Poem of the Decade

Derek Mahon's Against the Clock has finally made a game of this year's 'Best in Poetry' review and we will have to wait in fevered anticipation for that decision.
Meanwhile, however, I can announce the 'Poem of the Decade', that being the 10 years now up in which I've arbitrarily judged the collections and poems I've read.
With apologies to all those I haven't. 
Avid followers will no doubt recall that the shortlist, chosen from the ten winners of 'Best Poem' each year, was,

John Burnside, Mistaken for a Unicorn, from Still Life with Feeding Snake
Julia Copus, Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden, from The World's Two Smallest Humans
Helen Farish, Pastoral, from The Dog of Memory
Roddy Lumsden, Women in Paintings from Not All Honey
Martin Mooney, Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, from The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen
Sean O'Brien, The Beautiful Librarians, from The Beautiful Librarians.

David Harsent's  Night was made 'Best Collection' there and then, the category not seeming quite so competitive, but all six of those poems are very fine things and proper contenders.

Having chosen them from the ten, I read them in a random order and then going up the provisional order I had put them in, trying to discard poems in a 'Devil Take the Hindmost' fashion.
That might make for a suspect process of marginal fault-finding rather than the recognition of excellence but perhaps, and hopefully, it might make for the same result. They are all excellent in their various ways.
Burnside was first to go, partly on account of a facility that the whole book, and Burnside as a whole, became suspected of. While mysterious and magical, I wondered if there was some linguistic trick going on, a way of 'making' a poem that suggested rather than established itself. That might be what poetry is, and the poem had started out as a likely favourite, but up against such stiff opposition, it was the one that least convinced it ought to stay. Possibly a victim of simply being 'too flash'.
It was a similar feeling that soon attached itself to Martin Mooney's masterpiece that I was very much enthralled by at the time, and still am. It's a cruel and tough job to have to do.

The next decisions tried my very hardest not to be made by favouring long-established favourite poets. Sean O'Brien and Roddy Lumsden are two poets whose best work have become canonical for me, echoing through my understanding of what poetry can be like, and has been made like by them. I wouldn't want to side with them only on account of liking them so much but if Roddy's poem is an exquisite 'tour de force' both of and about artistic creation, it might have ended with more than a precis of a Bob Marley chorus. It faltered, didn't even really falter, only ceased to go beyond the language, in its last few words.
Whereas Sean provided a gorgeous elegy for what we perceive as better times, when we were all younger, and did it in his customary knowing way. I convinced a number of other poetry readers of its greatness when the book was published and only had to show it to them to do so. It isn't good enough to hold it against the poem that Sean has been a length or two better previously because he is a classic winner and thoroughbred and, in this form, still magnificent. I had thought The Beautiful Librarians a big contender but there is nothing wrong with coming third in a red-hot contest.

Which left me weighing up the much-loved Julia Copus poem, with its
                                                         sleeplessness
hovering inside you like a planet,

against Helen Farish's vividly alive conjuring of nature in and around Dorchester, written in terza rima.
I've found Julia's poem profoundly moving from the first time I read it and it had long been ante-post favourite for this meaningless award, which has nothing whatsoever to do with how generously she signed my copy of the book at Cheltenham. But it was a choice between the 'profoundly-moving' and the astonishingly well-made poem and then I noticed Julia compiling a list of five things,

mountains, oceans, vineyards, quaysides, gardens

and, although we shouldn't have rules, lists in poems start to get out of hand when they exceed the statuatory three. 
I can't find any such miniscule blemish in Pastoral. It's got the lot. One can read it time and again, as one can listen to perfect music, and enjoy it as much.
The first reading may not be the best because one doesn't know what one is going to find, it's just another poem in a book, but when you know you can go back as many times as you want, it's like a Brandenburg Concerto.

So, my favourite poem of the last ten years is Pastoral  by Helen Farish, and congratulations to her. It comes as a big surprise to me and not even I would have thought she was a possible winner until, and except that, the poem appeared in the TLS and prompted me to buy the book.
After all my doubts, after all I've said about continuing my subscription to the TLS. It remains worth it if it directs you to poems like this and, anyway, magazines I used to get, like Rover & Wizard, The Beano, The Listener and the NME no longer appear in print.  
  
