The T.S. Eliot Prize

 I set the Virgin box to record last night's edition of The Verb because it was the readings by the poets shortlisted for the big £25k T.S. Eliot Prize for the best collection of last year which is held, I'm fairly sure, in the Royal Festival Hall. And I listened to it earlier this evening.

It was an opportunity to take a crash course in the new poetry of 2021, most of which I'd missed, in the intrepid hope of dragging myself up to date and finding something to admire. I had my doubts from the beginning because I've long found Ian MacMillan's boundless enthusiasm a bit like poetry's answer to Boris Johnson, before he became forlorn, when although Philip Larkin's attitude towards many of his contemporary rivals was unnecessarily scathing, I tend to think that some scepticism is healthy.

The introduction to the programme warned listeners of some 'very strong language'. One would hope so, given that it was going to be 'poetry', that many-splendored thing that regards itself as worthy of the 'deep listening' that Ian credited the poets and audience with doing. But that's not what it meant. It meant those commonplace four-letter words, more often identified as having Anglo-Saxon origin rather than French or Catullus, that they are less shocked by but we in these islands need parental guidance about. I'm sure Larkin intended a few more 'sharp tender' shocks with his sparing use of them 60 years ago but it's playground vocabulary now. It's more likely to be some of us from the generation that bought the Sex Pistols album that find it a bit unnecessary. In poems, at least.

The first poet on was Jack Uunderwood. Okay, I can see one having to use poems like his in a poetry magazine if there weren't poems available that did a bit more with language but Ian was intent on persuading us how the poets had all taken on board his own show's 'rules for writing' and how, as such, they were very much extending the language in their use of it as a vital tool to 'examine what it is to be human', 'to explore the inner and the outer' or 'to go beyond difference'. They aren't quotes from him. I've just provided examples of the sort of thing that passes for poetry appreciation when actually what we heard were for the most part vague, under-developed lines shuffled together and read by their authors in that slightly distracted way that poets (these days) seem to think they have to.

I listened on but by the fourth poet I knew they had no chance. They were precious. Even if somebody any good had turned up I was already set against them. Somebody quite good did turn up, Michael Symmons Roberts, but even he couldn't save the event since he was on next to last and on last was the winner, Joelle Taylor, whose poem of protest didn't say anything one could object to but was simply bad poetry and went on too long.

As far as I could tell, it all sounded like free verse. So meaningful are they that submitting their profoundness to the discipline of any sort of scansion or rhyme scheme would have been like a prison, perhaps the sort of prison that a libertarian tennis player might find himself in, had it not occurred to them that embracing some sort of discipline might make their poems more interesting, more admirable and a bit more like 'art', like the way that paintings don't go beyond the canvas they are painted on and music has staves and clefs to define it.

 

It's not for me to say it's no good. The applause for Joelle made it obvious that the audience adored her performance. Poetry has been a different thing, mutating with fashions over the centuries, in different periods, and I struggle with Spenser, Dryden, maybe even Pope, possibly these days Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg. But if the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist represents the best of what happened in 2021, it isn't for me and I'm not convinced it would be for T.S. Eliot either.

Tony Blackburn's Sounds of the 60's this morning had its usual quota of at least half a dozen masterpieces. That's how old I am and I have to be glad I am because I can't see much that the poetry being written now is doing for me that the pop music of then still does.

Sean O'Brien - Quartier Perdu

Sean O'Brien, Quartier Perdu (Comma)

