what's it all about, Alfie?

Here in Baroque Mansions I'd say we are as interested as the next person in awards - who wins what, and for what, etc. It's a barometer of where things are at. The question is, what things.

The annual TS Eliot Prize reading last Sunday night was an interesting opportunity to probe this very question, and your correspondent has been mulling it over sever since then. So, plenty to mull, but not much to show for it. I have no aswers. I'm as swayed by thins kind of thing as the next person, if only for the reason that these awards have tangible results (as any decision has), but of course one knows that they mean nothing in themselves. Because there is no such of a thing as empirical reality.

So it's taken me a round week to get to it. There were ten readers, one for each shortlisted book, who were supposed to represent the best poetry that was published in the UK in 2006. (More information about the prize can be found at the Poetry Book Society. It is a great award, actually, with a large cheque handed over to the winner by Valerie Eliot herself.) Accordingly, the Bloomsbury Theatre was packed out, and hot as Hades, full of people all trying to get through to A) the bar, and B) the person they had to talk to. It is more an endurance test than anything else, in many ways. And you never do get to have more than two words with that person you have to talk to.

At the interval, squashed in near the top of the stairs and desperately trying to figure out how to get the bottle of beer someone else had just kindly got for me at the bar (nb. Tim Wells owes me a fiver change) to the person I was supposed to be getting it for, I remarked to someone, "This is like trying to have fun in the Tube", and he said, "except that here you know everybody." I said, "yeah, it's the Poets Line." My companion shuddered: "I'd hate to see what the final terminus of that one looks like!" And yet, we are all headed there.

The TS Eliot reading is a great opportunity to see lots of poets read whom you might not otherwise get a chance to, like Paul Muldoon (if, like me, you missed his gig at Poetry International). Penelope Shuttle was brilliant, with very moving poems about grieving for her late husband Peter Redgrove; and several things about her work came clear to me as I heard her read the poems. This is what one wants from a reading! The person I was sitting next to leaned over as she left the stage and whispered, correctly: "She has the crowd."

Muldoon was engaging, but a little by rote; it all looks very easy for him now, and Ms Baroque is not so sure whether that's a good thing. Simon Armitage was more fun than I'd expected. He read better than the last time I saw him.

Two notes: he was going on about having wanted an "eighties lipstick colour" for the cover of his book, which Ms B can only applaud - and it was very eighties for boys to take an interest in that kind of thing - but, isn't that shtick - the poetry lipshtick - now the intellectual property of Christopher Logue, since his War Music instalment All Day Permanent Red? And also, it wasn't really till the end, once the drama of performance had worn off, that one realised clearly how little Armitage's poem (I wish I had the book here, I can't remember what it weas now) had been doing. It had endless refrains, which he read so well they carried their weight - you can see he's used to reading to schoolkids, whose attention you really have to earn - and this is also to be loudly applauded - but I can't see them doing that on the page: faced with that much repetition, doesn't the eye just skip - like a record? And about 1/3 too many stanzas, really, clever and fun as they were.

Tim Liardet was a big fave with everyone I spoke to but somehow I found him a bit - flat - a bit empirical, a bit - correct me, somebody, if I'm just missing something. A bit safe and middle class. He was writing about his work with young offenders & I can't help wondering if it was the subject matter that got him the gig. It just seemed a bit them & us to me & I didn't feel the poems probed very hard. Jane Hirschfield - the only other woman - much more engaging than I'd found her on paper. She also had some moving poems about grief, which were very different from Shuttle's. (She did betray her San Francisco origin almost immediately, by saying how delighted she was to be able to be part of this community of poets, or something. Community?? Hm. Hyenas at the dried-up old watering hole still sounds more accurate.)

WH Herbert wowed and amazed the auditorium into - well - amazement with his performance of Bad Shaman Blues, rendered as blues. Or a bluesy rap. Anyway - fun! And clever. And fun! He was followed by his polar opposite, Robin Robertson, who also read only one poem, a version of the story of Actaeon, from Ovid (of course).

I should say now that this story has always horrified me. It is one of the most difficult stories our civilisation posseses. I feel, as who wouldn't, a tremendous sympathy for Actaeon, who is after all only human and has done nothing bad, nothing evil.

He read in an urgent, insistent, almost melodramatically staccato voice, the Voice of Importance. The poem was indeed chilling, but it also felt strangely hollow and unedifying. I did read this one several times when I bought the book, and found it oddly expository and humdrum. "Marsyas" it's not. (The talk in the pub was of how little point there seemed in this "version" at all, given how ploddingly faithful it is to the already-plentifully-translated Ovid; I heard one person refer to the 2/3-page list of hounds' names as "the Donder and Blitzen bit".) You know, when somebody takes a story like this and decides to do a new treatmewnt of it - or a not-so-new treatment, whichever - you do think, what is the point, why have they chosen this, right here and right now? In this case, the answer may even be unintentional. The myth came out feeling less like a fable about what gods can do to mortals, or about power and subjugation, ot about mortality itself, than just some bitter pub-rant about women.

(I never did write about the contents of my blueberry-stained copy of Swithering. There is some beautiful stuff in there. But a disproportionate number of the poems are hung on one or two great images, and seem to peter out... and he has no humour.)

Paul Farley and Hugo Williams were what they were. Williams an elegant thing, and Farley still laddish. There is a peacock-feather-preening quality to several of our prominent poets, all boys; they use and overuse words, they squeeze them till they pop, and it all feels like showing off, a bit. They also publish each other. And my question is this:

No, I won't ask my question.

Bernard O'Donoghue read Heaney's poems, as Heaney has cancelled all public engagements for the time being. That was a shame; but Heaney is on the mend, and O'Donoghue read well, and it was good to hear them aloud, anyway. I was there to give them another shot, because here, once again, I have to wonder if I'm just missing something. The poems started, had middles, ended, and went up in puffs of smoke.

The win, when it was announced, felt anti-climactic: predictable, safe (again), staid. It didn't seem to move our relationship with poetry on at all. I don't feel this is Heaney's best book, just as Rapture was far from Duffy's best. It's a lifetime achievement award, on which basis the others might as well have packed up and gone home. But I'm glad they didn't.