Best Poem and Best Collection 2017

I still haven't decided who has won these uncoveted awards but I will have done in a few paragraphs time. I have a bottle of Falling Leaf Zinfandel to help and if that doesn't work, nothing will.
The year's best in non-poetry were announced last month with the shortlists because conclusions looked foregone but since then the Portsmouth Choral Union's Belshazzar has come and done Carolyn Sampson's Wigmore recital on the line. You can't miss with Handel but still have to do it with some panache and, with Southern Pro Musica and the soloists as good as ever, I was entirely convinced. Carolyn won't mind - she has the Best CD award anyway and will undoubtedly have far too many prizes to collect for mine to make any difference.
But I'm only playing for time and avoiding the knotty problem of how to decide about the poems.
There were seven poems on the shortlist that qualified through the chancy early rounds of me being aware of them, then reading them and then being impressed enough to put them in the notebook with a view to making the shortlist. There are quite possibly reams of tremendous poems that my limited reading can take account of. Well, not reams, but probably a few more. Excellent work by Clive James, Douglas Dunn, Derek Mahon and Kathryn Gray was memorable but it has come down to three candidates to consider for the Best Poem.
John Burnside's Mistaken for a Unicorn set a high standard early doors and it was getting late in the year before the shortlist blossomed to seven. A Roddy Lumsden book rarely appears without it or something from it shouldering its way into the queue but then the title poem from James Sheard's The Abandoned Settlements was deep, resonant and derelict and insisted on being given the utmost of attention.
They are very different poems - Burnside capturing something sublime sublimely, Lumsden very astutely and inimitably (however hard anybody else wants to try) nailing something more wordly and Sheard somewhere in between. Something has to give, though, and very reluctantly, because I admire the poem devoutly, it's The Abandoned Settlements on account of the phrase 'the utter transformation of our lives', which somehow just has the air of a mindfulness workshop about it but it's a cruel world and I'm heartbroken to see it go.
And then I just wonder if John Burnside amazed me a little bit more than Roddy Lumsden. I couldn't write anything nearly as good as either poem but I might get closer to Work Crush than Mistaken for a Unicorn. So John Burnside it is.
But don't let that be a reason to pile all the last-minute cash onto John for Best Collection. While the two categories are independent of each other and there is no reason why they should both go to the same poet, If it looks like there's a bit of horse trading going on here, perhaps there is. Burnside, a bit like Lumsden, is a prolific poet as well as a brilliant one but such facility makes me suspicious. Has he just struck on a linguistic formula that means he can reel off pages of this stuff that looks good. Eventually one wonders if it all means as much as it looks as if it does. Mistaken for a Unicorn might just be where any legerdemain has kept its trick more deviously hidden than elsewhere, I don't know. The great thing about the best poems is that one doesn't really want everything explained as if for top marks in an essay, one would prefer to enjoy them for their own sake.
Although Work Crush was the only Lumsden poem on the shortlist it was Elba that was first put in the notebook from So Glad I'm Me. So, with two poems noted down, one might say that So Glad I'm Me by Roddy Lumsden has the best claim on Best Collection. I'd rather have two Best Poems, or even three, this year and forego a Best Collection but what can you do. Perhaps Still Life with Feeding Snake is the more profound and genuine achievement but I've gone and done it now and am only left with the feeling that James Sheard was robbed.
That makes Roddy Lumsden the first to be given that haphazard honour twice but Julia Copus did the double with Poem and Collection in 2012. Next year will be the tenth that the Best Poem question has been attempted here (Best Collection seems to have followed the year after) and so, if you can stand the excitement, next year's winners will be included in a celebration of a decade of maundering on like a drifting barge about poetry by putting all the winners together in a bag and see who gets pulled out as the one I really, really liked.

I don't think I could have done it this year without the sharpener of the very acceptable Zinfandel (and heaven knows, do Fetzer still produce such wine and, if so, where can you get it) so I don't know what I'll need to pick between all of the winners.

    

Best Poem and Best Collection 2017

It must be nearly time to make up the shortlists for our annual review of the year. There might be more to come in the additional categories but I might have read all the new poetry books I'm going to see this year. So, let's have a look in the book.

Best Poem

Having been concerned that it was getting late in the year and there wasn't much on this list, recent weeks have filled it out to a respectable length. There might have been more than one candidate in some collections but I've kept it to one from each poet.