 

The Poem of the Decade

With Ms. Duffy's new book imminent, she is the only poet likely to be added to this year's shortlists for Best Poem and Best Collection and prevent a walkover for Sean O'Brien's Goddess and Europa respectively. Although one can never quite say.
But my reading of new poetry, releases of new titles that recommend themselves and the buying of new such books has dwindled to the extent that this tenth year of the minorest of minor poetry awards is likely to be its last.

However, it was always the intention to look at the winners from those ten years and make a further shortlist for the Poem of the Decade, not the customary decade but 2009-2018.
I'm going to summarily give the Best Collection title to David Harsent's Night, from 2011, which has stayed in the memory most persistently but, for me at least, those ten years haven't produced the sort of list as competitive as those decades in which Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Larkin, Gunn, Sylvia Plath or Paul Muldoon were putting in their best work. But perhaps it's just the morning sun, when it's in my face, really shows my age.

Best Poem, however, is due more consideration, and I am doing this ahead of this year's O'Brien-Duffy head-to-head but can supplement any further contenders before reaching the decision. The shortlist as it stands is picked from the winners thus far.
Yesterday was a glorious Sunday going back to these poems while bathing, a picture to relish once conjured, only for The Early Music Show to follow up on the subject of Francois Couperin's  Lecons de Tenebres and suddenly one was re-assured that being alive really is worth it. But these are six excellent poems,

John Burnside, Mistaken for a Unicorn, from Still Life with Feeding Snake
Julia Copus, Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden, from The World's Two Smallest Humans
Helen Farish, Pastoral, from The Dog of Memory
Roddy Lumsden, Women in Paintings from Not All Honey
Martin Mooney, Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, from The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen
Sean O'Brien, The Beautiful Librarians, from The Beautiful Librarians

--

There will be much more to think about in deciding this year's Best Event, with a few still to come and several already shortlisted.
Best Novel might be unsatisfactory with the Murakami here but having to wait its turn while Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf makes a powerful case for being Best Biography Ever.
The Best Record of the Year might also be hotly contested with other contenders involved beyond a debate between Shostakovich and Buxtehude.
We will see.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

The plastic sleeve that contains my finished Uncollected Poems since the last booklet now contains 9 poems currently considered fit for the next book, 2 borderline items -and the correct decision on any 'borderline' item is to leave it out - and 7 already thought unworthy. However, those 9 poems are longer than usual and might be close to filling the standard size booklet I generally produce so it would be almost thinkable to take The Perfect Book to the printers soon.
I don't think I'll be doing that, though. The plan is to wait until I'm 60 and, hopefully, publish something more substantial, having left a 6 year gap since The Perfect Murder. It's not a commercial enterprise, it matters not at all that my audience is kept supplied with a product to buy as if I was Dick Francis, One Direction, James Bond or Downton Abbey. I only give them away to anybody kind enough to take an interest and I'm very grateful if they read them.
At Portsmouth Poetry Society on Wedneesday night, I read Martin Mooney's poem, The Self-Published, which asks a similar question to that I was asked at an interview at Exeter University in 1977 when Exeter were in the process of deciding if they wanted me on their B.A. English Lit course. Of course, they were quick to decide they bloody well didn't.
I was asked, after I had told them I was a poet, who I wrote for. Was it for myself or for other people. Although it's a very obvious question, I'd never heard it before or, up to the age of 17, ever thought about it. I didn't know. Exeter, where I think I might have quite liked to have gone, decided against having me but they can look at the University league tables now, some of which is based on the success of alumni, and see where Lancaster is.
But I know the answer now, nearly 40 years later. I write for myself. If anybody else finds anything worthwhile in anything I ever write, that's great, that's fine and it's a wonderful thing but if I don't like it enough, it goes no further. Writing is best, like so many other things, when it is amateur, not professional.  The idea of being a professional writer, as espoused by Dr. Johnson, is a nightmare I wouldn't want to live through and I much prefer going to the office to produce the mundane work that I do there than the ghastly alternative of having a deadline to produce, say, another Oh, Babe, What Would You Say on Friday night.

