The Tallis Scholars make the effort to come all the way down to a cultural outpost like Portsmouth and don't even get shortlisted for their trouble.
Julian Barnes would probably get the verdict over Hollinghurst for being a somehow better done job in the Novel but I also enjoyed the re-issue of Patrick Hamilton's Twopence Coloured and they could all be surpassed by Murakami's 1Q84, which I am halfway through as yet but does look like his best work and is proving most worthy of the time it is taking. 
But the real issue is the poetry and I'll leave you with the shortlists before returning with the answers some time later. There is no point including anything on the shortlist if they aren't potential winners and so I will keep the shortlists short. Only to say that Sasha Dugdale narrowly misses out on a place on the Best Collection list and so is compensated with a Best Poem contender.

Best Poem

Judy Brown, The Helicopter Visions
Sasha Dugdale, Plainer Sailing (Alzheimer's)
David Harsent, Ghosts
Martin Mooney, Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
Sean O'Brien, Elegy

Best Collection

David Harsent, Night
Roddy Lumsden, Terrific Melancholy
Martin Mooney, The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen

I'm fairly sure that the answers have finally been decided upon but I'll let it simmer for a while and if you come back next week the winners might have been announced by then.

Signed Poetry Books - David Harsent

With this book now looking a very likely candidate for this website's Poetry Collection of the Year award, the only regret for me is that it didn't get the Forward Prize as well or instead because that would have made me a bit richer and its author quite a bit richer than that.

But he's a fine and very welcome addition to the collection and the hand that wrote four episodes of Midsomer Murders has now touched my copy of his exemplary collection of poems.

Harsent, O'Brien, Muldoon at Cheltenham

Cheltenham Literature Festival - David Harsent, Sean O'Brien and Paul Muldoon, October 14, 2011


Jo Shapcott introduced some very top-end Premiership poets as her 'superheroes' in what must have been a poetry event of the year in these islands.
David Harsent is calm and unhurried as a reader, all clarity of expression and diction. His poems of considered, unflamboyant resonance included Ghosts and several of the 'blood-related' poems from Night as well as poems on his loss of faith in Mark Rothko's abstract. I wonder if that's something that happens to you in middle-age. I hope that it doesn't happen to me. But it's taken a long time for the idea of David Harsent to dawn on me and I'm grateful for it. He finished with a new poem commissioned on the subject of 1971, which I hoped might concern Marc Bolan and T. Rex, but was in fact about Mutually Assured Destruction.
Sean O'Brien is by turns darkly political and grimly funny. I was grateful that he did the wonderful Elegy for his mother and it was interesting to hear the background to poems on Marmite and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Jeudi Prochain and Narbonne were other more significant parts of a set that was just right. I don't know if I discerned a somewhat mellower Sean than was evident in the demeanour of the younger model but the fire is by no means fading yet..
As Paul Muldoon remarked on the way to the book signing, one doesn't like poetry readings to go on too long. Well, no, but surely you do more than one poem. To be fair to Muldoon, it was a long poem in eleven parts, Wayside Shrines, and a paragon example of his immaculate music, packed internal rhymes and measured cadence. He is a superb reader to listen to even in comparison with the exalted company here in an hour of genuine class act poetry. Unmissable really in a time that might one day become regarded as The Age of Muldoon.

View from the Boundary

A man with one bookmaker's account might be understood to just enjoy a harmless weekend punt. One could probably lend him a fiver with every expectation of getting it back. But how do we regard someone with two accounts. A bit of a liability, perhaps, on his way to the loan shark's tawdry clutches and then the workhouse.

But I have opened a new account with Paddy Power in order to take advantage of their free bet to use that to back up my investment on Hollinghurst for the Booker Prize (4/1) with a similar gratis stab at the Forward Prize, which is one of the more exotic markets that the Irish firm offer prices on.

They have Geoffrey Hill at 13/8 fav with Sean O'Brien at 2/1, David Harsent at 4/1, then Longley 8/1, Burnside 10/1 and Nurske 12/1. This is roughly in line with their respective kudos and reputation, one would guess, but I'm not convinced it takes account of the specific volumes in competition for this year's prize.

While Hill is undoubtedly the doyen of High Church English poetry, and could win the prize on that reputation alone, it's not likely to be his best work but I'm not to know whether it is or not. In betting against favourites, you do so in the hope they are not quite on top form. However, although a long-time admirer of O'Brien and all his work, I do regard Harsent's book as 'better' this year. And this is in the knowledge that O'Brien's form figures in the Forward Prize read 111.

