The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The contenders for T S Eliot’s crown
Poetry’s top prize is awarded on Monday. Will the winner take us to Mesopotamia or the Caribbean?
In 30 years of the TS Eliot Prize, it’s striking that it took until 2015 for a first book, Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade, to be the winner. From then on, a prize that had typically been awarded to works by established poets became gradually more accessible to debutants, with five on last year’s shortlist, and two this year.
In this, the £25,000 prize has reflected a current of feeling among readers and writers impatient with the half-imaginary Establishment that now seems to have been overthrown. If at times subject matter in itself seems to be viewed as a guarantee of artistic success, this too is a reflection of popular sentiment.
Two books on this year’s list – by Katie Farris and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin – are technically too short to be admissible – an oversight, apparently, but one the chair of the judges, Paul Muldoon, took in his stride, calling them “fully achieved poetry collections that merit their inclusion on the shortlist”.
Farris’s title, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Pavilion, £10.99), makes the book sound like a New Age self-help manual, though nowadays maybe that’s shrewd marketing. The work itself, though, is wholly serious: the subject is the author’s breast cancer: “Will you be / my death, breast? / I had asked you / in jest and in response / you hardened – a test / of my resolve? Malignant / magnificent palimpsest.” Emily Dickinson is a presiding spirit for Farris. There is fine, resourceful writing here, recalling an earlier grave-haunted American poet, James Wright, but there are too many slighter pieces, given the book’s brevity.
The Irish poet Jane Clarke is a stoic, taking the long view, as befits her farming background. In her third collection, A Change in the Air (Bloodaxe, £10.99), she goes against the grain of tradition by marrying a woman. When the poet’s parents visit to meet her wife, her father builds them a stone wall “hearted with spalls” – splinters and fragments. This richly ambiguous phrase stands out among restrained and uninsistent poems mining fundamental themes – love, loss, war, rural life – without ever raising her voice. For admirers, these are virtues; to the doubter, the naturalness can feel too long rehearsed, and the book itself simply too long. The syntax needs more variation, and the music is at times taken for granted.
Kit Fan’s The Ink Cloud Reader (Carcanet, £12.99) offers an oblique, melancholy lyricism, a poetry partly of exile – born in Hong Kong, Fan now lives in York – with the art residing in the understatement. While it’s undeniably attractive, there’s a nagging sense that some of the ground is too easily claimed without escaping the commonplace. “The Art of Descent”, with its stepped tercets, invites comparison with William Carlos Williams’s “Of Asphodel”, but wants the tension and the exactitude of line to quite carry it off: “we keep looking back // but fail to translate what / gravity and fiction do / to the stream”.
Ishion Hutchinson’s previous collections have been laden with awards. He has been seen as the successor to Derek Walcott as the leading poet of the Caribbean. Certainly, Hutchinson’s work has the heft earned by an understanding of form and musicality. School of Instructions (Faber, £12.99) takes its epigraph from Ecclesiastes: “Some there be, which have no memorial.” The book traces and memorialises the fate of West Indian volunteers who fought in Palestine and Mesopotamia in the First World War: “the battalion stood thousands of restless shadows casting no shadows upon the sand.” In the 1990s, but in the same imaginative space, Godspeed, an isolated boy bullied at school, begins perhaps to lay the ground for the work we are reading. As well as to the Bible, Hutchinson’s prose poems, or versicles, clearly owe something to Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns as a means of placing the imagination in history.
Jason Allen-Paisant’s SelfPortrait as Othello (Carcanet, £12.99) is less certain of its ground, exploring and pondering identity in the Europe that enslaved the ancestors of the contemporary “Othello”, a man with no father, adrift in Parisian academia and nightclubs, with “the brawn / of an intellectual rude boy sturdier in brain-work / than in war”, and perceived as sexually exotic. It’s only his second collection; as yet, Allen-Paisant lacks Hutchinson’s formal dexterity, and this may in part be why Self-Portrait as Othello sometimes reads as extended notes for a project, necessarily incomplete, rather than a finished work.
The thematic collection has become more widespread in recent years. In More Sky (Carcanet,
£11.99), Joe Carrick-Varty’s subject is his father’s suicide and its permanent reverberations. The dead man has left behind a prison for his son. We learn a little background – that his father was neither Irish nor British, that he was a violent alcoholic whose sudden acts of tenderness made his unpredictable rage more frightening, and that his recourse to violence was inherited. Carrick-Varty’s first collection shows how the idea and the fact of suicide dominate every facet of experience, the word “suicide” substituting itself unpredictably for other, apparently harmless terms (“he will fold / suicide between two pieces / of paper”). It’s harrowing and engaging in equal measure, evoking a poetic fugue state. This might explain the book’s second half, which revisits the material in a different form, to rather less effect.
A previous winner, Sharon Olds, returns with Balladz (Jonathan Cape, £12), a huge book where, isolated by Covid, she contemplates her own mortality following the death of a lover. Olds exhibits the same unshockable curiosity as ever. When she climbs into the lover’s deathbed, her scrutiny is tender but unrelenting. She approaches 80 “between boyfriends”, the phrase wryly insisting on the continuity between the adolescent girl and the woman in old age dismayed at the
idea that there is no sex after death. Other poems are ambushed by obsessive memories of her mother’s violence. Olds disclaims technique, though fascinating work inspired by Dickinson shows she knows what she’s about. More often, she trusts in instinctive rightness – powerful at times, but not always reliably sustained. Some of the declarations of liberal guilt at a world become nightmarish seem crass. Does Olds care? I doubt it: sincerity is for her an article of faith.
The prolific Fran Lock’s Hyena! (Poetry Bus, £8.50) has a superabundance of furious, vengeful energy that sends her allusive, grimly omniscient poems scorching down the page through the smoking wreckage of politics, cities, sex, misogyny and anything else foolish enough to get in their way. Lock’s hyena is herself a kind of Fury, unquenchable and beyond the claims of easy definition. A vigorous sense of line and cadence keeps the show on the road, and Lock’s a terrific phrasemaker, see: “the kind of managed / deviance morons think is gutsy”.
In The Map of the World (Gallery Press, £11.95), the doyenne of Irish poetry Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, now in her 80s, is as ever writing powerfully and beautifully. She’s a poetic world-maker, inducting the reader into a landscape where myth and history are as present as the weather. In the title poem, “The map had already told us what would happen to the peoples of the west – / long promontories hurrying them out into the salty ocean fields, / roads that twisted around inlets constantly promising a place to rest / and yet invention does not falter”. Nor does it: there is Irish emigration to follow to east and west, while echoes “listen to the places we came from, their stories elbowing each other out of the way”. Ní Chuilleanáin’s inimitable poems, even at their most local, keep an ear out for the epic in the detail.
Abigail Parry’s I Think We’re Alone Now (Bloodaxe, £12) is witty and accomplished, revealing the imagination at serious play rather than passively enduring events and feelings. Parry explores the idea of poetry as a game, but one whose outcome is to deliver the player to the chill of mortality – “the harm that’s coming to you up the stair”. It’s very funny and very dark. She’s a metaphysical poet: cosmology, sex, time and the subjunctive mood are all summoned to the page, revealing and withholding themselves by turns.
More than this, Parry’s grasp of form is a delight, like watching a fly-fisher playing a lure on the water until the quarry surrenders itself and is completed in doing so. It’s a great pleasure to encounter work that uses the full keyboard like this. Parry’s is the outstanding collection here.