Hi, We're The Miracles

 Some years ago, and dating it from his book, Music, it must have been in 2009, I went to see August Kleinzahler at the LRB Bookshop, there in uptown Holborn, Baby. Not many poetry readings were quite as memorable before or since. I had the sheer nerve to present the maestro with my latest little book. I'd taken it to give to somebody else if I saw them there. Roddy Lumsden, actually, but it turned out Roddy was in the bar next door unaware that August was reading only those few yards away. Jeez, when your luck's out, it all turns to a pile of chalk. I'll bet you my last cent to your bottom dollar that my paltry poems when flying out that airplane window, if it got that far but maybe I gave it away, as I usually do, whereas I gave him hard cash for his book which was what he had come for. I guess Roddy wouldn't have wanted those poems any more than he did.

Not many poets can spin round at the start of a reading and not look like some kinda goofball, but, hell, Mrs. Kleinzahler's boy could, and did, and he somehow gotten away with it. And then he said, Hi, I'm Archie Bell & the Drells. Sure, you need to know who they were before that means as much as a handful of chorizos but, boy, I gotta tell ya, it worked for me.

Which is all by way of introduction to Hi, We're The Miracles, the first of the five early Motown albums contained in The Sounds of Detroit which turns out to be two discs, not five. That's how compact compact discs are compared to LP's but I'm sure generations junior to me would find that laughable when they know that all the pop music ever made now takes up no space whatsoever on a megaverse of downloads. 

Hi, We're The Miracles is sensational, it's doo-wop, its to Tamla Motown what ska was to reggae, what the blues was to rock and it's gorgeous. The Good Lord only knows what treasure is waiting for me on Meet the Supremes.

Poetry as Therapy

Poetry as therapy is the sort of New Age, almost medieval treatment I'm not likely to believe in. Poetry might possibly cause more problems than it solves or maybe it's just the people that write it that make it seem so.

However, medieval is by no means always bad and I had thought I might sit down with some poems and see if it did me any good, with special reference to my loss of interest in the genre. I took the Firebox anthology with me to Chichester yesterday and in there, Sean points out Elizabeth Bishop's The Bight as a precursor to Craig Raine's 'Martianism'. 

The local library is closed on Wednesdays so I couldn't go and collect The Elizabethans by A.N. Wilson that they've got in for me. So, early this evening, I took books by Bishop, Sean, Julia Copus and Roddy Lumsden from the shelves and read a few poems, mainly reliable old favourites by those reliable, old favourites.

They were good, actually. Even if one's lost faith with the art in general, it takes more than that to dim the admiration for the best things.

It is always seeing other people do things well that makes one want to try it for oneself, or it always has been for me and before long, well, an idea of sorts. Poems, for some of us, come as much from other poems as they do from 'life'.

11 syllables per line with 10 in the last of each stanza, not making any claims to sonnet form, in some ways autobiographical, in others meta-textual or whatever it's called, but mostly ironic, downbeat, making no claims for itself, declaring itself a work-in-progress and so far, so good, I'm not displeased with it.

One Day Perhaps I Will Think of a Title

And poetry is like the sort of girlfriend

That leaves you on account of all your drinking 

Which you say isn’t half as bad as she says 

But still she won’t come back until you stop. 

I know the Köchel numbers of sonatas,

The name that Alpha Cyngi’s better known by, 

The scores from long-forgotten cricket matches 

And that is all the use I claim to be. 

We commit to no more than rainy Wednesdays

In suburbs where the library is still closed then 

And I perform repeats of all the stories 

She’s heard before in slightly different versions 

And then, if I’m polite enough to do so,

I ask her how she is but not to dance.

August Kleinzahler - Snow Approaching on the Hudson

August Kleinzahler, Snow Approaching on the Hudson (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux)

In Revenue Stream, August Kleinzahler tells of an 'interlocutor' he took a car ride with who takes an undue interest in him and his work,

                               he was determined, all right,

 

to find out what, I could not begin to surmise. About how

I went about stringing these words together, as I do,

 

and he might well have asked. I suspect there's a trick to it as there must be with other idiosyncratic poets with their inimitable styles. Paul Muldoon, John Ashbery, John Burnside, none of who Kleinzahler is particularly like but who have found their own way of doing it. And then Kleinzahler adds in a bit of Frank O'Hara's contrived, casual, non-poetry colloquial idiom.

It's been a little while since the last new Kleinzahler but as he hands in 80 pages of long lines dense with words, it has been worth the wait.