While some poets write only poetry, others move into other genres, too. Sophie Hannah is now a crime fiction writer, which is presumably more lucrative than poems; Tony Harrison's films and theatre work are as well-known as his poems; David Harsent and Michael Symmons-Roberts have written libretti for composers amongst other things and Glyn Maxwell is a playwright. Although Sean O'Brien has published two novels, this is his second book of short stories, as well as plays for radio, translations and criticism, he is, like Auden, still primarily known for his poetry. Quartier Perdu deserves to put that glib assumption up for re-assessment.
By all means, these pieces, like his other fiction, fill out more detail from the world view available in his poetry, the surrealism and gothic horror coming straight out of an early-ish poem like Thrillers and Cheese, but if at first one is reminded of the way that a Murakami novel can rapidly develop from laid-back domesticity into a nightmarish adventure that is only the other side of a wall or lurking under a fragile surface of a recognizably ordinary life, one can't ever forget O'Brien quoting Douglas Dunn's poem, The River Through The City, as a major influence. O'Brien is forever in its debt.
But he is a literary writer, never knowingly avoiding any allusion that suggests itself. Having produced a version of Dante's Inferno, that is in evidence here, alongside The Odyssey, poets such as Tennyson, Marvell and Larkin and any amount of knowing nods and quotation from past literature, not least T.S. Eliot who most notably made his books from bits of other people's. But like Eliot, whose work is very much his own, O'Brien has by now created an idiosyncracy of which his is the only likeness. If you think you've spotted an intertextual reference, you probably have and at the bottom of page 1,
Her smug prettiness was all that was the case with her.
if you weren't sure if Wittgenstein was being subliminally hinted at quite so early doors then one can look back and assume he was.
If we are chronically on the brink of subterranean nether worlds, whether being rowed by faceless boatman to unknown places, undergoing a change of consciousness via the moly drug of Circe or encountering ghosts or the suggestion of them, we soon get used to it but O'Brien's prose writing here is often a gentler thing than the characteristically uncompromising realpolitik of much of the poetry. Despite the literariness and the genre mannerism demanded by tales of mystery and imagination, this is fine writing with an entirely convincing naturalness. Only perhaps in Change for Low Rixham does the action become a bit more comic book than necessary.
If it would be an understatement to say the stories share a sense of dislocation, it is no exaggeration to say that O'Brien has a bottomless stock of telling expressions of ennui,
the watery crepuscular light of this town with its air of perpetual valediction.

That is from the title story, an epistolary account of a girl who goes into mitteleuropa to research the papers of a bad poet, gets no replies to her increasingly anxious letters home and is never seen again.
Although one becomes aware that something unsettling is bound to happen once the pattern has been established it is perhaps only in Lovely that the first date is going so apparently well that the macabre ending is totally to be expected but if one is led into thinking that you've sussed it, the formula has been outed and motifs are recurring with ominous regularity, the rest of the book is going to be more of the same, no, the best pieces are actually still to come.
Ex Libris has turned into an encounter with Dr. Johnson and Boswell that uncomfortably brings in avatars but becomes a meditation on literature and the novelists' revenge on critics whereas Revanant makes no effort to disguise the figure of Maurice Ashover, the biographical subject of his surrogate as a poet, Macklin, as being based not very loosely on Larkin. Macklin might have all but given up on poetry but is invited to contribute to a radio programme and hasn't been able to escape the way his subject took over his own life. He disappears into someone else's poems and the story is shudderingly more worrying for its understatedness.
That masterpiece follows close upon A Cold Spot, which is a calmly beautiful ghost story but political themes are not forgotten for long. There is clearly going to be more to come from Certain Measures than the cut-price crowd doing their Christmas shopping in Oxford Street so disarmingly seen, in some vintage O'Brien, for what they are, the diagnosis of a 'cure for capitalism...downsized God' and erasure of 'me from myself' having come only a few pages earlier. When it does come, and civil disturbance is orchestrated by the Police, the news item presented as further high street horror we all need to be protected from, one might ask of O'Brien whether or not he is siding with conspiracy theorists and whether or not he appreciates living in a country that, imperfect though it may be, employs security services to allow him to write and publish as he sees fit. It's a pertinent piece but suggests to me more questions about the defence of liberalism than the sinister forces of perceived tyranny.  
And, in A Green Shade, the 'monetarization' of university resources is lampooned and the purpose of universities, nowadays ostensibly 'positioning themselves in world terms', considered in the light of whether Lord Pybus's Ground, an area made over for contemplation, reading and sometimes performance, should be 'developed'. The issue is settled, non-acimably but fittingly, in the masque peformed there, in most literary fashion.
And then, presumably significantly as the last story, is The Aspen Grove, by no means the first to use the idea of having finished doing what one used to do (Macklin, above, had done that) but Morgan has given up his university post, book reviewing and poetry readings and gone back to his novel, so far seven years in the making,
Morgan had given up women as well as everything else. It didn't occur to him that this renunciation might be reciprocal.
But the poem is about a statue, and perhaps he is infatuated with it and just in case we hadn't been sated with enough literary allusion, it is an inversion of Orpheus and Eurydice and, as we probably always knew we were due to be, we are left,
turned to stone and the stone would burn forever.