The other reason why The Perfect Book will wait a while yet is that I only have two ISBN's left from the allocation of ten I was given in 1990. I need to use them sparingly because once they are used up, David Green (Books) has used up its quota and I'm not going looking for any other publisher.
Do you know the sort of things they ask? Like, how are you going to promote the book - by readings, a launch, appearances, gladhanding.
No, I'm not. I feel bad enough doing a poetry reading at the best of times, wondering why I'm taking up the time of these good people, without expecting them to buy a book at the end of it.
But another thing I've noticed is how, for the first half dozen titles I published, I filled in a form for the ISBN people and posted it off and that was that. Now, doing a title every four years or even less often than that, the agency dealing with it is different to what it was the last time and you have to register with some new people.
And all of that just so that my poems, those combinations of all available words that were already there but I decided to make my own, can be left in copyright libraries with my name on them. You might think I wouldn't care about that but actually I do. It's less about posterity or 'asserting my right as the author' but about how I first saw lists of titles by poets, or anybody else, whether it was Prufrock, The Waste Land, Four Quartets, or The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, High Windows or Fighting Terms, The Sense of Movement, My Sad Captains, Touch and all. I thought it would be a tremendous thing to have my own list to put alongside Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Station to Station. And eventually I have.
--
It's also nice to see Daisy Dunn re-tweeting (is it?) my mention of her book on Catullus, below, and seeing which line it is grabs her attention the most, which is the unlikely bringing together on one issue of Boris Johnson and me.
We didn't have a Bullingdon Club at Lancaster from 1978-81 but any inward-looking community will inevitably generate its own self-appointed bunch of oiks. And that must be the last I say on the European referendum because civil servants are duly warned of the period of purdah during which we are not to be seen to try to influence the outcome of a democratic process. So, I'm sure that all the traditional values of British democracy will be upheld by all those involved and still allowed to state their case and let that be a debate that is honest, considered, polite and reasonable.
--
But I don't think we've aligned ourselves with the USA thus far that I'm not allowed to mention their election.
One should never rest easy and it wasn't long ago that I was saying, Don't worry about a thing because every little thing is gonna be alright. But now Donald Trump is 3/1 with Paddy to be the next president, which realistically means he has more than a 25% chance. The fact that Hilary is odds on at 1/2 brings with it less comfort than it ought to because I've seen more odds on chances turned over in horse races than I'd ever have the time to tell you about.
Complacency is probably our own worst enemy in all such situations.
--
But, to end on a good note. Hurray for Vicky Pendleton, who rode Pacha De Polder to win at Wincanton this week, not getting knocked off, or falling off, whichever it was, like last time and she will go to Cheltenham.
I love her. She is tremendous but I'm with John Francome, who knows 100% more than I do about riding horses, that it's not been a good idea. I wish her well.
Come back safely, Vicky, with the horse, because there's some of us care about you and all that stuff about the next big challenge can sometimes be a bad idea in disguise.