The title is Kleinzahlian with several of his previous volumes being threatening ominous weather but the slick wiseguy is 71 by now and even Archie Bell & the Drells grew old and it is to be expected that poets reach a time when their new work seems to be generated from what went before. It wasn't a problem with Heaney and it's not a problem here. Kleinzahler remains exhilarating.

The book could come with its own menu and gazeteer, never mind glossary. There is as much relish for the food as there is for the language, which is place names and anything that sounds exotic. But I've looked some of them up. Weehawken is in New Jersey and a dybbuk is '(in Jewish folklore) a malevolent wandering spirit that enters and possesses the body of a living person until exorcised'. It would appear that things worth writing poems about don't happen to him in places like Portland or Boston with more mundane names but Michael Longley has Carrigskeewaun and so Irish poets as well as American jews have a word hoard of place names that most English don't but I might spend more time in Ashby-de-la-Zouche or Kingston Bagpuize and hope for the best.

Kleinzahler has long been one for a sense of rootlessness and nostalgia for times and places remembered, hardwon like an old bluesman past his prime. Perhaps he's poetry's much better answer to the question that pop music provided the answer Tom Waits. I thought Tom Waits must be about 60 when he was only 30 but August is now going back to childhood and adolescence at times, bringing back characters from the past with vivid anecdote and affection. There's not much in his extravagantly laconic default mood that isn't vivid and there is a swagger even in his elegies. I even checked on some lines quoted to August much to his surprise by his 'unofficial guardian' at the age of 14, Murph, in Murph & Me, in his sedan in all its specified specification and they are from Hart Crane. Had to be, really. Kleinzahler is masculine and his poetry is so, too, which is not to say that the lady I went with to see him in the LRB bookshop didn't love him, too. It's hard not to like the swank and sashay of his performance, either on the page or in person even if he's glamourizing the downbeat in a sort of bluesy way.

It all makes the sensitive moments the more touching, when he not talking about broads, a spicy sauce or the leather upholstery of a choice automobile. In She,

She barely acknowledged that I was there, turning

her head ever so slightly in my direction as if she had picked out

in the breeze the faintest strains of an unfamiliar folk melody,

 

even though we had been lovers once, long ago  

 

For one who delivers poems with such panache and verbal largesse, he isn't half world-weary, describing,

        on the TV overhead the number one ladies' morning chat show

featuring the twin goddesses of our exhausted imagination,

Kathie Lee and Whoopi

 

but maybe it's only the drearier, commodified parts of the debased culture that he's weary of because there's no lack of enthusiasm, his own raw affections or wide-ranging reference points.

FSG might not have minded, but I always somehow will, lines just so long they need indentation. Editing a booklet some years ago now, one poet did that which was a pain in the ass. Sorry about that - neck. One can't help but adopt the vernacular argot. But the long lines are a sort of rapture, carrying the expansive sweep of the language onwards and I daresay it couldn't be otherwise.

It's possible Kleinzahler is one of those poets whose schtick you either buy or don't buy. I've not really bought Allen Ginsberg's since I was about 17. I have my doubts about O'Hara and any other contrivance of authenticity. A poem is a contrived thing and the more 'natural' and immediate it tries to sound, the more contrived it will look. One can hardly accuse poems with this level of erudition of trying to be bar-room speil or the off-hand jottings-down. It's sophisticated and the adopting of an informal tone is only a part of it.

It is, for me, as thrilling as contemorary poetry gets and, with the sad passing of the likes of Derek Mahon, Roddy Lumsden and Anne Stevenson this year, August doesn't have as much opposition as he did a few months ago for the position of my favourite living poet, a position he has in the past been not far off. 

This book won't be going on the shelf any time soon. In fact, some of the back catalogue at least will be coming back out of the top right hand corner of the bookcase where they live.                                   

 

 

British Poetry 2000-2020

 I have been noticing how we've already had twenty years of the C21st. It might not seem like it but a fifth of it's been done. Those of us who still think our subject is C20th Poetry had better give that further thought. I wonder if anybody's doing the 'definitive' anthology of the period to put alongside The New Poetry, the Motion/Morrison book, the other New Poetry and Identity Parade, if that counts, if any of them still count, if anybody is still permitted the idea of a canon. A little while back we were being told it was being abolished, that Shakespeare and Kate Tempest are both as worthy of our attention as each other. In some schools, in the generation after mine, school teams were picked on a rota basis rather than with a view to winning matches so they probably weren't as good as the teams I played in but with regard to poetry it does depend on somebody knowing which poems are better than others and, as a look through some old Poetry Review magazines showed a while back, that became more a matter of tribalism and old 'poetry wars' but maybe it was ever thus and at least each offered a point of view.

