T. S. Eliot Shortlist 2020

 TS Eliot prize unveils 'unsettling, captivating' shortlist

Judges say the 10 poetry collections nominated for £25,000 award are ‘as urgent as they are artful’

by Alison Flood

Thu 15 Oct 2020

Judges for the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize: Mona Arshi, Andrew McMillan, Lavinia Greenlaw - (Chair)

The prestigious TS Eliot prize has revealed a shortlist that shows that poetry is “the most resilient, potent, capacious and universal art we have”.

Announcing the 10 titles in the running for the £25,000 award for the year’s best collection, the most valuable prize in British poetry, the poet and chair of judges, Lavinia Greenlaw, said the jury had been “unsettled, captivated and compelled” by the books they chose.

“When the pandemic hit, certain concerns of ours began to seem rather trivial,” said Greenlaw, who together with the poets Mona Arshi and Andrew McMillan read 153 collections to come up with the shortlist. “We had to be convinced by them as relevant in a profoundly changed world, which meant that we had to be able to connect with them at the level of essential human experience, which is where I believe poetry is really produced, and poetry is really received.”

JO Morgan was shortlisted for The Martian’s Regress, which explores what becomes of humans when they lose their humanity, as a colonist journeys back from Mars to abandoned Earth. “Waking from his nightmare / The pressing blackness of the air / Failed to hide the martian from himself. / The nightmare too had woken,” writes Morgan.

Will Harris was chosen for his first collection RENDANG, which draws on his Anglo-Indonesian heritage to explore issues including race, culture, memory and identity. Two other first collections also make the cut: Ella Frears’s intimate Shine, Darling, and Daisy Lafarge’s Life Without Air, which investigates suffocating relationships and toxic environments.

Natalie Diaz – already shortlisted for the Forward prize – was chosen for her look at desire, environmental destruction and Native American culture, Postcolonial Love Poem, while Sasha Dugdale was chosen for Deformations, which puts Homer’s Odyssey alongside the life and work of the controversial English artist Eric Gill.

Poetry has been “under pressure to adapt and respond to a rapidly changing world”, Greenlaw said, “but also to a world in which there is a great deal of silencing and under-representation. And now is a particularly exciting time because we have these voices emerging that are as urgent and new as they are artful.”

Greenlaw said there was an assumption of a “divide between poetry as literary, and poetry that is culturally or politically engaged”.

“It is hard to write good, powerful poetry that is explicitly politically engaged,” she said. “But these poets are all political. And they’re all artful.”

The shortlist for the prize, which is run by the TS Eliot Foundation, is completed with How the Hell Are You, the new collection from Glyn Maxwell, Shane McCrae’s Sometimes I Never Suffered, Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart, in which Kapil explores the relationship between an immigrant guest and a citizen host, and Wayne Holloway-Smith’s Love Minus Love.

“People talk about the obscurity and difficulty of poetry, and yet when we are in extremis, we write and read poems, even if we’ve never written or read them before,” Greenlaw said. The collections had been written in the world before Covid-19, she added, but the “urgency and vitality of the 10 books on this shortlist commanded our attention nonetheless … Poetry is the most resilient, potent, capacious and universal art we have.”

Last year’s award was won by Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise, which judges praised for “finding in the bitterness of everyday experience continuing evidence of ‘sweet, sweet life’”. This year’s winner will be unveiled in January.

The shortlist in full:

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (Faber & Faber)

Deformations by Sasha Dugdale (Carcanet Press)

Shine, Darling by Ella Frears (Offord Road Books)

RENDANG by Will Harris (Granta Poetry)

Love Minus Love by Wayne Holloway-Smith (Bloodaxe Books)

How to Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil (Pavilion Poetry)

Life Without Air by Daisy Lafarge (Granta Poetry)

How the Hell Are You by Glyn Maxwell (Picador Poetry)

Sometimes I Never Suffered by Shane McCrae (Corsair Poetry)

The Martian’s Regress by JO Morgan (Cape Poetry)






Click here to read this article at The Guardian website

Click here to read a review of  Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz in The Guardian

Click here to read a review of Shine, Darling by Ella Frears from her publisher

Click here to read a short review of RENDANG by Will Harris from The Guardian

Click here to read a review of Love Minus Love by Wayne Holloway-Smith from Bloodaxe

Click here to read a short review of The Martian’s Regress by JO Morgan in The Guardian

Booker Prize shortlist 2020

The judges for the Booker Prize 2020

Margaret Bushby (Chair), Lee Child, Lemn Sissay, Sameer Rahim, Emily Wilson

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications)

This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber & Faber)

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Canongate Books)

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Picador, Pan Macmillan)

Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Originals, Daunt Books Publishing)  

The Finalists

Diane Cook

                                                                    Douglas Stuart

Avni Doshi

Tsitsi Dangarembga

Maaza Mengiste

Brandon Taylor

Sleep by Max Richter

Sleep by Max Richter has been posted to YouTube. The performance is 8 hours and 24 minutes long. Rather distressingly I discovered it's broken up with advertisements. However, I've also just discovered the whole work is also on Spotify. 

