Laurel wreath for a woman?

Nobody yet knows, or probably much cares, who is going to be Britain's next Poet Laureate, but I can state with some certainty…

Nobody yet knows, or probably much cares, who is going to be Britain's next Poet Laureate, but I can state with some certainty who won't be: Australian farmer-poet Les Murray.

In a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, Mr Murray tells of learning that his name was on a "longish shortlist of possible nominees" for the post. "I'd never heard," he says, "of the position going to even a Welsh or Scots or Irish poet, still less one from the Commonwealth."

So how did he respond when the Australian media asked him about the possibility? "I stumbled a little at first, but made it clear that though I felt honoured, I'd have to decline any such appointment if offered to me. I simply didn't see Queen Elizabeth as my head of state; I didn't, in fact, believe in heads of state at all, considering that the sovereignty of nations ought to be vested in all of their citizens, as on election day."

Spoken like a true republican (with a small "r"). And he goes on: "So I couldn't feasibly be Laureate to ERII, much as I respected her as the head of a friendly foreign power."

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He then went on to say to the various media that he thought, "for what it might be worth, that a woman poet should have the job. At long last, seeing that in the 300-year-history of the Laureateship, no woman has held it."

So whom does he propose? "Elizabeth Jennings, the distinguished Oxford poet. The variety, depth and continuing vivacity of her work are astonishing, and she has a humanity, a balance that might strike just the right note for her country in times when it needs a guru."

But I thought it already had one in Tony Blair, the People's Politician who spoke so eloquently last year about the People's Princess - if perhaps not so eloquently last month about the bombing of Iraq.

Two Irish books feature among the best-selling books in Britain in 1998. Maeve Binchy's Tara Road is placed sixth in the Top Ten Hardbacks, outstripping such big names as David Attenborough, John Grisham, Bill Bryson and Terry Pratchett, and only bettered by Ted Hughes, Ainsley Harriott, Terry Pratchett (again), the Guinness Book of Records and, in inevitable first place, the ubiquitous Delia Smith.

Among the Top Ten Paperbacks, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes makes it to fifth place, beating John Gray, John Grisham, Bill Bryson, Ian McEwan and Dava Sobel, and only pipped by Louis de Bernieres, Helen Fielding, Arundhati Roy and The Little Book of Calm. Actually, Angela's Ashes has already spent a staggering eighty-two weeks in the bestseller lists, and such is its obvious appeal that I see no reason why it won't remain in them for a lot longer.

So what Irish books are likely to make an impression in 1999? Time alone will tell, but certainly the spring-summer catalogues from British publishers feature a goodly number of Irish titles, and some of these are bound to make an impact.

For instance, commercially, if not necessarily critically, Marian Keyes's new novel, Last Chance Saloon (due from Michael Joseph in July) should be a winner. Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married certainly did the business, and her publisher is ecstatically describing her as "the biggest new star in women's fiction to have emerged in the last ten years".

Then there's Irish Times journalist John Connolly, whose serial-killer-thriller, Every Dead Thing, which has just been published, gained for the author an advance of which most writers can only dream.

And still on crime fiction, Dublin doctor Paul Carson, whose first novel, Scalpel, spent seventeen weeks on the Irish best-seller lists, has a new thriller, Cold Steel, due from Heinemann in March. Murder, medicine and Irish-American relations form the backbone of the plot.

In a less obviously commercial vein, Maeve Brennan's The Springs of Affection (Flamingo, May) collects for the first time twenty-one of the author's stories, set mainly in suburban lower-middle-class Dublin. Alice Munro, one of the greatest living short-story writers, says of them: "I had forgotten how pure and strong Maeve Brennan's stories are. It is a great joy to me to have these all together."

Novels are also due from Robert McLiam Wilson, Lara Harte, Elaine Crowley, Maggie Gibson, Kate Thompson and Ruth Dudley Edwards - whose book on the Orange Order is also forthcoming - while Edna O'Brien's James Joyce, an account of his life and work, promises to "surprise and amuse".

And if your passion is poetry, Chatto & Windus are publishing Bernard O'Donoghue's third volume, Here Nor There, and Anne Haverty's first collection, The Beauty of the Moon.