Books of 2010 (Part 1)

My house is full of piles of books. They teeter and totter on tables, on shelves, beside beds, on the floor. I ought really to start tidying them up and sorting them out. My attempt to alphabeticise all the fiction books in the house failed last March at about G, but I do feel it would be good to know approximately where a particular book might be found.

However, picking through the piles today, I have been sidetracked into contemplation, and now find myself sitting at the laptop with yet another pile: a small selection from the books I read or acquired during the last year. A pile that wants to be a list. So here goes – musings on some books I read last year, and would recommend to you. Part one is all blokes, but that’s chance – just the way I picked up the piles. Watch this space for Part 2 to follow.

Don Paterson: Landing Light (Faber 2003)

Okay, this wasn’t published in 2010, and I didn’t even buy it last year, but it’s probably the poetry collection I’ve been back to most often over the last twelve months. ‘St Bride’s: Sea-Mail’ is one of my favourite poems ever. It’s beautifully balanced, subtly rhymed and patterned, and is one of those poems I just don’t want to analyse, and I certainly don’t want to influence other people’s readings – I just want everyone to read it and appreciate it for themselves, to find their own significances. It’s also one of the few contemporary poems that successfully centres the text, a practice which is usually scorned as suitable only for the interiors of greetings cards. Nothing Hallmark-ish here, one feels, just the perfect appropriateness of the shape of the stanzas on the page, and an apt allusion to Herbert’s Easter Wings. Except – I wonder whether Don might be having a little wry smile at us. This is, after all, a poem about sending a message – although a very different one from those one might find in a greetings card. As the speaker says:

I post this more in testament

than hope or warning.

Mario Petrucci: Heavy Water (Enitharmon, 2004)

I picked this up in the Oxfam bookshop in Durham in October, and on the six-hour train journey home I read it from cover to cover. Then I went straight back to the beginning and read it through again. It’s probably the purchase that has most affected me this year. It’s a collection-sized sequence of poems based on eye-witness accounts of the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath.

There are the ‘Grey Men’:

They thicken to a second skin – grow on us –

our clothes. A grey rind. Only teeth show through. Our

teeth only. White and shining and in the moment.

Today a man with a box and shoulder strap

waved his wand over our empty boots. Jumped back.

The slow deaths:

In the dark    she goes to him

    for his crusts        of hipbone

‘The Room’:

…There is

a room for weeping. How hard

the staff are trying. Sometimes

they use the rooms themselves. They

must hose it out each evening.

The state is watching. They made

this room for weeping.

It’s horrifying, wonderful, and important. The poetry feels so true to the voices that although the language is far from ‘every-day’ they seem strangely unmediated. It’s as if the poetry has clarified and distilled them. Read it.

Alasdair Paterson: On the Governing of Empires (Shearsman, 2010)

I heard Alasdair read a good selection from this book at its launch in Exeter, and was hooked from there on. He pulls and shapes his poems, his stories, his fragments of possibility, out of texts that had no idea that they might have poetry within them: princesses are analysed through the discourse of furniture catalogues, an unwanted tattoo becomes a riff on the manipulation of language. Definitions are stretched and pulled, verbs are juggled like eggs about to hatch. I love this collection for its language play, and what it allows us to apply to the world we live in. As the speaker in ‘on verbs’ says:

we’re picking their language over

like looters with a bolt of cloth

a thing of the finest weave

Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems (Faber 1988)

I’ve come late to Louis MacNeice. I put this on my Amazon wish-list on the strength of having recently read ‘Soap Suds’, ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘Bagpipe Music,’ and was given it for my birthday. It’s like a box of very expensive, very rich chocolates, and I’m still dipping into it, making time to savour each one. But oh, it’s full of wondrous stuff.

Read ‘The Brandy Glass’. I don’t often learn poems off by heart but I want to have this one inside my head for ever.

Michael Donaghy: The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions (Picador, 2009)

I wish I could have met Michael Donaghy, or just attended a reading or a talk or a lecture by him. His essay ‘Wallflowers’, subtitled ‘A lecture on poetry with misplaced notes and additional heckling’ is just a joy. Erudite, witty, original – an absolute pleasure to read. The whole book is a pleasure to read. Another one I read cover-to-cover on a long journey, and have gone back to many times since.

So - that's the first few books from the pile beside my laptop. The new pile that I have just created. Part 2 will follow soon, and then the contents of this pile can be repatriated to their original teetering stacks. Hey ho.