The best of 2016

I was asked to pick a few books of the year for Big Issue North, and here they are – needless to say, it was a pretty hard decision picking my favourites, but I tried to include a bit of variety.

Blackbox Manifold 16 out now!

Issue 16 of Blackbox Manifold is out now, with work by Matthew Carbery, Imogen Cassels, Adam Hampton, Lewis Haubus, Tom Jenks, Kent MacCarter, Amy McCauley, James Midgley, Peter Mishler, Simon Perchik, Stuart Pickford, Sam Riviere, Iain Rowley, Ian Seed, Afshan Shafi, Rachel Sills, Dale Smith, David Spittle, Catherine Vidler, Corey Wakeling and John Welch.

There are a new series of essays on the sequence and seriality by Dorothy Alexander, James Capozzi, Alan Golding, Astrid Lorange, Simon Smith and Anne Stillman, and there are also pieces by Ed Luker on JH Prynne, Joe Luna on Douglas Oliver, and Adam Piette on RF Langley.

More RF Langley

And following on from yesterday's post, an excellent piece here on RF Langley. Hard to argue with any of it, really - I've been enjoying the Complete Poems hugely, and dip in and out of the Journals a lot, too.

Numero Cinq has a lot of interesting reading generally, while you're there. Have a browse.

Recent reading

Very different, but both well worth seeking out. 

RF Langley's Journals

This has been my recent reading. I don't know Langley's poetry that well, although I've enjoyed what I have read, but you really don't have to know it to get an awful lot out of this terrific book from Shearsman. Langley's eye for the tiniest details of the natural world, in particular, make it constantly surprising.

There's little doubt that keeping the journals must have fed into Langley's poetry-writing process too, though, and it's made me think of keeping one myself. At the moment, I scribble notes down constantly, and I do keep a sort of nature journal, but it's haphazard. I think my New Year resolution, of sorts, will be to make time to write a little in it every day.

Overlooked UK poets

Over on Twitter, Ian Duhig and a number of other poets drew my attention to this article in Partisan magazine, highlighting the 11 best UK poets you never heard of.

Glad to see RF Langley and John Riley among them. Riley's Selected Poems is a book I go back to again and again – I can't remember exactly where I found it in a secondhand bookshop. Second Fragment (you can read it by following the link that Ian provides) is absolutely exquisite.

I'd be interested to hear further suggestions for poets who might have made the list. Who wants to start?

And more RF Langley

No sooner had I mentioned RF Langley, than I came across this article – Helen Macdonald makes a great case for his Journals, available from Shearsman. They, along with the forthcoming Collected Poems from Carcanet, look like essential buys.

Helen's superb H Is For Hawk won the Costa Book of the Year award the other night, and deservedly so, too. I've been re-reading it this week, and finding new things to enjoy.

RF Langley

On Twitter yesterday, Jeremy Noel-Tod linked to his obituary, from The Times, for poet RF Langley, who died four years ago.

It's an excellent piece, and reminded me that Langley is a poet I need to read more of. What I have read I've liked a lot. Anyone else out there a fan?

Transtromer enNobeled

I was just starting to pull together a few thoughts on last night's announcement of the Forward Prize winners when Twitter started, er... twittering with speculation about who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I'd completely forgotten that the announcement was due.

There seemed to be a strong rumour that Bob Dylan might be in line for it. Now, I'm a big fan (I spent the drive to work this morning listening to Blood On The Tracks, funnily enough), but I can't help feeling this would have been a bad thing. It's not so much that I'd see it as a slap in the face to novelists and poets, as a bit of a half-hearted recognition of his Royal Bobness. After all, if he'd intended his songs to be read purely as poems, he wouldn't have bothered writing the music for them, then playing and arranging it, in the first place, would he?

Anyhow, turns out that Twitter was barking up the wrong tree entirely, as it's Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer who has scooped the prize (how appropriate, on National Poetry Day). I'm highly delighted about this, although what the evil Decepticons think about it is anyone's guess (oh come on! Everyone is making at least one Transformers joke about this).

My copy of his New and Collected Poems (the New Directions edition from 2006, translated by Robin Fulton), is extremely well-thumbed, being one of those books I find myself going back to on a very regular basis. So, hats off to the judges for recognising a consistently fine body of work.

Going back to the Forward Prizes, John Burnside took Best Collection for Black Cat Bone, Rachael Boast took Best First Collection for Sidereal, and RF Langley, who sadly died earlier this year, took Best Poem for To A Nightingale.

I was a bit underwhelmed by the shortlists at the time they came out, although without having read much of what was nominated. I have rectified that partly now, and I'm pretty glad that Burnside won. I do wonder if there's an element of 'lifetime achievement' in it, because I don't think this is anything like his best work, but still, I can't grumble.

I can't really comment on Rachael Boast's book, because I haven't read it yet - Ahren Warner's the only one on that list I have read thoroughly (and enjoyed, incidentally). In the Best Poem category, I like Langley's poems a lot, so it's good to see him win. I hope it doesn't sound too bitter to say that it would have been nice to see him get more recognition while he was alive.