Peter Levi
THIS year I have escaped reading any overrated books except lunatic ones about Shakespeare, which is an area that does not count. One of the best was the poems of Bei Dao (The August Sleepwalker, Anvil, £5.95), a young Chinese poet now living in exile. I am only now getting on terms with.Thomas Kinsella's New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (£5.95), a shining light among the rubbish-heap of recent Oxford Books. But the most unlikely book and the one likeliest to please Spectator readers, apart from James Fenton's poems and Hugh Johnson's History of Wine, is Francis Spufford's Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings (02.95), an extremely funny and learned assembly of lists, including the expenses of a wedding, A. S. Byatt on Miss Wells's room, Gulliver on the art of war, a prose poem on the Crystal Palace (1851), and Les A, Murray on the Achievements of the Fat. This original anthologist looks like a bank-clerk and is only 25. I vote him laureate of the year.
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