Here’s the thing. I bought this book from Apple’s iBooks store and read it on my iPhone. It was an experiment. I certainly don’t see myself making many purchases from iBooks – not least because it’s the same price as a “real” book, and if I’m going to pay £8.99 I really want the physical object – but I thought that a short book of poems might be the sort of thing that reading-on-iPhone would suit. Short things, perfect for standing in queues, or filling the odd couple of minutes. And I do think that it works for that. The text is clear (you can change both size and font) and in short bursts reading on that screen is in no way uncomfortable. I can’t imagine myself ever reading a full-length novel from start to finish on it, but poetry and perhaps short stories, it’s not too bad at all.

But on to the poems themselves. Some of them I already knew, in particular the selections from The World’s Wife (my favourite Duffy book) and Feminine Gospels. I was pleased that one of my favourite World’s Wife poems was included, ‘Delilah’:

Teach me, he said -
We were lying in bed -
how to care.

I have now discovered new favourites as well. The opening poem, ‘Correspondants’, is from Selling Manhattan (a collection I’m not familiar with) and is a real stand-out poem from the whole collection.

When you come on Thursday, bring
me a letter. We have
the language of stuffed birds, teacups.
We don’t have
the language of bodies. My husband
will be here.

I just adore that image of letters being ’stuffed birds’, carrier pigeons, full of messages of love and passion.

Virtually every type of romantic love is covered in these poems. There are passionate poems (‘Close’), funny poems (‘Text’), poems full of longing (‘The Darling Letters’), and poems that capture the sheer heady joy of being in love, like ‘Drunk’ (“Suddenly the rain is hilarious”). There are also incredibly sad poems, like ‘Deportation’, which is told from the point of view of someone having come to Britain to try and find a better life for their family, but being sent home to them with nothing.

In some ways, Duffy’s way of writing about love very much reminds me of Ali Smith’s short stories about love. I have always thought Smith’s love stories were her strength, and there is something in style of Duffy’s poems – her tone, and her way of thinking about and describing love – that brings Smith’s writing to mind. Perhaps because Smith’s writing can be very poetic, I don’t know.

If you’re new to Duffy’s work, then I think this collection would be an excellent way in, taking in as it does poems from the breadth of her career. I’m now really looking forward to her next collection, The Bees, on the basis of the poems contained her. It publishes, apparently, in 2011.

Also: gorgeous cover.

We went to see the Scottish Parliament building. Now, we’re both very glad Scotland has its own parliament, but my that building is ugly. Inside is much nicer, though, from what little we were able to see. FH’s only criticism was a distinct lack of vegetarian food in the coffee shop (on learning that both quiches had meat in them, he was instead offered either a baked potato with tuna or a cheese and ham panini). Onwards from the Parliament, and we stumbled across the Museum of Edinburgh on Canongate, complete with a small but very moving exhibition on the Scottish suffragette movement.

More wandering followed, and we made extensive use of my Good Beer Guide iPhone app, which tells you which CAMRA-approved pubs are close to you at any given time. Special mention to the Halfway House on Fleshmarket Close and, of course, the Cafe Royal on West Register Street.

Of course, there is also the castle, which occasionally looms at you when you least expect it. We were innocently walking round a corner, looked up, and whoops, there’s that castle again.

But what all you really want to know, I’m sure, is what books I picked up while in Embra. I shant disappoint you for I managed to accrue ten in three days. They were:

• Push by Sapphire (the basis for the new film Precious, and good lord, it’s an emotional ride)
• The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (because I’m about the only person in the world who hasn’t read it)
• A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark
• A Scots Quair by Lewis Crassic Gibbon (I LOATHED Sunset Song when I read it as a late-teenager, but I want to give it another chance since it’s such a Scottish classic)
• Daughters of the House by Michele Roberts
• Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson
• The Road by Corman McCarthy
• Handfast: Scottish Poems for Weddings and Affirmations (hoping for wedding inspiration)
• The Canongate Burns (I didn’t have a complete Burns. I do now.)
• The Faber Book of Love Poems

Anyone read any of these? What should I be starting with?

Although I haven’t read the collection – and indeed, I don’t read as much poetry as I perhaps should – I really am pleased to see non-prose take home a major prize like the Costa. I do think poetry gets rather maligned sometimes, and I’m as guilty as anyone, and something like this will hopefully give it a bit of a boost in the public eye. Not to mention the fact that the publisher will get some welcome publicity too.

Congratulations all round, and commissertations to the other shortlistees.

The BBC News Website has an excerpt from Reid’s winning book.

• Video of Mantel talking about Wolf Hall
• Did the right woman win?
• Rescusing the Tudor court from cliche
• “I have no inclination to read a book set in Tudor England.”

Today is National Poetry Day:

• TS Eliot is the Nation’s Favourite Poet, apparently. I can assure you he isn’t mine.
• The blog of a Forward Poetry Prize judge.
• Scottish poet Don Paterson won the £10,000 Forward Prize last night.
• Carol Ann Duffy reads her poem ‘Atlas’ on Radio 4, written for National Poetry Day.