But, twenty years in, I have been comparing the first two decades of the C21st with those of the C20th. Without looking it all up, 1900-1920 seemed to be major in a major way with names like Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Edward Thomas, notwithstanding Wilfred Owen and reportage from WW1, and women like H.D. and Mina Loy at the forefront of Modernism, which was as big a revolution as any one cares to mention, but by all means provide your own names. Romanticism had made the individual and their preciousness a priority and after 200 years we don't seem to have recovered from that. The incoming French influence into English made Chaucer very different from Old English. The first Elizabethan Age is sold as a high point in English poetry. 

British. English meaning from England. English meaning 'in the English language'. Anybody needs to set their parameters but the barricades are largely down by now and it's Poetry and many of us aren't fluent enough in other languages to appreciate poetry in them sufficiently.

But 1900-1920 must have been an exciting time, with bad, old Ezra, the Dominic Cummings of English letters, showing everybody how it should be done henceforth. In retrospect, it looks like it, and then one looks to find what 2000-2020 have to offer.

Michael Donaghy was born in 1954 but died in 2004, much too soon, which already means that the 2000-2020 are like Argentina without Maradona. Paul Muldoon was perhaps at the height of his powers with Incantata in The Annals of Chile in 1994 and Hay in 1998 but subsequently proceeded to become more Muldonian than even he needed to be. Sean O'Brien has continued to provide powerful, highly accomplished commentary on what appear to be increasingly troubled times but despite an extensive list of highly talented poets writing in English - some of them in America and many in Ireland- he can't be expected to do it all on his own. There is much to be admired in the poetry of John Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, Julia Copus, David Harsent, Don Paterson, the much-missed Roddy Lumsden -and I apologize to all the others I don't mention but this is a short essay rather than a directory - but it still doesn't feel like a period. It might be a good thing that it doesn't but the unfashionable idea of being 'great', like Bach or Mozart, meant taking the art to 'the next level' (for want of a better phrase).

If Roddy were still with us, he might defend his assertion that the current generation of new poets, a few years ago, were the best in the history of English poetry but it raised some eyebrows here if nowhere else, looking a bit like blurb for a generation he had done much to teach how to continue with ludic, Muldonian allusiveness. Nothing goes out of fashion quite as quickly as the avant-garde but all innovation contributes to the mainstream if it's worth taking in. (There we go. I haven't said it for a while so it was time I said it again).

I don't know if the Creative Writing industry has made poets so clever and self-aware that it has brought about some sort of ultra-plural paralysis, whether a liberal inclusiveness has not allowed anything to be regarded as 'elite' any more but, supposing there is an Eng Lit syllabus in unversities in 2100-2120, something is going to have to be on the reading list for the Poetry of the Early C21st. Or, isn't it. It won't all be Theory by then because even Terry Eagleton seems to have accepted that it isn't all Theory even now.

I was as dubious as any campus academic a few years ago when I heard it said of the Romantic Poets that 'there were six of them' and that's what happens when you have a syllabus or a canon but while contemporary poetry still has fine work in it, one can't help thinking that, like pop music, it doesn't have its Motown, Beatles, Prince, Bowie galaxy of impossibly great satars any more. On the other hand, one notices on University Challenge that when the music round consists of pieces of popular music to identify, a team with an average age of 20 listen to Roxy Music with blank looks. They know the festival artists of their generation well enough so perhaps those of us who thought poetry was about Eliot, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Larkin need to move over. It might have been our game once but it doesn't remain so forever.  

Roddy Lumsden

Saddened indeed, to be checking out Bloodaxe for a book, and find that Roddy Lumsden has died.

As well as a quiz genius, most memorably demonstrated on Round Britain Quiz in a formidable partnership with Val McDermid, he was the ever-inventive poet that set the style, and standard, for a generation of imaginative, genre-expanding poets. But he was the one that did it, and led from the front, most effectively.
I met him unexpectedly at a National Poetry Day event on the South Bank some years ago where he astonished me with knowledge of a review I'd published in a magazine. His mind was an amazing compendium of retained detail and creative potential.
His 'ripple' poems, that end in words made up from the consonants in the title word, did what he said and created a compelling half-rhyme effect.
An Older Woman was a sonnet that rhymed the same throughout.
Women in Paintings was a big favourite of mine from 2013 and won the Best Poem category here in the unlamented poetry awards I used to review the year with.
Not All Honey was Best Collection in 2014 and So Glad I'm Me was the same in 2017. He brought a zest and energy to his poems that I simply didn't find anywhere else and that was reflected in the consistently compelling cover illustrations for his Bloodaxe books.
There had been health issues, I know, but such talent and commitment to his art comes rarely in a generation and he had comandeered most of that allocated to his. 

