Reading the Observer's books of the year list - presumably designed to boost sales etc, as well as giving all the oiks a chance to see what the "real writers"* are reading - I'm struck as usual by the same thing that strikes me every goddamn year.
This year I'm wondering if participants are actually briefed specifically not to mention poetry! It's only a whole genre of literature, one widely considered to be a pretty major, important genre. But it's an internally-focused genre, and we are nowadays suspicious of that kind of thing, as you'll see below.
Andrew Motion, our poet laureate, chooses the letters of Ted Hughes. A gargantuan tome one must read if one is at all interested in - er - letters? (He says it allows us to see the range of Hughes' interests, as well as the generosity of his spirit. I'm all for this. But I think I discerned the range of his interests from reading his poems, actually, along with his essays on poetry.) This choice would be fine and great, as far as I'm concerned, if practically anyone had chosen any poems, or poems by living, non-Nobel-winning poets. But they haven't, so I'm looking for an example here. Motion is our poet laureate, so couldn't he be encouraging us to read the little blighters themselves, not the spinoffs?
Salley Vickers wins my heart a little by talking about how unputdownable Paul Muldoon's The End of the Poem is. I know that technically this is spinoff material too, but these lectures are brilliant in the same way his poems are, and it really is one of my books of the year (of which more presently).
The poets on the list who choose non-poetry books are:
Gerard Woodward
Owen Sheers
James Lasdun
Jackie Kay
John Burnside
The thing that strikes me about all these poets is that they all write novels, too - or memoirs: in any case, these are poets who write something besides poetry. Sheers in particular has said he feels the poetry was a way of getting into writing novels, which just makes me want to never read any of his poetry.
This brings me to Ralph Steadman. His entry is actually great, in its way, pointing to the very phenomenon that renders everyone nowadays so suspicious of a mere innocent little art relying only on words - so I'll quote it in full:
"I took two challenging books to read in a cabin on Lake Huron in Canada in September: The Idiot by Dostoevsky (Penguin Classics) and District and Circle by Seamus Heaney (Faber). But what instead caught my eye was a 'reader's proof' lying on the coffee table of The Cult of the Amateur (Nicholas Brealey) by Andrew Keen. He has had the temerity to point out that our search for instant wisdom through, say, Google and Wikipedia provides not necessarily what is most true or reliable - merely what is most popular. I read it in one sitting then went outside to fish for our supper, firmly believing that the poor fish that swallows my squirming worm on a barbed hook is infinitely smarter than the idiot on the other end holding the rod."
See? He actually took a poetry book with him on holiday! (Heaney. Oh, I hear you say. A Nobel-winning, obvious choice.) But he didn't even read it. (And, like, wasn't the whole thing about District and Circle that it could have been a little more challenging?) Oh well...
More excitingly, Toby Litt chooses an actual book of poetry! He read it! He liked it! He was overjoyed to find it at all, which says something. But it's by Celan: long dead. A new edition, and wonderful that someone's publishing it, so full marks to Litt for that. Shame he felt the need to apologise for Celan having "a reputation for obscurity" - but brave to admit to liking it, I suppose! Now, if we can just get Litt reading someone who might still be in a position to pick up their royalties...
And now to the finale. Even Benjamin Zephaniah has written novels for young people - and plays - as well as poetry. Maybe the editors simply can't see that there are poets who write only poetry (and, maybe, poetry criticism, as so many do, of course). Lots of people who've never written a thing but novels have been asked to contribute. And people who write journalism, and people who write biography. I really don't get why a non-non-poetry-publishing poet couldn't have been called on to give his or her book of the year.
The way this list has been compiled, I mean commissioned, really does reinforce my bugbear about the bookshops - the big chains, the empires - and the newspapers - the weird symbiotic hegemony that makes up whatever passes for the"Establishment"** - not even wanting "living" poetry to sell.
Anyway, Zephaniah has, like Toby Litt, chosen a book of poetry! As his book of the year! It is Derek Walcott's Collected.
Oh, I hear you going. Right.
Well, why not. But you know, Walcott, though another Nobel-winner, is alive, and not a novelist, and that is really something. And it sounds like he read the book.
It was a year in which not much reading got done in Baroque Mansions, as it happens. Maybe more of a Year of Movies, what with one thing and another. Could I choose just one? Maybe not, but fortunately I don't have to. I haven't read any big important books on the Holocaust, or memoirs of anyone important, or anything like that.
Various friends wrote books which I loved, for example Annie Freud's The Best Man That Ever Was and Isobel Dixon's A Fold in the Map.
I read Alison Weir's biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, at least half of it.
I read The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene, and it was gorgeous and delicious. Images of it still float through my mind.
Persuasion was great when I was ill in the spring.
Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers, by Antonia Quirke, made me laugh when I needed it - a fresh, funny, fun book
Fanny Brawne's letter to Fanny Keats were incredibly moving and surprising, & both girls came alive in a way they never have before, unsurprisingly. The most surprising aspect of the letters is why they are not better-known!
I read John Ash's poetry for the first time and loved loved loved it.
I read, still in the A's, Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and found it engrossing, fascinating, exhilarating in places, but unconvincing.
Kenneth Koch's long poem The Art of Poetry was sent me by a friend, and brightened things up considerably for a spell. I was going to write something about it here but then realised that all my mooted passages to quote were merging into each other, and that what I really wanted to do was simply quote the whole poem. Sixteen pages, if I rfecall correctly, and under copyright. but great joy and happiness.
Autumn Journal by MacNeice (of course; sorry to bring it up again) coloured a huge part of my mind for much of the year.
The End of the Poem by Muldoon is an absolutely spot-on choice, idiosyncratic and erudite, off-the-wall enough to invite the reader really to engage with its conclusions, "challenging" in the way that is really only invigorating.
The Speed of Dark by Ian Duhig, a slightly more recherché volume than some but one which nonetheless anyone should be able to read and appreciate, seems to have started me on a little journey of my own, back into the Middle Ages - a slightly different one from the one I loved as a teenager, but recognisable and much-loved - kind of like moving back to your old neighbourhood but in a different street.
Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit Nagra - if you were looking for something to encourage people to read contemporary, vibrant poetry written by someone who's young (enough!) and not scarily academic or whatever, I'd choose this. This is my nod to market forces. After all, they've given it a second cover treatment in less than a year.
This is almost all the books I read this year. Fortunately, I'm not trying to sell books. The way I read, I don't read whole books so much as the poems or essays that are in them. This can therefore only be a partial list. And what it's a partial list of is my intellectual life of the year.
* we will just pretend we didn't see Katie Melua on that list.
** a friend of mine, a graphic designer, is working on a commission for a cover for a novel. The publishers needed hisinitial concepts in in time for their meeting with Waterstones.