Why I Like Poetry

Of course, I don't like all poetry any more than I like all Northern Soul, all horse racing, everything about Scotland or Jacob Rees-Mogg. If I had to choose between books and music, I'd probably get it wrong and say books because eventually, I'm sure, I'd miss music more. But if I had to choose between music and poetry, poetry has no chance whatsoever. It's just that, at its best, poetry is a very wonderful thing, made only of words, on a page and/or heard aloud. It doesn't need an orchestra, amplification, paint, canvas and brushes or anything more solid than language. And language is not always a very solid thing.
Having been at various times, and in a low grade, footballer, cricketer, bike rider and other things to an even less exalted standard, poetry is what I'm left with, my output as frugal as it ever was and not much of it to be found these days beyond this website. I don't mind that. The answer to the question I was asked at a university interview in 1978 - 'Who do you write for- an audience or for yourself?'- is obvious now, it is for myself. And so as long as I'm happy, that is all that matters, except, on those rare occasions when I read my own poems, it can sometimes seem completely dreadful, sometimes look okay and then, once in a while I remember an apposite line, wonder who wrote it, realize it was me and then feel inordinately pleased with myself. The only real confirmation one gets is from a review or if someone takes the trouble to say that a particular piece struck them as being worthwhile. So, thanks to those that have ever done that.
But, poetry is not always a good thing and there is a misconception that calling something 'poetry' is an endorsement. While it might be meant that way, the fact that something is poetry is no guarantee of its worth. I don't mean Pam Ayers and the like. Pam is fine by me and I hope her teeth are now well maintained. I recently bought the Collected William Empson, a poet whose work I was sure was exactly my sort of thing, a book I possibly thought I already had before realizing I didn't and one of the few poets whose Collected Poems is shorter than mine would be. But I don't like it at all. Stiff, mannered and unrewardingly difficult, it might have been the fashion once but it's no surprise to find it isn't any longer.
Which makes me think of the vibrant, latest generation of poets that were born into a world of allusive cleverness. While they are admired for their individual 'voices', the new ways in which they see the world and all the benefit that many have accrued from their Creative Writing courses, so much bewildering variety, inventiveness and studied style eventually amounts to a sameness. Oh, no, don't tell me that this one is 'different', 'new' or somehow invigorating. All the others are like that, too.
The problem with poetry is that it is very precious- and rarely more precious than it is to its author. I'm not usually a fan of haiku in English but the late Brian Wells wrote one about a poetry reading at which every poet privately thinks their poems are the best. At least Brahms had the decency to destroy some of his music because he thought it didn't compare with Beethoven. But before this turns into 'Why I don't like poetry', here are some examples of why I like it.
Thom Gunn is the example that made me want to be a poet in the same way that George Best made me want to be a footballer. I find it hard to believe that anybody suddenly takes to any activity without the example of a precursor. The loosening of Gunn's attitude from existential, separate protagonist, through masterpieces like My Sad Captains, to his later poetry of empathy, community and sharing, reflected in the way he moves between strictly metrical and free verse and stations in between ended all the stand-off debate about whether poetry should rhyme and scan or not. Because there was one who did both consummately.
Poems like Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden by Julia Copus, Martin Mooney's Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (amongst others), Muldoon's magnificent Incantata, the whole idea of Rosemary Tonks and much of Elizabeth Bishop, and, of course, Larkin in An Arundel Tomb and in any number of other places, were and remain ideals of some sort of artistic zenith with no other means of support than ideas exquisitely realized. But, to quote some lines, which I'll do from memory and only then check, the ending of Latinists by Sean O'Brien, his evocation of a schoolroom and the teacher of that dry, old, exhilarating essential language, explains the non-plussed with chiming erudition,
When the stare you award me
Takes longer than Rome did 
To flower and vanish, I notice
The bells are not working in heaven today.
And I very nearly got it right. There won't be many others who have the choice between checking it in a copy signed, 'Hull June '97' or one inscribed as 'Sean's reading copy' that I saved from e-Bay. Because I don't regard poetry as such as 'something I like' but rather something without which I wouldn't even be me. It isn't my own poetry I like that much, I still think I should have been a journalist, something even less reputable. No,
The great thing about poetry is that it was always the finest thing in school, university or ever after, to do whatever you wanted to do, be whatever you wanted to be and associate yourself with whoever you wanted to because even if a good many poets were reprobates, mavericks, ne'er-do-wells or even deeply conservative types of a religious disposition, it was 'homework' or 'culture' or highly respected and it is Shakespeare and so, somehow, one is credited with having the moral high ground. And, as Ken Dodd would say, 'they couldn't touch you for it'
And so, that seems like a good place to end Why I Like. I hope you've had at least a small fraction of the enjoyment I've had writing them if you've been reading them.
The illustration here is The Poet by Fernando Botero (1987). 

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 - Martin Mooney

It was long overdue that the Signed Poetry Books collection welcomed new arrivals and so I was keen to make sure I got Martin Mooney at the Oxfam Bookshop in Marylebone last night. With apologies to his friend, Heather, I managed to end up with her pen, too.

It was a great evening with a varied international cast of poets genially introduced by Todd Swift but I'm going to give myself a day off and not actually review it here. Even I tire of contriving those considered sentences of judgement and evaluation sometimes. Instead, to preserve the occasion, here's the man himself caught in full flight.