John Burnside, Mistaken for a Unicorn, from Still-Life with Feeding Snake
Douglas Dunn, The Nothing But, The Noise of a Fly
Kathryn Gray, Bournemouth, Flowers
Clive James, Anchorage International, TLS
Roddy Lumsden, Work Crush, So Glad I'm Me
Derek Mahon, Howe Strand, TLS
James Sheard, The Abandoned Settlements, The Abandoned Settlements

Best Collection

The Best Collection list is nowhere near as long because everything listed needs to be a potential winner and if I knew already there would be no point in a shortlist. Thus, although Simon Armitage, Douglas Dunn and others put in worthy performances, and I haven't even seen David Harsent's book even though I am a great admirer - a long book made of short poems, some only one line long isn't selling itself to me- it does come down to two titles.

John Burnside, Still Life with Feeding Snake
Roddy Lumsden, So Glad I'm Me  

Novel

Arundhati Roy and Alan Hollinghurst put in good performances that suffered under high expectations and so, unfairly perhaps, were slightly disappointing. I don't think I'll be reading another new novel this year and so provisionally we can give it to,

Adam Thorpe, Missing Fay

even if the missing girl theme has become a cliche and because Murakami's Men Without Women was short stories, on which grounds I wouldn't have left it out, but has stayed in the memory less vividly. 

CD

It is tempting to shortlist the Bacewicz String Quartets by the Silesian Quartet because it is clearly an immense record but even though there are more discs on the way this year, including Carolyn Sampson's duets with Iestyn Davies, it is highly unlikely that

Carolyn Sampson, Bach Cantatas for Soprano

can be bettered by very much which, after last year's wide-open heat, comes as a bit of a surprise to be calling the winner quite so far from the finish but I think we can.
I would feel like an even bigger fraud than usual if I pretended I enjoyed the Bacewicz, or anything else, more than that.

Event

It was announced at the time that nothing was going to be a better event than the Welsh Championship 12 Hour, in which my nephew inherited my long lapsed role of family marathon bike rider.
Everything went to plan, which it ought to considering the expertise in all areas of planning, riding and catering for such a ride that the family brought to the occasion and the lad delivered exactly the great debut that I astutely predicted for him. Although we still don't know yet if my first runner in a time trial as a trainer won the novice prize for best first attempt at the discipline. But it was tremendous to see it all come together quite so convincingly. Top marks to Chris and all of his entourage.
But if the award were limited to arts events (which it quite clearly isn't), we are back with Carolyn Sampson and her lunchtime concert at the Wigmore Hall in March. There is at least one more concert to come but it won't be Carolyn, whose year it has been this year - and that could continue indefinitely - and it won't be the Wigmore Hall in which one instinctively feels everything is right.

So, it is largely foregone conclusions apart from the poetry. Tune in mid-December to see what further reading of the poems brings about because we know about the Eliot Prize, those people at Forward and all the other jamborees that go on but this is the one that nobody's heard of or cares about and so is the one that, if I were them, I'd be most pleased to accidentally find out I'd got.     

  

James Sheard - The Abandoned Settlements

James Sheard, The Abandoned Settlements (Cape)

It's not a gig many would relish, being the next book to be read after the arch, knowing virtuosity of a Roddy Lumsden book. In Elvis Costello's memoir there's a story of how he headlined a festival in Australia with Bob Dylan on before him so, rather than do his usual set of unrecognizable covers of his own songs, Dylan went on and played two hours of greatest hits exactly how they were originally and, as he passed Declan on his way off stage, said, There you go, son, I've warmed them up for you.
But James Sheard is well fitted to the difficult role because he is an entirely different thing, much less flash, for a start, and gentler.
Gentler, I think, also than in his first two books which I remember as darker and grimmer than these poems. Those two books are here somewhere, I know they are, but I'm damned if I can find them which is an indictment of both my librarianship and level of preparation for poetry reviews. I'm sorry about that.
There is either a relationship sadly finished in these poems or I have developed a debility that makes me read sadly finished relationships into any poem I read. But this is one place you can still come where the text is regarded as primary and not as a cipher for biographical clues about the author whose life is actually none of our business. The title poem, well-chosen as such because it is the most impressive piece in the book, is possibly, if unintentionally, an objective correlative for that theme that one senses throughout.
                   It's like the sands where you once might have watched
a lover coming wet and lovely towards you - undisturbed now
and colonised by the shyest of creatures.

If it seems unreasonable to expect another Spem in Aluim from Thomas Tallis then it is equally unfair to think that James Sheard might have written a couple more poems like that one.
For love exists, and then is ruined, and then persists.

