A mixture of disbelief and anger has greeted Oxford University Press's decision to stop publishing modern poetry, with women poets especially chagrined by Oxford's action.
In a letter to the forty or so contemporary poets it has been publishing up to now, the OUP refers to "tough conditions in some of our many markets" and insists that it has become "increasingly difficult to give such specialisms the attention they deserve". But what's the point of the OUP, of all publishers, if it's not to give "specialisms" such attention?
And what's next to be axed by the people now running Oxford? Its classics of English fiction? Its dictionaries? And what will take their place? CD-Roms of Jeffrey Archer? Videotapes of Will Self's Booker-night rants?
As I say, women poets are particularly incensed by the decision, given that Jacqueline Simms, OUP's poetry editor for the past twenty-one years, has built up her list to the point where fifteen of the forty-odd OUP poets are women, but anger over the closure shouldn't be sidelined into a feminist issue.
The brutal fact is that though fantasists may describe poetry as the new rock`n'roll, by and large it doesn't sell - certainly not enough to satisfy the money mandarins at Oxford. Maybe if they published Noel Gallagher . . . Meanwhile, I look through my shelves to remind myself of the poets that Oxford once thought worth publishing: Fleur Adcock, Joseph Brodsky, Basil Bunting, Keith Douglas, D.J. Enright, Zbigniew Herbert, Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, Frank Ormsby, Peter Porter, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, Anne Stevenson, Edward Thomas, Charles Tomlinson, Hugo Williams.
All very sad.
THAT pre-Christmas perennial, the books-of-the-year choices, are already filling pages in the British upmarket newspapers, and while fewer Irish books are being cited than in previous years (it wasn't a notable twelve months for Irish fiction, for one thing), a couple of Irish books are being singled out for special praise.
So far, the most-mentioned Irish book is Paul Muldoon's latest collection of poems, Hay (Faber), chosen by, among others, Tom Paulin, Lachlan Mackinnon, P.J. Kavanagh, Alan Brownjohn and Jo Shapcott. The last-named rhapsodises that "you'll need to get your sunglasses out or prepare to be dazzled. The poems sing . . . Hay is fun, tender, virtuosic, explosively true."
Derek Mahon's The Yellow Book (Gallery) is also singled out - by William Scammell ("one of our master poets back near the top of his form"), Grey Gowrie ("Ireland's best neo-classical poet") and Alan Brownjohn - while Ruth Padel thinks Michael Longley's Selected Poems "wonderful" and describes their author as "a diamond in Cape's poetry crown".
Of Irish novels, I'm pleased to see Carlo Gebler's terrifyingly good How to Murder a Man (Little, Brown) praised by a number of contributors, including Aamer Hussein and Julian Rathbone. William Trevor's Death in Summer (Viking) fares well, too, being recommended by John Mortimer and Penelope Lively, while Julie Myerson thinks Joseph O'Connor's The Sales- man (Secker) "extraordinary, terrifying - a thriller full of soul and pity." It scared her "witless".
IF you're a P.J. O'Rourke fan, the droll American is in Hodges Figgis of Dawson Street tomorrow at 2pm, signing copies of his new opus, Eat the Rich (Picador). Its subtitle is "A Treatise on Economics", but don't let that put you off.
WHO says writing can't be taught? Well, the person who made the idea famous in Britain, for one.
If sufficient lottery money is forthcoming, England will have a National Academy of Writing within a couple of years, providing courses in fiction, poetry, biography, drama, screenplay writing and other disciplines, but Malcolm Bradbury, who has been running a much-publicised MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia for thirty years, is sceptical of the idea.
Commenting in the Observer last Sunday, he says he has his worries: "Writing is inspiration and genius as well as skill and craft. Good writers are good readers and might benefit more from a course in literature than one in the contemporary arts of writing."
Such courses, he argues, can "generate dangerous illusions. You take a writing course and you duly win the Booker Prize!" (as two of his former students, including Ian McEwan, did).
He concludes: "We should not pretend that everyone can be a writer, nor build illusions that lead only to frustration. For only a few will be true writers."