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.

Sean O'Brien - Europa

Sean O'Brien, Europa (Picador)

art is all there is and might not be enough

looks like one of those lines deserving, if not destined, to pass into the language. Masterful at his potent best, Sean O'Brien's surely nailed it and, moreover, not for the first time.
But selective quotation does not a scholar make. Poems work as whole poems, not as quotable wisdom strung together by conjunctions, the other bits and syntax.

What it says in Completists, whether or not the R.L. it is 'for' may or not be Maestro Lumsden, is,
         for an hour it was beyond dispute
That art is all there is and might not be enough.

Like all those who think that Larkin wrote, What will survive of us is love, which he did but he went to great lengths to qualify it so far that wasn't really there, anybody who thinks that Sean has summed it all up needs to look again and notice that what he offered has already be taken away.
But, there again, if it's not the case that art 'might not be enough', perhaps it is and, for some of us, it might be 'all there is'.
Completists could almost be the masterpiece in Europa but for line 4. About a band that never got beyond a restricted, 'cult' following, 'By accident we saw them live one night',

On a 'short autumn tour' of seaside toilets.

Is that really necessary. They might have been dives. And Prof. O'Brien makes use of more serious vernacular more than dignity might allow without me needing to be either Barbara Cartland or wonder if machismo isn't diminished rather than enhanced by such regular usage. Although such words have become more commonplace with a generation of comedians like Lee Mack or Jonathan Ross superseding the Ken Dodd vintage, they lose their impact exponentially the more they are used and the fact that Larkin used the f word three times, each in a different participle, won't mitigate the offence by reference to a more revered authority.

Europa opens with a wonderful line,
The grass moves on the mass graves

which is as close as a poem might ever get to the smooth wonder of the opening bars of Brahms 4.  O'Brien could possibly have been Keats if he had wanted to be but can't let himself, doesn't want to be and why would he.
The blurb tells us,
Europe is not a place we can choose to leave

but whether or not the poems add up to a pro-EU, anti-Leave lament is less clear than the recurrence of mirrors in the poems, making us look at ourselves in the way that the poet has always found us guilty of being ourselves and stuck with it. Although his vision was 'noir' long before it became the staple diet of television drama imported from Scandinavia, it is not clear that he would ever have been anything but a malcontent; much though there may be to be malcontented about.
There is more of a sense of an ending in Europa than the accustomed, ongoing recipe of sinister goings-on, ominous politics and personal alienation but that is autobigraphical, Sabbatical being an understated title for a poem about leaving his old professorial office for perpetuity.

There might not be anything in Europa to put alongside the several major pieces in Ghost Train or such things as the supplicant Beautiful Librarians. But the book maintains the insistent rhythms with which O'Brien has always cast his compelling spell. It is quite possible that any of these poems found in a magazine under an unknown name would alert the reader to a new talent but it is what I might call 'Magnetic Fields Syndrome' - nothing's ever going to be as good as 69 Love Songs, or 'Al Green Syndrome', it will never be 1971-73 again, and even Manchester United don't win every week now that Eric Cantona is elsewhere.
The generation born from 1945-the early 1960's had it all. State-paid-for Liberal Humanities education; The Beatles, Tamla Motown, David Bowie and T. Rex, all the amusement of the cranky avant-garde; the most incredible sense of entitlement and progress being made. And we blew it. Maybe it was circumstances beyond our control but it happened on our watch and we blew it. And it is too late to complain now. Poetry is a very unlikely instrument to use to set it right but it can be a powerful way of resigning oneself to a game that has been played out and gone.
It's a fine book and I wouldn't be without it but future retrospectives might decide to put other of his books ahead of it in estimating which represented the ones he should best be remembered for.    

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.     

  

Roddy Lumsden - So Glad I'm Me

Roddy Lumsden, So Glad I'm Me (Bloodaxe)