None of the other poems stretch quite so languidly, broodingly or with such accomplishment across the page. It justifies the book on its own and the whole review could be about it. But if that is going to define the book by making it memorable, there are other poems worthy of our attention.
Landings suggests the idea of being tethered, as it were, or untethered, and which feels right or desirable,
we wanted a land where we might fall together,
then fail to wake - or, at least, to sleep beyond

the nag of morning, dragging us to its terraces
and its coffee and tobacco, taken slow and strong;

North is one of several where the music is subtle and just as much the point of the poem as its ostensible meaning. I'm often happy enough with fine music and care less about interpreting meaning but James is just this side of John Burnside on any such scale.
Even in novels of a couple of hundred pages, one sometimes notices a particular word occur among the many so they are much more apparent in books of poems.
Late threatens to be a sensational poem and is like a blueprint for something that was almost a classic but didn't have the ambition to be so but there is 'shyly' again. They use computers for concordances these days, I'm sure, but it is preferable if the words creep up on you more telling than have an app to show you. There is an appreciation of reticence in these poems but not reticence itself. They are very confident poems, confident enough not to attempt machismo or show off, which is the confidence of maturity, big enough to achieve acceptance.
James Sheard had fallen below my radar before I found this book had appeared but he's returned changed, and in significant ways, maybe the better poet for it. It's not the first time in recent weeks that I've reflected that there may not be an Eliot, Auden, Larkin or Heaney among the poets currently at the height of their powers, I honestly couldn't say which poets the second decade of the C21st will eventually be remembered for but, credit where it's due, we are not short of fine poetry to enjoy as long as you know where to find it.
    

Best Poem of 2010

I don't read very many poetry magazines these days and also don't think awards and prizes mean much beyond creating a discussion and some publicity so perhaps my award for Best Poem of 2010 actually transcends itself by being the Most Redundant Literary Award of 2010 above and beyond whichever poems it nominates. But I did say earlier in the year that Lachlan Mackinnon's book Small Hours would deserve to win a share of this year's prizes and even though it's been taken on by books from Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Simon Armitage and other somewhat major names, I think it has held on to its position as my favourite book of this year.
Much of the power of Small Hours, however, depends on the long prose poem sequence, The Book of Emma, and it is not a straight contest to put that moving and subtly powerful work up against the general fashion these days for poems that don't expect us to turn over many pages before we get to the end. There are several excellent other poems in the book but none that have made it onto my shortlist.
Last year, in an effort to try to give this award some history, I probably liked Don Paterson's poem The Day best without making Rain the best book of the year. So I'd like the best poem not to have appeared in the best book.
2010 was a year that several celebrity names added new titles to their bibliographies but, Mackinnon apart, few of those new books achieved tremendously much that their authors hadn't showed us already but that isn't to say it wasn't a good year.
I've had a relaxed look through the books I've bought and reviewed here this year, and tried to recall what I've seen and liked in magazines and on the internet and made a shortlist, which has been reduced to these, with no poet allowed more than one poem on it as the sort of arbitrary rule that these sort of shortlists sometimes give themselves.
So,

Derek Mahon, An Aspriring Spirit, from An Autumn Wind
James Sheard, The Strandperle Notebooks, from Dammtor
Paul Muldoon, The Fish Ladder from Maggot
Seamus Heaney, 'The door was open and the house was dark' from Human Chain
Jane Yeh, The Body in the Library,
Kelly Grovier, The Ratio, both from PN Review 195.

I'm honestly not sure which way it's going yet and none would be shortlisted if they didn't have a chance. Having left out some excellent poems to get this far, I'll have to give it some more thought before selecting the winner. I'm sure the poetry world will be on hot bricks in anticipation of my decision.

COMPETITION TIME

Roll up, roll up.

I'm not the BBC and any competition I want to run here isn't fixed. I can offer prizes and will do so if and when I have something to offer.

I'm soon going to have two copies of James Sheard's fine book, reviewed however briefly below, because I waited three weeks for my order to arrive and then ordered it elsewhere, before the first supplier sent a replacement.
I'm a fan. I buy the books I review. I'm keeping the industry going. It's not like those old days on University Radio when one could keep the books one reviewed. I can't claim to have a readership big enough for publishers to send me review copies, concert promoters to send me tickets or record companies send me new releases. And, in a way, I'm glad they don't.

But Dammtor is a fine book, very much the sort of thing I want to promote and so I'll send my spare copy of it to the one of the people who successfully nominate the winner of the following award.
Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to a few choice events and will review them here and then, for the sake of this competition, say which one I enjoyed the most. All you have to do to win the book is say which one it will be. There are five events and the runners, with notes on form and pedigree and betting forecast, are these.

Maggi Hambling at the Cheltenham Literature Festival.
The ferocious and alarming artist is highly entertaining in person as well as the most convincing living painter I know about. She is sure to go well and the only possible fault would be if she runs through stories I've heard before. I don't know if she'll take the stage clutching her own personal bottle of champagne but she's an obvious favourite for this at 6/4.

