Poetry, dead? We beg to disagree

A hundred years after ‘The Waste Land’, these 10 talented poets are following in TS Eliot’s footsteps

Tomorrow night some 2,000 people will gather in our nation’s capital to hear new poems. Do not be alarmed. This is normal. Every January, poetry-lovers pile into the Royal Festival Hall to watch 10 authors in the running for the £25,000 TS Eliot Prize, the UK’s richest award for a volume of verse. All this must baffle the New York Times, which proclaimed in December that “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month”, fingering Eliot as the culprit and his 1922 poem The Waste Land as the murder-weapon.

Poetry didn’t die with The Waste Land – it just sounds different now. Eliot’s polyvocal poem had the working title He Do the Police In Different Voices. Different voices – not just styles, but voices; cadences, accents, dialects – define this year’s shortlisted books. They take familiar forms and fill them with words from Nigeria and Northern Ireland, London estates and Trinidad.

James Conor Patterson’s debut Bandit Country (Picador, £10.99) is peppered with what Patterson calls “a dirty mélange of English, Irish, Ulster Scots and Shelta”. It’s the noise of “hammers,/bitsa sheathin, casin nails”, the sound of his hometown, Newry, Co Down. Patterson ventures further – from “yer toffee nut latte” in today’s London to 1930s Hollywood – but the pull of home is inescapable. The book’s motto could be the line he imagines spoken by a sprouting yew aril: “My God, this is where I’m rooted.”

“We shall all be rooted in this well of hours,” writes Anthony Joseph, thinking about mortality, memory and family in Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury, £9.99). Albert was the poet’s semi-estranged Trinidadian father, who leaps from every page here: frustrating, unknowable, funny, larger-than-life. In one poem, we might see him “pickling pig foot for souse [...] or grinning at a policewoman on the beach”.

Yomi Sode’s debut Manorism (Penguin, £12.99) invents a word, “aneephya”, for an imagined toxin caused by inherited trauma, a striking symbol running through a book that begins with a prayer in Yoruba and takes us to a chicken-shop in Peckham where “Paddy mi dey vent that the mother of his pikin wants nothing to do with his culture”. Culture is central here: in a 30-page sequence about a greataunt’s death from cancer, the family’s reluctance to discuss illness is called “that cultural thing”.

Family and sickness are also at the heart of Denise Saul’s The Room Between Us (Pavilion, £9.99), pained by what’s unsaid. “What you leave out is everything,” Saul writes, in one of several poems about her mother, whose stroke left her with aphasia. A numbed blankness is what gives these poems their poignancy. Elsewhere, her life is reflected in fables; we meet a god, “the same one who gave us the Word and took it away when we sat in the garden where bindweed climbed the wall”.

Every spare word has been stripped from Mark Pajak’s Slide (Jonathan Cape, £12). His lines are whittled down smooth, heavy on monosyllables. Listen: “I find a live rifle shell/like a gold seed in the earth.//So I load it into my mouth.” Beautiful, but unsettling – like most of these poems’ vivid, troubling vignettes. Two boys kiss in a toolshed; a slaughterhouse-worker flinches at public showers; a photographer drowns; a barman ignores the predator spiking a woman’s drink; we watch it all, somehow complicit.

Slide is the most polished debut here, but the newcomer I’m keenest to see more from is Victoria Adukwei Bulley, whose Quiet (Faber & Faber £10.99) surprises me more on each reading, with its unusual phrasemaking. She can do keen-eyed contemporary observation (applying hair relaxer, “watching the mirror/from under the eaves/of our alkaline cream hats”) and oblique myth-allegory (“Fabula” takes us “below/the dreadful scope of the visible”). Odes to a snail and a mosquito made me laugh; “Six Weeks”, an elegy for a “wantable & imminent” foetus, very nearly reduced me to tears. Quiet is uneven in the best way; Bulley tries everything, not yet pinned down by a defining style.

By contrast, Philip Gross has long since found his groove. His 27th collection, The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe, £12), muses on shadows and light, reflections and absences in a John Glenday-ish way. Ideas and gestures recur. “The road/is nothing but a going”; rain is “almost nothing”; in another poem, the sky is “so much almost nothing”. But when he strays out of this via negativa, Gross finds excellent images: lamp posts, “with their melancholy down-regard”, look like “Fin de siècle aesthetes, elegantly pained by us – how banal, look, a car”.

In Wilder (Pavilion, £9.99), Jemma Borg writes with a painter’s eye of “brute, smudged earth” at Broadwater Warren, of grass “tutting/with its many wet tongues”, but saves her best writing for the human species: “My son in his ancient world is swallowing dreams” is a terrific womb-with-aview poem with the same kick as Dylan Thomas’s “Before I knocked”; the poet’s unborn son “coils at my navel, the pendulums/ of his legs accruing bone, his soft hands/shuddering at his face”.

Like her Vertigo & Ghost, Fiona Benson’s third collection Ephemeron (Cape, £12) is split between nature, motherhood and Greek myth. But few poets write on these themes so brilliantly; Benson’s urgent compassion makes us care, whether she’s writing about the minotaur’s tragic mother Pasiphae, or watching a caddisfly hatch “beyond its hovelled self,/ hurtling gold”. Ephemeron is my favourite here, but the most likely winner might be the quiet yet assured England’s Green (Faber, £10.99). Meshing language and landscape with the deftness of his Heaney-esque debut Us, Zaffar Kunial’s second collection reads England’s hedges as “Thorned blank verse, strange runes, folioed text”. If you’ve drifted away from contemporary poetry, this book might win you back round.