The Nobel Prize for Literature is being announced at 12pm, UK time:

• Who should win?
• Committee members for 2009
• And the winner is… Herta Muller!

From The Guardian:

William Hill, which had made the multiple award-winning Duffy its 5/4 joint favourite with Simon Armitage to take the role, said yesterday that it had closed its books on the laureateship race.

 

“Carol Ann has been the heaviest backed contender for the job, and would already cost us a five-figure payout, so we’ve decided to close the book as the decision appears to have been taken,” said spokesman Graham Sharpe. William Hill had also been offering odds on Roger McGough (5/1), James Fenton (10/1), Jackie Kay (10/1), Jo Shapcott (12/1), Wendy Cope (14/1) – not particularly generous odds given that she ruled herself out of the running earlier this year – and Benjamin Zephaniah (20/1).

From The Bookseller:

Carol Ann Duffy has been put forward for the Queen’s approval to assume the role of Poet Laureate, from Andrew Motion, reports the Independent. “If all goes as planned, the Glasgow-born poet will become not only the first woman to hold the post but the first openly gay one.”

From The Independent:

It is understood she has been chosen after a new selection process, introduced by Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary, in which the public was invited to offer their views on the search for the successor to a position whose previous incumbents included Lord Tennyson, Sir John Betjeman and Ted Hughes.

I really can’t recommend her writing to you highly enough, particularly her collections The World’s Wife and Feminine Gospels.

First up, the longlist for the Man Booker International Prize, which is given once every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language. In addition, there is a separate prize for translation and, if applicable, the winner can choose a translator of his or her work into English to receive a prize of £15,000. It is awarded to a writer for a body of work, rather than an individual novel.

The judging panel for the Man Booker International Prize 2009 is: Jane Smiley, writer; Amit Chaudhuri, writer, academic and musician; and writer, film script writer and essayist, Andrey Kurkov.

And the all-important longlist:

Peter Carey (Australia)
Evan S. Connell (USA)
Mahasweta Devi (India)
E.L. Doctorow (USA)
James Kelman (UK)
Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
Arnošt Lustig (Czechoslovakia)
Alice Munro (Canada)
V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/India)
Joyce Carol Oates (USA)
Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
Ngugi Wa Thiong’O (Kenya)
Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia)
Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia)

There is unsurprisingly a lot here that I’m not familiar with (I’ve only heard of 7 out of 14 authors), but I’m chuffed to see Alice Munro on there. If you haven’t already, go now and read her short story collection Open Secrets.

The other big prize news is that poet Seamus Heaney has won the £40,000 David Cohen Prize for Literature, which again honours his whole body of work, rather than a specific collection.

From BookBrunch:

Speaking of the Prize itself (“highly honorific… a roll-call of the best writers of our time”) and of its benefactors, Heaney felt there was “something more than philanthropy at work… It’s sacramental… there’s an inner grace”. And he was delighted to be able, as part of it, to decide on whom, or on what, the £12,500 Clarissa Luard Award should be bestowed. He chose Poetry Aloud, the annual poetry-speaking competition for post-primary schoolchildren, a collaboration between the National Library of Ireland and Poetry Ireland – an acknowledgment of the importance of poetry learned by heart and spoken aloud and “the seedbed” it provided for future learning and appreciation.

I was listening to Seamus Heaney on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row last night. He was talking about the prize obviously, but Mark Lawson also asked about the fact that he is shortly to turn 70, and what words of wisdom he had to pass down to the younger generations.

“Read,” Seamus Heaney said, “Trust, and be cynical at the same time.”

I think that’s pretty good advice.

There has been a bit of a hoo-hah about the ending of the novel, which is about a 100 year old woman in a psychiatric hospital, with many reviewers being unhappy with it. Even the Costa Book Award judges spoke about it. Head judge Matthew Parris said:

“The feeling of many of the judges with The Secret Scripture was that there was a lot wrong with it and it was flawed in many ways… Almost nobody liked the ending (and) for some that was fatal to their support for the book.”

However, they ultimately decided that Barry’s characterisation was so strong that it made up for “structural weaknesses” in the book. Adam Foulds was apparently a close runner-up for his collection of poems, The Broken Word. Parris has said that out of the nine judges, five voted for The Secret Scripture while four voted for The Broken Word, so it was a close thing.

The other shortlisted titles were The Outcast by Sadie Jones, Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill, and Just Henry by Michelle Magorian.

• I asked my fellow OUPers for their favourite books of 2008
• Batgirl demands equal pay (via Feministe)
• Also from Feministe: Sorry ladies, but your vagina conflicts with my morals
• Yes, I am entering the Times/Waterstone’s Christmas quiz. The prize is £500 of book vouchers. OF COURSE I’m going to enter!
• Les Miserables sequel novels are allowed to go ahead
• Carol Ann Duffy writes a Christmas poem for The Guardian
• There’s a new book about Charles Dickens and his attempts to help destitute women, and I really want to read it. Perhaps I could buy it with all those Waterstone’s vouchers which I shall so surely win