Modern poetry: here’s your starter for 10

Schoolroom sonnets, poetic Pringles and an ode to Soho are all jostling for the £25,000 TS Eliot Prize

The TS Eliot Prize is poetry’s Booker, the richest award for a book of verse published in the UK. I wonder what Eliot himself, that allusive polyglot, would make of its current rules, which frown on allusion and polyglottery. “Any poetry inspired by the work of one or more other writers” must somehow be calculated and capped at “20 per cent” of the book. This would bar several stand-out shortlistees of the past decade: Daljit Nagra’s Ramayana, Alice Oswald’s version of the Iliad, Simon Armitage’s The Death of King Arthur. The rule that books must be “in English” also elbows out a lot of interesting work: Harry Josephine Giles’s recent Deep Wheel Orcadia,a sci-fi verse novel in Orkney dialect, for instance. Next year, why not broaden the field?

Still, there’s beauty to be found on this year’s shortlist, even if it offers a more formally conservative snapshot of modern poetry than the 2021 lineup. Of these 10 books, two are written almost entirely in pentameter; half use rhyme; most feature first-person reminiscences about the poet’s family. They deal with difficult experiences, but none are “difficult” books. They’re less concerned with ripping up the lyric tradition than exploring its possibilities. That said, Selima Hill is a good argument against reinventing the wheel. She was last shortlisted in 2001, and since then, the Hill poem has hardened into a form as fixed as the limerick or haiku: a couplet or two of unrhymed pentameter, sketching a character or state of mind, hinging on an alarming image. Here’s all of “Crab”: “I pray he doesn’t offer me the crab./ I pray he doesn’t even mention it.” Poems as Pringles; one on its own seems insubstantial, even pointless, but eat a few and you become an addict. I loved Men Who Feed Pigeons (Bloodaxe, £12), Hill’s huge book of tiny poems. One sequence, “Billy”, captures the kind of sacred friendship found only between a man and woman who have nothing in common and don’t much like each other but have been friends forever and so must soldier on regardless. It’s very, very funny.

Shortlisted five times, Michael Symmons Roberts is a perennial Eliot bridesmaid. His serious puns and religious motifs are all present and correct in Ransom (Cape, £10), which has a wonderfully atmospheric sequence inspired by Messiaen’s music, in which Occupied Paris becomes a film set where Christ method-acts in close-up.

Victoria Kennefick’s Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet, £10.99) is the only debut here, and it’s terrific. One poem describes a visit to Sylvia Plath’s grave, and Plath’s shadow hangs over these prickly, bloody, self-mythologising poems, sensuous and shocking by turns. Every one hammers at the same theme (appetite), but they use it variously to explore motherhood, sex, faith and Ireland’s past, via Mary Tyler Moore and medieval mystics. We meet Catherine of Siena, who let nothing touch her lips apart from a holy relic,

Christ’s preserved foreskin: “Oh Bonaventura, I am a house of sticks,/ my bones rattle with desire until I lick it./ I feel it quiver, alive on my tongue.”

“Like a saint/ you kiss the sickliest part of me,” writes Daniel Sluman in Single Window (Nine Arches, £9.99). It’s a diary of spending month after month on the sofa with his wife, 24 hours a day, too agonised to move. He’s an amputee with chronic pain; she has Crohn’s disease and fibromymonotony algia. The window of the title was their only glimpse of the outside world. A book-length poem in free verse fragments, punctuated by Sluman’s photographs, its lines capture the stifling atmosphere of its setting with all the intimacy and bruised directness of Andrew McMillan.

Jack Underwood, meanwhile, is anything but direct; refreshingly, he shuns anecdote for freewheeling metaphor. A Year in the New Life (Faber, £10.99) is just 45 pages of poems (almost short enough to be disqualified by those pesky rules) and distilled on a line-by-line level, too. Love is “precision gratitude”; time passes “like small bones being broken in order”. Several poems offer a sweet, off-kilter response to becoming a father; others grapple with existential malaise. Underwood writes like “someone wading into a shallow sleep/ in pursuit of symbolic problems”, which is more fun than that sounds; there’s a fine-tuned, untrivial whimsy that recalls Caroline Bird.

Kevin Young, The New Yorker’s poetry editor, might have got on well with Thomas Gray. In Stones (Cape, £12) he wanders graveyards musing on mortality. Young has an exceptionally fine sense of euphony – his lines flow like water – and makes grace seem easy. But with every poem in carefully measured tercets, creeps in, not helped by a narrow range of imagery. A chimney is a “reddened finger... aimed above”; one poem’s tombstone is “a carved finger/ pointing above”; another’s is “a finger aimed/ at heaven”.

The first half of Hannah Lowe’s sonnet sequence The Kids (Bloodaxe, £9.99) is an affectionate portrait of her time teaching a class of struggling students (“Each page we read is a step up a mountain/ in gluey boots”). The second reflects on family and her own schooldays, with memorable lines on messy adolescent desire: there’s a boy whose “voice was like a shirt unbuttoning”. Lowe’s social conscience, grounded register and frank humanity recall Tony Harrison – who gets a nod in A Blood Condition (Chatto, £10), Kayo Chingonyi’s subtle follow-up to the superb Kumukanda. The condition of the title is HIV/Aids, to which the poet lost both his parents; he charts its journey from the Congo Basin in 1920 to 1980s dancefloors in a skilful crown of sonnets. Chingonyi uses the story of his family as a microcosm of history, much as Raymond Antrobus does in All the Names Given (Picador, £10.99). “You know, the Antrobuses/ owned Stonehenge”, says his grandmother; the poet traces the surname to a plantation owner in the West Indies, raising unanswerable questions about Englishness and the long legacy of the slave trade.

Written with equal parts love and anger, slam champ Joelle Taylor’s C+nto & Othered Poems (Westbourne Press, £10.99) hurls the reader through the doors of a lesbian bar in 1990s Soho. You’d swear you’ve met the regulars; you can smell the spilt beer. It’s the most uneven book here (and really could have used a sharper edit), but also the most formally experimental – and the only one that reduced me to tears.

For Lowe’s schoolkids, ‘Each page we read is a step up a mountain/ in gluey boots’