Horizon Review contributors’ books of the year, Part 2

Continuing the round up of the favourite reads of Horizon Review Issue 5 contributors – it’s a wonderful mix! Poetry, story, memoir, history, urban studies and architecture, photography, biography… and a few older things thrown in as well – the delights of the year.

Rob Mackenzie

Terrance Hayes: Lighthead (Penguin USA)
Steve Spence:  A Curious Shipwreck (Shearsman)
James Sheard: Dammtor (Cape)

Three books of poems, not chopped-up prose or painstakingly tedious exercises; each distinctive, serious, humorous, entertaining, never dull or formulaic, and hard to classify within any poetic genre.

Steven Maxwell

The Pregnant Widow (Martin Amis): A savvy and humorous look at the sexual revolution. Sentence for sentence, Amis writes better than anyone.

Invisible (Paul Auster): Paradoxical and tortuous in its construction, this work of metafiction is Auster’s finest in a decade.

Point Omega (Don Delillo): An intricate, erudite, and subtly foreboding novella. It’s terseness and haiku-like structure only add to its ghostliness.

Ben Mazer

Three new books of poems which I derived immense pleasure from this year were Annie Freud’s The Mirabelles (Picador), Bill Berkson’s Portrait and Dream, and Pam Brown’s Authentic Local. Bill Berkson’s collected, spanning his entire career (1959-2009), is not to be missed.

Matt Merritt

My books of the year are:
In The Wake Of The Day, by John Ash (Carcanet): the familiar clash of past and present, better than ever.
Difficult Second Album, by Simon Turner (Nine Arches): not difficult, just assured and exuberant.
The Peregrine, by J A Baker (Harper Collins): republished with The Hill Of Summer, the writer’s diaries, and notes. Like one vast prose poem.

Nuala Ní Chonchúir

Here are my picks: Room, by Emma Donoghue (Picador, 2010): a brilliant novel. The child narrator’s voice is authentic, sweet and clever. The story is tense and harrowing and gave me nightmares, but it is also hopeful and well executed. Deserving of the hype. And The Night Post, by Matthew Sweeney (Salt 2010): 171 pages of Sweeney’s fantastical, irreverent, crafted, surreal poems. What more could you ask for?

Sophie Nicholls

Sarah Bakewell’s magnificent How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, is a biography of Montaigne’s Essays as much as of Montaigne himself. Pascale Petit’s What the Water Gave Me celebrates how art transmutes and transforms painful experiences. And Eizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories, with its innovative structure and brilliantly discerned detail, shows compassion for our secret inner lives.

Ian Parks

John Lucas is a poet, academic and editor of Shoestring Press. In Next Year Things Will Be Better he looks back at that ‘grey decade’ the 1950′s and finds vibrancy, colour and jazz amid the austerity. Alexei Sayle’s autobiography, Stalin Ate My Homework is moving, candid and hilarious. Andrew Oldham’s Ghosts of a Low Moon is an excellent debut from a young poet whose themes are deepened by an acute awareness of persisting memory and history.

Andrew Philip

My book of the year is a 2009 publication, but it’s the one that hit me the most. It’s Sarah Gabriel’s Eating Pomegranates: A Memoir of Mothers, Daughters and Genes. Gabriel beat me to the Scottish Arts Council first book award with this, and it’s easy to see why. The book – a memoir of her struggle with an hereditary form of breast cancer – is pitch perfect, honest, gripping and powerful.

Máire T. Robinson

Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: A Novel: Marilyn Chin’s Californian coming-of-age tale, influenced by Chinese folklore and Buddhist fables, is irreverent, poignant and laugh-out-loud funny.

Patti Smith’s Just Kids charts her journey from poet to rock-star – a tender portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe, and their symbiotic evolution as artists.

My Father He Killed Me, My Mother She Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, ed. Kate Bernheimer: possibly my favourite book title of the year. These re-imagined stories from 40 writers are an entertaining, disturbing, engaging read.

Aidan Rooney

I recommend Mary O’Donoghue’s début novel Before the House Burns (Lilliput Press), for the elegance of its prose and its crochet of emotions; Daniel Tobin’s fifth collection of poetry, Belated Heavens (Four Way Books), for poems that sidestep the lyric self to larger, metaphysical and historical concerns; and I want to give a shoutout to ourboy Padraig Rooney’s latest collection of poems, The Fever Wards (Salt), his best trek yet in verse.

Eimear Ryan

Justin Taylor’s story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (Harper Perennial) is New York hipster-lit of the highest calibre – funny, strange and sharply observed. Emma Donoghue’s Room (Picador) manages to be both uplifting and desperately unsettling, and Suzanne Collins closes her YA trilogy, The Hunger Games, with the pacy and impressively uncompromising Mockingjay (Scholastic).

David Secombe

The only genuinely new book on my list is Owen Hatherley’ magisterial condemnation of Blairite town planning A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso). A book new to me is V.S. Pritchett and Evelyn Hofer’s limpidly beautiful 1965 photographic survey, London Perceived: an unsung classic. Thirdly, Jad Adams’ biography of Ernest Dowson, Madder Music, Stronger Wine, which I re-read after hearing Adams’ moving speech at the re-dedication of Dowson’s grave in September.

Andrew Shields

I read most of Brad Leithauser’s novel The Art Student’s War on a long plane flight, and it was perfect. The book also sent me back to his poetry, which is “enticing and entertaining.”

Three more poet’s novels that I read this year were Ciaran Carson’s Shamrock Tea, Fishing for Amber, and The Pen Friend. I love Carson’s verse novel For All We Know, so it was great to discover his prose novels – like a more celebratory W.G. Sebald.

Angela Topping

Hourglass and Sandgrain by Penelope Shuttle (Bloodaxe). Many of these poems are elegies for the poet’s husband, Peter Redgrove. Despite her great loss, Shuttle is optimistic, believing she will one day reach happiness as small as ‘wren-song’.

What the Water Gave Me by Pascale Petit (Seren) introduced me to Frida Kahlo; the poems mediate her work so beautifully that I cannot imagine being without them.

The Birth Machine by Elizabeth Baines (Salt). This novella is a powerful argument against the medicalisation of birth and the way medical ethics can forget about the person.

Peter Vilbig

I loved Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, a disjointed story of loss, held together by sterling prose and compelling characters. The title story in Roberto Bolaño’s The Return is a love story – involving necrophilia, and no gimmickry. And J.M.G. Le Clezio’s first novel, The Interrogation, is about a man who is uncertain whether he’s an escaped resident from an asylum or a soldier released from the war.

Chrissy Williams

My first two books of the year are easy: Kei Miller’s A Light Song of Light (Carcanet) and Chris McCabe’s a play for voices, Shad Thames: Broken Wharf (Penned in the Margins). Both wield language in powerful and affecting ways. The third is trickier, but I’ll choose Infinite Difference (Shearsman) edited by Carrie Etter – it’s packed full of interesting voices and forms.

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