Being a tremendous admirer of Sean O'Brien at his best, and finding any thoughts of a correspondance with the Ashover/Macklin axis in Revanant harrowing and to be vigorously contested, I adored this book and read it not in one sitting but really only with breaks to look at e-mail and be delayed by a chess habit for which no cure has yet been found.
It might not rival the short fiction of James Joyce, George Moore, Katherine Mansfield or William Trevor, if they might be thought of as paragon examples, as some of the best in the language, not least because some knowledge of poetry, a subscription to the TLS and a bookish mindset might be required to appreciate it for what it is. But it might stand alongside Sean O'Brien's best poems as his most memorable work. It's rare for me to be still up gone 10.30 on a Sunday night, fuelled by Merlot, only because I wanted to get on and do it rather than wait until tomorrow night.
Quartier Perdu is a book to relish, sometimes sentence by sentence, for its dark humour, layers of irony, untrustworthy beauty and unashamed panache, never apologetic about being what it most obviously is, a book for book people, the brooding machismo still there somewhere and the nightmares only one more sleep away but we are a played-out generation, us, and the exquisite account of that trauma is what we have left to enjoy.     
   

What a Day for a Dave Green

I can see why long ago, and some people still now, might have thought it was all decided by the stars. That sometimes they are all lined up nicely for you but other days it would have been better to not bother.
It began yesterday, really, with a postcard from the postman saying my latest book delivery was at the sorting office waiting to be collected despite me having several neighbours who have happily taken them in in the past.
Perhaps a bibliophile is a nuisance in the community and they've finally drawn the line at it. But, never mind. I rose early so that I could buy the paper, look at it while Danny Baker whipped through the usual routine from 9 to 11,
Good Morning, Everybody,
It's the Danny Baker Show,
Radiating out across the airwaves.
In the sunshine or the rain 
Come aboard the Danny train,
Kick off yoyr slippers,
Throw your cares away.
What better thing to do
Than have have a jolly jape or two,
Don't touch that dial,
there's nowhere else to go.
Something about a session,
something else about recession.
Dum di dum di dum di dee da dee.