I have an account. 

Max Richter

Click here for a link to hear the whole work on YouTube

Below are a few phrases that came to me in the opening minutes

Autumn falls

scattering yellow leaves.

Afternoon light

stretched thin over the day

I open the front door

and let the cold air in.

The shrivelled day.

The window blinds are closed in the house opposite. 

Empty scaffolding 

Louise Gluck wins the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature

The Swedish Academy has chosen the American poet, citing her ‘unmistakable poetic voice’

An 'unmistakable poetic voice'

by Alison Flood

Click here to read the article in The Guardian

The poet Louise Glück has become the first American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature in 27 years, cited for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.

Glück is the 16th woman to win the Nobel, and the first American woman since Toni Morrison took the prize in 1993. The American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was a surprise winner in 2016.

One of America’s leading poets, the 77-year-old writer has won the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award, tackling themes including childhood and family life, often reworking Greek and Roman myths.

The chair of the Nobel prize committee, Anders Olsson hailed Glück’s “candid and uncompromising” voice, which is “full of humour and biting wit”. Her 12 collections of poetry, including her most recent Faithful and Virtuous Night, the Pulitzer-winning The Wild Iris, and the “masterly” Averno, are “characterised by a striving for clarity”, he added, comparing her to Emily Dickinson with her “severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith”.

“In her poems, the self listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting the illusions of the self,” Olsson said. “But even if Glück would never deny the significance of the autobiographical background, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet.”

In a short interview conducted in the early hours of Thursday morning, Glück told the Nobel prize: “My first thought was, I won’t have any friends because most of my friends are writers. But then I thought, that won’t happen. It is too new, you know? I don’t know what it means. It is a great honour. There are recipients I don’t admire. But I think of the ones I do.”

She said the winnings – 10m Swedish kronor (£870,000) – would help her buy a home in Vermont. “But mostly, I am concerned for the preservation of daily life, with people I love … it is disruptive. The phone is ringing now, squeaking into my ear.”

When asked where new readers should start, Gluck said, “I would suggest they don’t read my first book unless they want to feel contempt. But everything after that might be of interest. I like my recent work. Averno would be a place to start, or my last book Faithful and Virtuous Night.”

The news was welcomed by her fellow poets. Claudia Rankine told the Guardian that she was “so pleased”.

“Something good had to happen!” Rankine said. “She is a tremendous poet, a great mentor, and a wonderful friend. I couldn’t be happier. We are in a bleak moment in this country, and as we poets continue to imagine our way forward, Louise has spent a lifetime showing us how to make language both mean something and hold everything.”

Praising Glück’s poem The Wild Iris, Imtiaz Dharker said: “There is no easy comfort in it (or in any of her work, when I went to find more of it). What she offers instead is uncompromising clarity, especially about the slide of all living things towards death. Yet she often turns that awareness on a pin and tilts the poem to catch a different light.”

Kate Clanchy said it was “great to have a woman poet win the Nobel”.

“She is a very quotable poet – you can look her up on Instagram,” Clanchy said. “But it’s worth noting that her resonant aphorisms are always spoken by ironised voices – a wild iris, for example. Her poems are austere, difficult, very much alive. I’ve always admired her.”

Born in New York City in 1943, Glück grew up on Long Island and attended Columbia University. She has taught poetry in many universities, and is currently an adjunct professor of English at Yale. In an interview with Poets and Writers magazine, she spoke about the balance between her life and work, arguing “you have to live your life if you’re going to do original work”, because “your work will come out of an authentic life, and if you suppress all of your most passionate impulses in the service of an art that has not yet declared itself, you’re making a terrible mistake”.

“When I was young I led the life I thought writers were supposed to lead, in which you repudiate the world, ostentatiously consecrating all of your energies to the task of making art,” Glück said. “I just sat in Provincetown at a desk and it was ghastly – the more I sat there not writing the more I thought that I just hadn’t given up the world enough. After two years of that, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be a writer. So I took a teaching job in Vermont, though I had spent my life till that point thinking that real poets don’t teach. But I took this job, and the minute I started teaching – the minute I had obligations in the world – I started to write again.”

President Barack Obama presents poet Louise Glück with the National Humanities Medal in 2016. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The award will mark a change for a writer who has often avoided the spotlight. When Glück was appointed as US poet laureate in 2003, she said she had “no concern with widening audience”, and that she preferred her audience “small, intense, passionate”.

At Glück’s UK publisher Carcanet, which has published the poet for more than two decades, Michael Schmidt said staff were “completely surprised” at the news but also “astonished at the justice of the win”.

“What the Academy seems to have done is they’ve gone for a poet who is, in a sense, aesthetically, imaginatively, at odds with the age,” Schmidt said. “She’s not a cheerleader. She’s in no way a voice for any cause – she is a human being engaged in the language and in the world. And I think there’s this wonderful sense that she is not polemical, and maybe this is what’s being celebrated. She’s not a person trying to persuade us of anything, but helping us to explore to explore the world we’re living in. She’s a clarifying poet. There doesn’t seem to be much political engagement in her poems. They’re really about the individual human being alive in the world, and in the language.”