In yet another tremendous cover photograph, Roddy Lumsden has Sandy Denny for his latest book. Anybody who doesn't know who she was is going to struggle with most of the pop music and cult figure references that are strewn throught the poems inside. I doubt if I got half of them and I'm not bad at such games. On the back, in his new publicity photo, Roddy looks like an unpainted Roy Wood but it's by no means all music, his natural constituency when reaching for a metaphor is food.
The Round Britain Quiz star retains an inordinate amount of detail and his poetry similarly teems with invention, innovation, technique, esoteric knowledge as well as a penchant for the Chinese horoscope and the fragile nature of relationships.
I began at the beginning, which I don't always, and read the first section of the three in page order, feeling no need to flick forward in search of something more interesting. His idiosyncratic style forever ducks expectation, defies received ideas of what poetry should be. He did suggest a few years ago that the coming generation of poets were the best/greatest/most exciting (delete those he didn't say) ever in English poetry, which I took to mean those he had coached on Creative Writing courses, but I don't think they are. They might have been if he could genuinely bequeath his gift but he can't and most of them don't possess anything like it.
I'm rarely sure why poetry collections are divided into sections. I imagine it's thematic and I can see the second section, A Soft Leviathan, made up of the 'conflation poems in which he 'has knocked the square peg of one subject through the round hole of another', which is as maybe but the poems I've noted down as most worthy of comment come from the first and third parts.
Simone's Cookie is phenomenology, if not ontology, not letting us in gently by introducing Kierkegaarrd as an early gambit. And,
you remember awfulness, a sad station 
you once waited on, or the acre of chaos
which pretends to be our understanding.

This might be advertised as Lumsden's most optimistic book for some time but the confidence is in the shifting, elusive bravura of the poems, the trains of thought and the apparently bottomless resource of telling lines rather than in the account of discomfiting life as it is lived that they serve.
Page 16 is an uninhibited tribute to, and consideration of forms of coitus, beautiful in its way but I'm still with those who were reluctant to translate Catullus 16 for schoolchildren and there are enough other pieces to enthuse about more.
Elba is the poem I've returned to most often, exile being a powerful theme in poetry from before Homer and Ovid, and no less rich in potential now. For Napoleon here, solipsism or something like it is both a trap and a source of unlikely freedoms.
                                   Treason was impossible.
What won me was simplicity, the sweeping,
the bed-making, the birdless birdcage gaping.

It would diminish Roddy Lumsden to categorize him as avant-garde and it is such more accessible poems that his use of the language is seen to best effect but many admirers of 'mainstream' poetry are going to find some poems difficult. He's not as difficult as Geoffrey Hill, who insisted on it, but like Michael Donaghy, Paul Muldoon or Don Paterson, it's not of interest how avant-garde it is. If that is all there is to discuss about poetry then it must be missing something. There isn't time to whittle ourselves over labels that others have made it their raison d'etre to prove themselves to be.
Work Crush is a brilliant piece that understands office life as well as The Office itself did.
                            Our lives would lift 
into that starling swarm of whatever.
I barely know you and yet you may
be welcome at my funeral, karaokeing
my best song.

Even that 'my best song' is the demotic, grammatically incorrect usage that means his favourite song rather than the best he ever wrote. 
On second reading, some of the poems didn't seem to have the same immediate impact as when one didn't know what to expect but staying with it and winnowing a generous full-length collection down to the handful of those shortlisted for masterpiece status, those are the poems you buy books in the hope of finding - nobody writes masterpieces all the time - and the book is a palpable hit.
This is Roddy's tenth book, it says. I don't have all of them, I don't suppose, and I had begun to wonder if anybody needs more than one because they all provide similar elusiveness of meaning in places, enough to puzzle on what they mean, if anything, and whether or not it always works. But you do need several, this one as much as any, because there are great things to be had. It's not easy being a poet these days, avoiding all the obvious pitfalls in an industry overcrowded with dedicated artists who all think it's about them but without enough consumers to buy all the available product.  Should it be reportage from the front-line of one's own life, giving biographers licence to relate every line to some trauma or idiosyncracy or should it be classical art for art's sake. It doesn't matter. It would be very odd if it were entirely one or the other.
Roddy Lumsden remains one ahead of the game, still clear of the pack, good at doing his own thing, there is also a confident suspicion that the poems would achieve another level if heard read aloud by him -the page being a democratic but sometimes deadening stage for some poetry- and there's not many you can say all that about.             

Ripple

Thinking ahead to a forthcoming Portsmouth Poetry Society evening on rhyme and back to 'ripple poems', the brainwave invention of Roddy Lumsden in which the consonant sounds of the title are replicated in any order as line endings, I have this.
I can actually, perhaps, extend the form to 12 lines with 'forever loop', 'slurp', 'pillar', 'water polo' and anything else that crops up in idle moments and one can see how the search for rhyme can lead one to outlandish ideas that would never have happened without the discipline. Although we must use them in subtle ways and not be seen to be crowbarring them in.

Another poem to take is Ted Hughes' October Dawn that is half-rhymes throughout before rounding off on a full rhyme.

Ripple

Some poets regard rhyme as puerile,

something they need to withstand or repel

unlike Chaucer in his undemure pool

of couplets that he begins in April.

But somewhere in this short downward spiral

it might lurk disguised, keen to explore

in the same way that many people are.

Thus rhyme is a gentle interloper.