And Uncle Griff was the guest so that was fine.
Since I was going to a play in the evening, I realized that great parsimoniousnes would be rewarded by going down town on a day ticket on the number 21 bus. Which took me right where I needed to be, except the queue outside the post office was ten outside the door. More than twenty minutes I waited, the girl in front of me giving up once we had got inside.
The Elder Pliny didn't like to waste a moment of his day and so would have a slave read to him while he was in the bath, it is said. Neither do I, so I took The Times crossword with me but I haven't finished it.
Remembering to pick up my prescription before coming home, it looked as if things were turning out okay. The racing began in earnest for me with a 4/1 winner but that was not the main event. The vibes were all against Road to Riches at Gowran Park and the market moves proved right. Chasing that money was a bad idea and I knew I shouldn't have done it and all the week's good work was undone on Saturday, as often can happen.
I read a bit of Murakami's running memoir in the bath and then a chapter of George Gissing before going back to the bus stop to go to see Murder in the Cathedral in the cathedral. It's a long time since I've been to see any play and even this time, I only saw half of one. The Southsea Shakespeare Actors have always been a worthy troupe and have put on some memorable productions. However, plays about ideas, I've heard, are not in fashion and Murder in the Cathedral, judged only on its first half, is dull fare, as I expect  Joyce's Exiles or Sartre's In Camera would be if anybody put them on.
Being not only congenitally disposed to being early rather than late for any appointment, especially if dependent on public transport, I was among the first dozen in the queue before the doors opened only to find that the best seats were reserved for quite a few local dignataries. But, with all due credit to the work put into the production, it was one of those that 'made use of the whole theatre space' and so more actors spoke from behind the audience or up and down the aisle than is strictly necessary, just so that the director was shown to be aware of that facility.
There is a stage. That is where the actors go. There is an auditorium and that is where the audience sit. It was a long tradition and it worked. I couldn't bear to move into the other part of the cathedral for the beginning of the second half and then be herded back to where we had been sitting and so left at half-time, thinking that I could catch the update on Auden's Night Mail by some contemporary poets as it went out.
Home by 9.10, I was soon on a train with Michael Symmons Roberts. Liz Berry, Andrew McMillan, Imtiaz Dharkar et al came on and I assumed Sean O'Brien was the big name who would provide the ending. But he wasn't. I'd missed him. He'd provided a few lines to set it all off and they were read by an actress.
When Kate Tempest's Live performance on 'prime time BBC2 on Saturday night' began, I wished I'd stayed at the play. Of course it is poetry. She says it is, and so it is. An artwork is an artwork if so designated by the artist. And that doesn't preclude this shouty, facile performance from being as much and providing the very latest of all the things that get poetry a bad name. It wouldn't be quite so bad if she wasn't quite so pleased about it. I could still hear it maundering on from the front room while I retired back here to the computer to take some pointless revenge on some unsuspecting chess players who were unlucky enough to offer me a game.
But if all of that is all I have to complain about, then it's not too bad, is it. If every day was a glorious sequence of untold pleasures, it would be dull. Perhaps not as dull as a life spent listening to Kate Tempest but it would lack nuance in very much the same way. And now tomorrow is almost here, with Postponed looking all over the winner of the Arc. Let's hope the stars align themselves better on a new day because that one result will make everything look so much better, not for the money- that doesn't matter much- just for the feeling that we are back on track, our explorations of discords and minor keys are over and we can return to equanimity.
There is a lot to look forward to, including presenting an hour of Latin for Beginners, which is in preparation and will be as much fun as The Sooty Show or The Wacky Races if I can get a quorum of an audience.  Portsmouth bookshops would sell out of Ovid, Catullus and Horace within hours if they stocked any of their books.
 

Best Poem and Best Collection 2013

It is decision time.

I kept reading all the new books of poems I bought this year and some gained in stature while others stayed roughly where they had been from the start.
Sue Hubbard's book was always one to return to as it impressed more and more. Michael Symmons Roberts already has the Forward Prize to his name for a book that surely extended his achievement so far and then after I had picked shortlists for Best Poem and Best Collection, Helen Mort came late into the reckoning and was added to the Best Collection list.
Any of the Best Poem shortlist would be a worthy winner and one of Helen's could be added in there but I won't go to those lengths and I'm glad I don't nominate a runner-up in these awards because that would be too difficult but a clear winner is Roddy Lumsden's Women in Paintings, http://edinburgh-review.com/extracts/poetry-women-in-paintings-roddy-lumsden/
I have already made special mention of it here in the summer. It does all I want a poem to do and perhaps that bit more and makes one look forward to a new volume from Roddy whenever that might be.

One can see why Symmons Roberts is already a prize-winner in 2013. Drysalter is a sustained technical achievement and continues to lure one into its meditations. I've been looking at Helen Mort's book ever since I recently got it and, as I said only a few days ago here, it is a debut collection. I'm not sure how many years it is since a first book made quite such an impression. One might have expected some experimental initial efforts before a poet produced anything quite so assured.
For a while I wondered if it ranked alongside my long established favourite, August Kleinzahler,'s book and thought about making it a shared Best Collection this year but the whole point is that I'm supposed to make decisions here and must do so if I can.
And so my Best Collection of 2013 was August Kleinzahler's Hotel Oneira, for its tender machismo, sense of loss and transience done in a way that I think is all his own.

Best Poem and Best Collection 2013 Shortlists

The winners won't even get a cup as magnificent as this little trinket presented to the winner of Portsmouth Poetry Society's annual competition but it is nonetheless a sincerely considered tribute and not easy to win. The Best Poem and Collection that I've read in the year.
First of all, the poem or book needs to come to my notice and then I have to decide I'm interested enough to read it. This is an appallingly difficult criteria for any poetry to meet if not written by anyone I recognize as a personal favourite but I do read reviews and sometimes specifically scan the internet or the Poetry Library for likely candidates, not initially for the purposes of the prize, of course, but to find new poems worth reading.
Once I'm reading it, then, the poems are well ahead of the opposition from the huge amount of new poetry published each year and the game is on to make the shortlist. I will provide some commentary when the winners are announced next month but these candidates will be considered further for a few more weeks while I convince myself I got it right.
A list of previous winners was compiled and put here on the equivalent posting last year.