Michael Longley's reputation seems to remain a little way ahead of his achievement for me while the prize going to an outsider would make it just one of those events in which the roulette ball goes into 0 or 00. So, I'm with Harsent on this and can't help but notice that twenty pounds on two 4/1 shots multiplies up to five hundred. A monkey, in fact. The only way I've ever had a monkey before is by saving up for one. Perhaps Hollinghurst and Harsent will deliver me one over the winter.

--

Faber and Martin Amis would be the only ones who could know why a Selected Larkin (pictured) is required. I can't see the need for it myself but it's due out very shortly.

It will mean me going into a bookshop next month to check on the contents list and skip through Martin's introduction. I don't intend paying to have a copy for myself.

Faber's Selected Poems of Douglas Dunn 1964-1983 ends on page 262 whereas their Collected Larkin edition of 2003 has its last poem on page 198. It has always seemed to me that Larkin did the selecting of his poems before publishing, finishing or even writing them. His Collected Poems are also his Selected Poems. So the interest in Martin Amis's edition is only really in what he leaves out or what he says in his introductory essay. We know he admired the 'instantly unforgettable', 'mnemogenic' nature of Larkin's poems while taking a less sympathetic view of the unambitious, provincial nature of the man himself. We don't really need a new selection to read that point of view again but I will be seeing if I can find a High Street bookshop to sneak a look at whatever else he has found to say.

--

And, finally, from Robert Robinson's knowing and worldly-wise memoir, Skip all that,

(though Bill Gaskill, who wore an ear-ring and went to parties dressed as Nijinsky, had met Lady Redgrave in the vacation and after she'd said to her butler 'Butler, would you bring Mr. Gaskill a glass of fruit juice,' Bill had asked her if this was the correct way of addressing butlers, and she replied, 'certainly, if their name is Butler'.)

David Harsent - Night

David Harsent, Night (Faber)

After Don Paterson's Rain and Muldoon's Maggot on a theme of decay and Sean O'Brien's November forthcoming, David Harsent's Night has another of this generation of poets providing dark poems for our dark times. It is O'Brien, in The Drowned Book, that he most resembles here in these poems of nightmare underworlds, often dark and usually when it's raining, that describe a limbo, a purgatory existence.
There are memories but there's no specific destination in the wanderings or situations of the characters here and they are either sustained or ruined -hard to say which- by alcohol, which is most often gin. But this discomfiture is something we are becoming accustomed to and it is portrayed almost relentlessly here in a long poem of 721 lines, Elsewhere, a long night's journey of strange encounters impressive for its insistence and shifting rhyme scheme.

Ghosts is an early highlight, who 'bring/a dew of death that settles on picture frames,/on pelmets, on clothes in the closet, on books...' from their other world with its 'undrinkable rivers, its scrubland of snarls and hooks..'. Immaculately imagined, the poem is a simple construction made discursive by the listing technique of these phrases, a distended form of sentence that often includes that sort of hendiadys doubling of 'fun and games' and 'snarls and hooks' and a use of familiar phrases, like the ending here on,
bearing a look
of matchless sorrow as would, for sure,
stop the heart of whoever it is they take you for.

The Hut in Question deliberately seeks out the hut in which Edward Thomas sheltered and experienced so much rain; The Death of Cain is 'from the Cornish, 1611' and uses his example of a cursed outsider and Necrophilia seems to find advantages in 'nothing of jealousy, no risk of bliss,/the wide, white eye; the perfect parting kiss'. The subject matter is carefully selected to fit the themes of desolation, loss and limbo.
The title poem in ten sections is a sleepless night of meditation on horror and anxieties, some bitterness from a broken relationship, the 'gulp and lurch of apnoea' and a catalogue of fears. Nothing like the catalogue of Elsewhere, though, an encyclopedia of night-time underworld that turns out to be what the earlier shorter poems were only building towards, a journey (to take just a short sample from one list),
past walk-up and rack-rent,
past casinos and clubs and shebeens, past Mr. Moon's
Tattoo Shack, past day-for-night hotels, past cash-
on-the-nail, past rat-runs and bargain bazaars, arcades,

dives and dumps, cross-cuts, bootleg cabs...

for almost as long as you could want. And eventually it comes back to what had set it off,
that mournful music, her face in the glass, the sting of gin on my lip.

We are simply not used to poems as long as this these days and so it comes as a bit of a challenge but it's not difficult otherwise and is worth the effort as a coda to an excellent collection, the collection being the real unit of currency here, working as a book as well as individual poems.
It's a bleak vision but a sustained one, sustained in fact by those other poets in concert with Harsent.
The poets seem to be telling us that these are dark times that have crept up on us from somewhere.