Hamlet at the National Theatre this Friday.
I collect Hamlets with only slightly less compulsion than Pete Doherty collects visits from the police. Rory Kinnear is a big ticket this autumn but I can be a contrary little difficulty when I feel like it and don't always admire the biggest names having seen several tremendous local Hamlets over the years, so he had better be good. But there's so much in the play, it's hard to see such high profile people making a mess of it. It is a contender at 2/1.

Philip Larkin at Cheltenham.
Not the poet himself, obviously, but his biographer, editor and the moody offspring of his best mate, Mssrs. Motion, Thwaite and Amis junior. On the occasion of the publication of the Letters to Monica. Will this be a step too far into Larkin's famously guarded privacy or will these stars in their own right, and of Larkinalia, find enough to say that hasn't been said before. And can Larkin's greatness as a poet cast enough light onto an event like this. It opened at 3/1 but, thinking about it more, it's drifted out to 4/1.

National Poetry Day on the South Bank.
Simon Armitage is a banker in this line up but I'm not sure if the supporting cast can make it a great day. Dalgit Nagra is a fine performer and you don't know what else the day might provide. It's a day that has in the past provided a sense of belonging to the poetry world that I don't feel on the other 364 days of the year, so you just can't tell. This could be a dark horse, as it were, but you'd still get 7/1.

Roddy Lumsden and Colette Bryce at Cheltenham.
Roddy's been a much admired poet for years now and I'm glad of the chance to catch him here for free. I'm thinking of growing a beard and wearing a hat as a disguise after my review of the anthology he edited earlier this year but I've never had anything but praise for his own poetry. I must dash to the Hambling event straight after so might not get a book signed by him but, up against Shakespeare, Larkin and Maggi, even with the help of the fine Colette, he's got a job on to win this at 7/1.

So, place your bets at dg217.888@ntlworld.com with an address to send your prize to.

The questions to think about, the prize to be won. You have to admit, it's a fascinating competition. Autumn is the kindest season.

James Sheard - Dammtor

James Sheard, Dammtor, (Cape)

James Sheard's Catesby poem was just about the best thing in the Identity Parade anthology earlier this year (according to me), which might be a little bit like winning the League Cup, but, in the old cliche, you can only beat what's put in front of you.

Tim Liardet is the latest to get to express his doubts about that massed attack on posterity, in the latest PNR, while I'm now mostly fascinated by its biographical notes in which most of the poets are defined by the esoteric creative writing posts they hold in universities one's not quite sure one has heard of, as if they bestowed honour or meant something.

But I was looking forward to this book because I wasn't quite sure if Scattering Eva, his first, had provided anything I liked as much as the Catesby poem and there's nothing quite as disappointing as a one-hit wonder. There was no need to worry, although there are more poems that refer to the writing of poems that one would ideally like, one has to appreciate that someone who studied creative writing and now teaches it is likely to think like that and we mustn't think badly of them all the time.

I was also expecting a darker book, perhaps of more mitteleuropean angst, which despite James' genial cover photo, seems to lurk in much of his poetry, but although there is something sinister in the Sheard imagination, there's a lighter attitude here, partly the joy of being a father, also a more structured shape-making in the poems, and I think it's wittier than the blurb gives it credit for, which would sell you a bleak, unremitting book if it could.

The Strandperle Notebook is the most memorable piece, six and a half pages of sharply observed nostalgia for a place and its stored up history. Taking its tone and rhythms from Tony Harrison, it shows Sheard rather more metrical than the earlier book had allowed us to think, as well as adept at fitting captivating words to elusive measures,

Frumped-down Muttis hissing Susse

out from doorways, warm in comfy

coats and hats - their punters

mainly shy and just-past-school boys

needing someone who won't laugh.

After the Funeral is a fine, short poem that captures the sense of absence. The emptiness of Compound Country is out of season quietness but with the same threat latent in it that Sheard so regularly feels, in Taken, in Others, in Postcard from Famagusta and, you almost suspect, all the time.

The poems about the new-born son come at the end, straight after the funeral poem, and end on an undarkened note of thrill and Within Days, That Hour and Nathaniel at Newborough might have been a better place to stop than with The Last Poem, the point of which is lost on me. That Hour, again using a repeated stanza pattern throughout, is perhaps the best, apparently a request from Mrs. Sheard for a poem 'but not one of your usual ones', which one might suspect means more straight-forward and literal. He makes a great job of it. It's a fine thing to see a poet moving between metrical and free verse, rigorous formal patterns and less structured lines. It is a handicap not to be prepared to do so.

James Sheard is assured and accomplished and must be confident of a place among the most respected names in British poetry for years to come. Not too flashy, not too much of it and a sense of development from the debut book to the second, it all looks good from here.