Still room for the odd joke?

Tristram Fane Saunders on this year’s runners and riders for the biggest prize in poetry – the £25,000 TS Eliot award

If the 10 poets up for the UK’s richest poetry prize have anything in common, it’s that they’re worried.

Here are poems anxious about the environment, fearing the rise of fascism, haunted by the inevitability of death. (Thankfully, there’s still room for the odd joke.) Last year I complained that this prize was ignoring new writers. This year, half the books are debuts. An odd list, it omits what seemed obvious contenders: prizewinning work from J O Morgan, Robin Robertson and Danez Smith; Anne Wroe’s widely acclaimed Francis. There’s a poet laureate here, but not our one. But by ignoring the big-hitters, it shines a light on some serious and seriously accomplished poetry, a solace itself in uncertain times. Take comfort from Ailbhe Darcy’s words: “We are not doomed yet.” Kunial’s conversational debut explores how his identity has been shaped by his family’s heritage (father from Kashmir, mother from the Midlands). It’s Heaney-esque, sharing his quiet lyricism (“this light has trailed me longer than I knew”), his knack for showing a thought developing in the moment of writing, and his fascination with how etymology offers a glimpse through “the past’s/ dark, half open door”. He comes across as a bit of a young fogey (loving Dickens and George Herbert, cricket and Laird’s fourth collection is a set of dispatches from “the heated, moist robot I currently inhabit”, finding “our lifelike life” not wholly In a list dominated by Faber and Penguin, the presence of a book from Scotland’s tiny HappenStance Press is a welcome surprise. The poems in this long-awaited debut are intimate, quiet, and expressed in the simplest language, but pack the same emotional punch as Elizabeth Jennings. Half are about the loss of Moore’s husband; imagining him in a Heaven he never believed in, she feels “almost disloyal”. Moore worked for 22 years in the Foreign Office, and draws on that experience in a sequence of globe-trotting political poems; a ghazal about a riot-loving Greek dog; a echoing visit to