Publishers and retailers are always trying to find new ways of getting us to buy books, and Waterstone's latest wheeze is called Books To Be Out With.
As the title suggests, this aims to promote gay literature, or as the Waterstone's publicity machine more excitedly has it, it offers "a celebration of cool, contemporary and classic Gay and Lesbian writing". Curiously, no reason is given as to why such a celebration is being held at this precise moment of our history on this planet, but I suppose the selling of books is deemed reason enough.
And what it comes down to is a list of books. Well, two lists of books, actually - one called "The Boy's Club" (there are no men in the homosexual world, apparently) and one called "The Girlie Show" (no women in the lesbian world, either), with Colm Toibin's The Story of the Night holding the Irish fort in the former and Emma Donoghue flying the Irish flag in the latter. And if you buy any of the thirty listed books in a Waterstone's store before April 3rd, you'll get a 20 per cent reduction.
Great stuff, though I wonder what the next deeply meaningful and relevant Waterstone's brainwave will be - Novels Written by Men with Moustaches, perhaps, or Travel Books with Seven Words in Their Titles.
The reason why there is no review of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters in this issue of Literary Review, or in the last one, is that there was an embargo on it."
Thus states the magazine's editor, Auberon Waugh, in the current issue, explaining that "there is nothing useful to be said about a book a month after The Times has shrieked `The greatest book by our greatest living writer,' a claim backed by Andrew Motion's considered opinion: `A thunderbolt from the blue - this book will live for ever'."
He continues: "Whether our reviewer would have agreed with these exalted opinions or not, the time to produce them was while the frenzy was still on us - not a month later, when everyone has forgotten about Birthday Letters and literary editors on our `quality' newspapers are looking for something new to be excited about."
Needless to say, the irascible Mr Waugh is only getting into his stride. Musing on the Poet Laureate's recent translations from Ovid, he recalls such earlier translators as Marlowe, Dryden, Pope and Congreve, and he suggests that "by any normal standard of good manners, it would be polite not to compare Hughes with any of these. Ovid was a master of metrical form. Hughes, to put it mildly, is not."
Mr Waugh, who has seldom put anything mildly, broadens his attack by declaring "we cannot deny that poetry is in a very bad state indeed. There is nobody writing serious poetry which is any good, although it is a bit unfair on Ted Hughes if such comments are always hung on his peg. One has no desire to hurt his feelings. It is not his fault he is a rotten poet, and much of the blame must surely attach to the insecure, fashion-conscious literary establishment which encourages him to write such pretentious drivel."
Gosh, I hate such fence-sitting.
Perhaps Mr Waugh would feel more at home with Nicholas Cummins's A Wonder in the Shade: Balbriggan Poems, which has just been published. Admittedly, most of the poems don't rhyme, and Mr Waugh likes rhyme a lot, but there's a clarity here, as well as a freshness and accessibility, that I think would meet with his approval.
I liked these poems a good deal. Mr Cummins, who is head of the Spanish department at Castleknock College, is a native of Balbriggan and his love of the place and its people comes through in language that almost always avoids the obvious and often has a striking originality. I was reminded of Michael Coady, whose similar feeling for his native Carrick-on-Suir is so memorably evoked in the recently published All Souls (Gallery Press). Mr Cummins doesn't manage quite the same breadth or scope, but his achievement is to be applauded.
Applause, too, for Wavin Ireland, a company very much associated with Balbriggan and whose support made the book's publication possible. However, do we need to be reminded of their involvement on the front cover, the back cover, the title page and the following page? Could they not have piped down about it?
Astronomical advances to new fiction writers continue apace. We all know of the £409,500 given by Hodder & Stoughton to first-time Irish novelist John Connolly; now it's the turn of another young Irish novelist, Cathy Kelly.
Her debut novel, Woman to Woman, is due out next month, and Headline paid her a cool £250,000 for the privilege of publishing it - much the same sum as Penguin presented to her compatriot Marian Keyes for joining their list. Meanwhile Bantam Press will be hoping that, come Maytime, sales of The Lazarus Child by English novelist Robert Mawson will justify the £420,000 they lashed out on it. It's a mad, mad world out there in publishing.