Ted Hughes died in 1998, but I am begin to wonder if anyone has told him yet. The year began with his posthumous winning of the Whitbread Prize and T S Eliot Prize with Birthday Letters, leading one contender to remark wryly: "Maybe next year they'll have a Ted Hughes Prize and give it to T S Eliot." The year ends with Ted nominated for the Whitbread Prize again, for his drama Alcestis. It is almost as if he'd never left.
He did, though, and the selection circus of a new Poet Laureate gave the media something to feast on, briefly lifting up the stone of poesy to peer at the pond life beneath. Andrew Motion was chosen, to an unedifying and unpoetic chorus of complaint, and has since been quietly impressive, writing a number of conventional, restrained pieces on public life, but nonetheless pushing the possibilities of the appointment by engaging with anything from the CBI conference to the Paddington rail disaster.
Motion is, in most ways, a traditionalist, but also a modern left-winger; his ethics are humanist and egalitarian; he has a background in arts administration. These are not unreasonable qualities for the holder of a civil service job on Parnassus. What his detractors have really demonstrated is their envy, pettiness, selfishness and narcissism, and they should be ashamed.
Possibly the best volume of the year, unlaurelled and unlisted for any prize as yet, was Almost by Oliver Reynolds, a witty and superbly crafted collection about, among other things, the end of a love affair, and the inadequate consolations of art. For sheer zest and skill, it would be hard to improve on this book.
Late in the day we have also had Heaney's Beowulf, a version threatening to become canonical, rendering the alliterative axe-beat lines of the original Anglo Saxon epic in a sensitive and occasionally Irished idiom, while retaining the grandeur of its rhetoric.
Don Paterson's The Eyes, another and very different volume of translations, has also impressed; he is a poet with a real technical facility, allied to a voracious enthusiasm in expressing his peculiar nihilism.
An extraordinary number of anthologies, some of them nakedly opportunistic, have been produced, by poets and critics with their eyes already assessing how the poetry of the century can be carved up and canonised. A bit premature, perhaps: like Mao, when asked about the effects of the French Revolution, one might murmur that "it is too early to say". Nearly all fall prey to current fashions as they approach the present day.
Defiantly unfashionable, the reclusive and modest J H Prynne allowed Bloodaxe to produce his Poems, containing nearly all his life's work to date, diligently prepared and proofed by Australian admirers, including the ubiquitous John Kinsella. Prynne is hard-going, off-putting, and much disliked by many more traditional writers; he is also, when one gets into him, so good that he changes the way you think and feel.
Otherwise, it has not been a blazingly exciting year for poetry, more a time of consolidation, though scores of books have been published, far too many for all but the specialist magazines to keep track of, and too many to list here without unjust brevity. Poetry thus enjoys boom and bust simultaneously. It has, in fact, spent the past decade being freshened up: being better marketed, talked-up, hyped, given youth appeal, allied with pop and comedy, laden with new prizes and lottery money; and still some excellent collections hardly sell, and still the practitioners complain, not unfairly, of neglect and ignorance.
It is an art that does, mostly, require a little more extra time and attention than a novel or a song or a film, and is therefore unlikely ever to have the mass appeal it secretly yearns for. But it can still put people in touch with ideas and feelings that cannot be better expressed than in the peculiar medium of poetry; one hopes it will still survive, and even flourish, in the free market, high-tech world of the next millennium.