Martin Mooney - The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen

Martin Mooney, The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen (Lagan Press)

It might have been said that a poet doesn’t arrive at maturity until the age of 40. And elsewhere, if not in exactly the same places, that some start to run out of ideas or begin to repeat themselves not long after they go beyond 50. But even given those strict parameters, Martin Mooney was born in 1964, doesn’t have any excuse and doesn’t need any.
For me, his best poems were among the relatively early work that I first knew him by but here he provides new pieces that are at least their equal and in a place or two have gone beyond that, which is of course what one hopes to see and is then grateful for.
The Humours of Ballycran kicks off with verve and panache like a band hitting the right note from the very beginning of a live show. Although it is in the end a poem about age and perhaps the passing of better days, it is done with exuberance, quickness of thought and a re-working of cliché and old saws. It establishes several of the themes that are going to recur in the following pages.
Later, Hokusai is imagined in old age still striving for finer art and mourning the loss of his younger self but it is in Avercamp: Skaters on the Ijsselmeer that Mooney gives us a new masterpiece. While mainly obsessed with the artist’s passing and the contingency of his existence, it is also aware of the limits of his brilliant but narrow oeuvre,

knowing full well that life in all its shades
of love and truth and worship will go on
without you to record it.
However well a fire station is designed, it won’t prevent house fires but that is no obstacle to the jaded wisdom of The Architecture of Fire Stations, one of several poems in which Mooney handles form and rhythm to great effect. Similarly, Cure is that rare thing, a successful villanelle and Rendition brings together a number of Mooney themes- the radical politics, thoughts of mortality, Belfast and, new in this volume, sexual jealousy- in only seven concentrated but lucid lines. Which is one way that poetry can be more than prose but often isn’t in the hands of some poets.
Throughout the book we are aware of continuity in lives and communities, a stalwart and committed attitude in a world that is transient for the individuals in it who are subject to change, age, misunderstood passions and ultimately their own passing.
But Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, after a Hokusai picture, is the best new poem I’ve read in a long time. In years. Its slimy eroticism is powerful and tangible, associating the disgust of jealousy with the feel of octopus and wet groping. The clean release when the fisherman

retires to his boat for a month of net-
mending, keel-scraping, caulking and sake.
is welcome, refreshing and lovely to share with him. As is the tremendous metaphor of the stunted ‘refusal of the cherry to blossom’ as a comparison with the ‘fish-porn predictability of her lust’. (Female sexuality is as ever a problem, I’m afraid). But if that wasn’t enough already, the ending on,

I’ve said I’m sorry and I’m sorry.
is an adamant but desperate attempt to lock down feelings that doesn’t sound as if it’s going to be adequate to get over them.
Martin did say on his website about the making of the book that this was one of those cliched moments when the thing seemed to do the heavy lifting by itself.
And when a poem does arrive quite so fully formed, the poet can only be grateful and try not to fret that it doesn’t happen more often.
It is a sonnet, with its own fittingly distorted, un-Shakesperean and non-Petrarchan, rhyme scheme and packed with such well-made phrases in its compact flow that I hope it wins more accolades than those that this little website is bound to offer it.
‘Well-made’ is one of the stand-by, benchmark epithets that I’ll attach to many of the things I like best if it seems appropriate, given my restricted repertoire of endorsements. It applies to much of this book, which is a fine thing, with all of Mooney’s natural, unflashy erudition and the perfect pitch of distance and detachment (I've seen it called 'decorum' somewhere) that his language achieves between text and meaning, like the superb ‘furious’ decorating in The Ballad of Moscow Joe before the inversion of the usual Country & Western song themes. I can almost see how C&W melancholy fits with the cultural references of working class Northern Ireland, or anywhere else. It is funny, and it’s okay as long as we understand that life isn’t perfect and you can never really have it all.
Excellent book.

Top 6 - Patrick Kavanagh selected by Martin Mooney

The poems of Patrick Kavanagh demonstrated to Seamus Heaney that the matter and voice of his rural home life could be the stuff of art and books. For many of us growing up later in the 1970s, the urban/rural borders in Irish life had become vaguer and more permeable, as towns expanded into the country and new estates sprang up in pastureland. So it wasn’t Kavanagh as a poet of the fields – the ploughman poet, as he was caricatured, not least by himself – who spoke to me when I first encountered the work. It was Kavanagh the poet of frustration and longing and determination to take notice of the ordinary.

‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’ is a young man’s poem, and makes the best of the bad job of loneliness, and feeling at a tangent to one’s family and community. It’s ‘alienation’, the way a moody bookish teenager might use the word:

Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

Better poets than I have admired that ‘blooming’. I’ve always liked the opening line for its blunt annotation: ‘The bicycles go by in twos and threes’. Perfect.

‘The Great Hunger’ is anything but: rancourous, melodramatic, a kind of ‘Waste Land’ written by someone who I don’t think understood or sympathised with modernism. And yet… I sometimes think it’s the first Irish poem since the 17th century to deal head-on with real social and cultural problems without resorting to allegory. And it’s a characteristic Kavanagh move: don’t just describe a thing or comment on it – give it its proper name:

Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.

Kavanagh disowned the long poem. ‘Shortly after it was published a couple of hefty lads came to my lonely shieling on Pembroke Road. One of them had a copy of the poem behind his back. He brought it to the front and he asked me, 'Did you write that?’ He was a policeman. It may seem shocking to the devotee of liberalism if I say that the police were right. For a poet in his true detachment is impervious to policemen. There is something wrong with a work of art, some kinetic vulgarity in it when it is visible to policemen.’ But ‘kinetic vulgarity’ is essential to poetry if it is engage with the world.

It has taken me a long time to learn how to value some of the plainer poems. Perhaps only in middle age does one appreciate understatement and sincere failure, or perhaps naively it takes certain experiences to open you to certain poems. There’s a streak of sentimentalism running through Kavanagh which makes me suspicious of poems like ‘Memory of my Father’; yet the more I try to dismiss it, the more it has stubbornly insisted on its honesty and urgency:

Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.

That man I saw in Gardner Street
Stumbled on the kerb was one,
He stared at me half-eyed,
I might have been his son.

And on the other hand Kavanagh grew fonder of rhetorical flourish and complexity as he aged, prone to half-baked satire and daft rhymes, a pub wit who’s had one or two too many and has started to repeat himself, again. But this late style also produced some of his sharpest insights into his own nature and the nature of what poetry had come to mean for him:

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal.

That’s from ‘Canal Bank Walk’, one of a series of sonnets from the 1950s when Kavanagh was poor, aging, ill, and had to a large extent alienated whatever audience he’d had in Ireland. The ‘redemption’ the sonnets celebrate is both spiritual, a matter of a reconnection with or rediscovery by the muse, and physical, his surviving lung cancer with a lung amputated. By all means read ‘The Hospital’ on its own terms:

A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward
Of a chest hospital: square cubicles in a row
Plain concrete, wash basins …
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge.

But read any of the canal bank sonnets aloud and concentrate less on what they say, more on their syntax, punctuation, line-length, how much breath one needs to say them, and you understand the meaning of poems such as ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’:

Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July.

The man recovering from cancer demands of himself and his readers the very thing that keeps us going, the thing that will inevitably stop, the thing that makes poetry possible.

Martin Mooney's most recent book of poems was 'Blue Lamp Disco' (Lagan Press, 2003). His next, 'The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen', is due next year.

Top 6 - Martin Mooney

It beats me why Martin Mooney isn't a name seen more often in higher places in the strange little world of poetry. By all means, in recent decades, Northern Ireland has been over-crowding the place with major names but the fact that England might have been under performing is no reason for this fine poet to have been overlooked.

The fact that Blue Lamp Disco was published as long ago as 2003 gives rise to the hope that there might be a new book with us soon. Although that does remind me of the story of when one Oxbridge don asked another when he might hope to see his new book. And the answer was (something like) 'you can hope whenever you like'.

Dimitri Gregorievich Rasputin is a wonderful poem, full of working class spirit and fight, and daring to be longer than is required to fill a page or two. Not very far behind is Painting the Angel, moving and beautifully done. Much, much longer than the usual word quota expected these days is the early poem on Brecht .

I can't leave out the brilliant horse racing/bookies poem, The Cancellation of the Races. Two Pages from a Travel Diary catches the eye and it would be difficult to leave out Anna Akhmatova's Funeral but that is 6 already and I'm not saying I've done him justice at all.