This must be a first - there are four volumes of poetry on the current British bestseller lists.
When Waterstone's conducted their nationwide Book of the Century poll last year, it was bad enough to discover that Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was deemed the book of the age, but even more depressing (if not surprising) was the complete absence of poetry from the list of the top hundred books.
Is this about to change? Among the top twenty paperbacks listed in British newspapers this week, you'll find at tenth place The Nation's Favourite Love Poems, edited by Daisy Goodwin (Penguin), at twelfth Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid (Faber), and at sixteenth The Nation's Favourite Poems edited by Griff Rhys Jones (BBC Books).
And at number one place among the non-fiction hardbacks you'll discover Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, which Faber released in an initial print-run of 50,000 and which, because of demand, they're already reprinting.
Still, it would be easy to get too excited about these things. Hughes is currently all the rage simply because of the media hype about his relationship with Sylvia Plath, and I fancy that those who rushed out and bought the book in hopes of lurid revelations will find themselves disappointed, if not bemused, by a series of poems that require rigorous reading before they yield their less-than-sensational observations and insights.
In other words, most of the purchasers of Birthday Letters will feel cheated at discovering that Ted Hughes is not, in fact, Andrew Morton and will thus revert to their original position of staying as far away from poetry as possible.
As for the two anthologies - I can't really imagine what they're doing on the bestseller list and can only suppose they were bought as last-minute Valentine's Day presents. Let's see if they're still on the list in a month's time.
Meanwhile, in this country, Hodges Figgis has released a list of the thirty books that sold most copies in its Dawson Street store in 1997, and it's heartening to see that nineteen of them were Irish and that nine of them came from Irish publishers.
Chief among the Irish bestsellers was Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, which is hardly surprising, given that since its publication it hasn't been off the bestseller lists on either side of the Irish sea. And the huge popularity of Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark is also predictable.
But it's refreshing to see some less obviously commercial books selling so well - Cork University Press's truly splendid Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (worth every penny of its £35 asking price) was the tenth most popular book of the year, while the first volume of Roy Foster's Yeats biography made it to twenty-eighth place.
If you want to know the full list, it's on Hodges Figgis's first e-mail newsletter - circulated to members of the store's new website book club, this first issue has already reached book lovers in in Japan, Australia, the US and India. The e-mail address is: hfclubhodgesfiggis.ie, while you can locate their website at: http://www.hodgesfiggis.com.
Where would we be without Joycean scholarship? From European Joyce Studies 7: New Perspectives on Dubliners, I offer you the thoughts of Marie-Dominique Garnier. Her essay is entitled "From Paralysis to Para-Lire: Another Reading of `A Mother' " and she's worried that "an ontological drop or loss seems to be at stake in Joyce's choice of the indefinite article in the title of the story". Confused? Well, let Marie-Dominique explain what she means:
" `A' reacts against a substantification and determination, while providing oblique inroads into motherhood as a form of otherness, or other/authorship, once a pre-Wakean exercise in verbal cut-up has been carried out on the title. In the last segment of Finnegans Wake linguistic molecules and particles resist the return of the substantive, the law of `the,' the deixis of fatherhood - which might be called THE-ology. Conversely, (m)other/ness implies an absence of determination."
I couldn't have put it better myself.
Some upcoming events. Garrison Keillor will be in the Gate Theatre tomorrow night reading from his new novel, Wobegon Boy, giving renditions of American art songs and answering questions about the US of A and his place in it. If there are any tickets left, you'll find them in Waterstone's at £5 each.
And next Friday, Nobel prize-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer will be reading from her new book, The House Gun, at Trinity College's Walton Theatre (tickets £2 each from Waterstone's, redeemable against the price of the book).
Just to let you know that the adjudicators for this year's Kerry Ingredients Award are eminent novelist and short-story writer William Trevor and Radio 1 Arts Show series producer Ann Walsh.
The award, worth £4,000, is for a work of fiction by an Irish author published between March 1st 1997 and March 1st 1998, and will be presented at this year's Listowel Writers' Week, which takes place from May 27th to 31st.