Best Poem

Sue Hubbard, The Ice Ship, from The Forgetting and Remembering of Air
August Kleinzahler, A Wine Tale, from The Hotel Oneira
Roddy Lumsden, Women in Paintings, from The Edinburgh Review 137
Glyn Maxwell, The Case of After, from Pluto
Sinead Morrissey, A Day's Blindness, from Parallax
Sean O'Brien, Lamplight, from Poetry London 74
Michael Symmons Roberts, In Babylon, from Drysalter

Best Collection

August Kleinzahler, The Hotel Oneira (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Sinead Morrissey, Parallax (Carcanet)
Michael Symmons Roberts, Drysalter (Cape)

Michael Symmons Roberts - Drysalter

Michael Symmons Roberts, Drysalter (Cape)

It is so hard not to hear 'psalter' in the title of Michael Symmons Roberts' new book that I'm having great difficulty thinking of the real meaning of it as 'a dealer in drugs, dyestuffs, gums, oils, etc.' and the heavy associations are made more redolent when you notice the dedicatee is James MacMillan.
It is more than a modern day prayer book, though, if it is one at all. 150 poems of variously arranged 15 lines each make it longer than Shakespeare's Sonnets (2250 lines comapred to 154 x 14 = 2156) and it is not only noticeably thicker than most 'full- length' collections, which I might have seen defined as 60 poems somewhere, but it also offers a more comprehensive consideration of, what, the human condition or the poet's view of it than many of its peers.
Poetry at its best defies reduction to summary or a perceived set of premises and exegesis and, in many of these poems 'meaning' as such is elusive, although we can trace themes of what is pralleled with what may be, a world here and now which is also one to be transcended, a sense of times in some sort of crisis but dark times that in other contemporary poets are just that in these poems often offer the possibility of redemption and if they are quieter for the most part and less dramatic than much of MacMillan's music, one can think one is appreciating some thread of kinship between them. It will have been said of other work, I'm sure, that the 'meaning' is the poetry itself but we don't want to get too immersed in theory when it is a remarkable and hugely enjoyable book to take pleasure in for its own sake.
There are a number of groups of poems that spread throughout the book. There are Hymns to a number of cubicles, like secular confessionals, that include a photo booth, a karaoke booth, cars, a roller coaster and a ghost train. There are Portraits of the Psalmist in various guises- the old man, in mid-life, as a man in tears, in utter darkness, and, although not explicitly identified as a psalmist, a dove, that,
   does not 
sing for shattered cities, but her own
nut-hard and ever tightening heart.
And that might represent a way in to the theme of the book, a set of songs still to be sung in limited times when reasons to do so appear to be diminishing.
In Babylon echoes the sentiment in more apocalyptic circumstances but Roberts has possibly been tuned into a Gold FM radio station because,
      the songs are so old no one
will forget their tunes. Besides,
they play them all day on the radio.

String Theory describes a forlorn 'scrap of balloon' hanging from the ceiling of a closed-down office, from a past works party, that represents a barometer of the economy, the culture or zeitgest. He is a commentator on and observer of detail like that before he is meditational.
In For Want of a Leap Second, time isn't quite a good enough measure of itself and there are fractional, microscopic stallings such as 'the kiss that stopped at pout'.
The book balances on its dualism of irony and mysticism, the one needing the other, the psalter heard in its title playing off against the dubious peddlar of potions, the poet selling an intoxicant or remedy in his songs, its import fugitive but there somewhere time and again..
   

Signed Poetry Books - Michael Symmons Roberts

A bonus for the signed poetry books collection was finding that the Oxfam Shop had a copy of Michael Symmons Roberts' latest book on its shelves and the poet only a few yards away to append his signature.