The prize is awarded by the 18-strong Swedish Academy to the writer they deem has fulfilled the condition laid out in the somewhat murky words of Alfred Nobel’s will: to “have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.

After enduring almost three years of scandal, observers had predicted the Swedish Academy would go for a safe choice this year, with Canadian poet Anne Carson, Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid, Chinese novelist Yan Lianke, Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Japanese bestseller Haruki Murakami and perennial contender Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist, poet and playwright, named as possible winners.

The august and secretive voting body was rocked by allegations of sexual abuse and financial misconduct in 2017, culminating in the conviction of Jean-Claude Arnault, husband of academy member Katarina Frostenson, for rape in 2018. Frostenson subsequently left the Academy after she was discovered to have leaked the names of previous winners, and a string of resignations from Academy members followed, with the 2018 award postponed.

Announcing the 2018 and 2019 winners last year, the Academy was hoping for an end to criticism, with Olsson promising that the prize was moving away from a Eurocentric, male-oriented focus. Instead, they chose two European writers, the widely-acclaimed Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, and the Austrian writer Peter Handke, a choice which was widely criticised over Handke’s denial of Serb atrocities during the war in the former Yugoslavia.

Click here to read The Guardian article Louise Gluck: Where to start with an extraordinary Nobel winner by Fiona Sampson 

Obituary from The Guardian: Derek Mahon, Belfast-born giant of Irish poetry, dies aged 78 by Sian Cain

Derek Mahon, Belfast-born giant of Irish poetry, dies aged 78

Poet famed for A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford and Everything Is Going to be All Right, read on national TV as the pandemic hit, has died after a short illness

by Sian Cain

Derek Mahon. ‘Pure artist’ … poet Derek Mahon. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

Derek Mahon, the Belfast-born poet who became an immense figure in Irish poetry with poems such as A Disused Shed in Co Wexford and Courtyards in Delft, has died at the age of 78 after a short illness.

Mahon, whose poetry career spanned a half-century, was most often compared to WH Auden, Louis MacNeice and Samuel Beckett, with the critic Brendan Kennelly calling him “a Belfast Keats with a Popean sting”. Several of his poems became staples of school curricula, and, as Ireland locked down in March due to the coronavirus pandemic, RTÉ ended its evening news bulletin with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to be All Right, which includes the lines: “There will be dying, there will be dying, / but there is no need to go into that.”

His final collection, Washing Up, is due to be published later this month.

Announcing his death on Friday, Mahon’s publisher Gallery Press called him a “master poet” and a “pure artist”.

Fellow Belfast-born poet Michael Longley said: “Derek Mahon was my oldest friend in poetry. We went to the same Belfast school, and we served our poetic apprenticeships together at Trinity College Dublin. Even then, I knew that he would be one of the great lyric poets of the past century. He was always entirely focused on writing poems, never distracted by the business of ‘the poetry world’. He was a supreme craftsman. There is much darkness in his poetry, but it is set against the beauty of the world, and the formal beauty of his work. I believe that Derek’s poetry will last as long as the English language lasts.”

Poet Paul Muldoon told the Guardian: “Derek Mahon was one of the great poets in English, one of the few whose technical brilliance was somehow adequate to the successive terrors of our age.”

Critic and poet David Wheatley, meanwhile, paid tribute to “his endlessly inventive, witty and humane poems.

“His work emerged just as Northern Ireland was collapsing into civil strife, and in his classic early books – Night-Crossing, Lives, The Snow Party – Mahon alternates thrillingly between dandyish detachment and a reckoning with visceral forces with the power to overwhelm all art. There are many Mahons – he is a latter-day metaphysical poet, a belated French symbolist, a poet-philosopher of the overlooked and undervalued carving a refuge from a hostile world in the green shade of his Kinsale home,” he said.

Born in 1941 and raised in the Protestant inner suburbs of Belfast, Mahon attended Royal Belfast Academical Institution. He then went to Trinity College Dublin, where he befriended Longley, who would later describe them inhaling with their “untipped Sweet Afton cigarettes MacNeice, Crane, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Larkin, Lawrence, Graves, Ted Hughes, Stevens, Cummings, Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, as well as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Brecht, Rilke”. While tales of “The Group” – young Irish poets including Seamus Heaney, Mahon and Longley who gathered at the Belfast home of Queen’s University lecturer Philip Hobsbaum – would be repeated in stories about their professional ascent, Mahon disputed the period’s significance: “The way that story is told, we were terrified provincial ignoramuses who needed someone from Cambridge to get us going.”

Mahon published the book Twelve Poems in 1965 and gained critical acclaim three years later for Night-Crossing, published while he was working as an English teacher in a Belfast high school. Mahon later described the collection as his “horrible, scatterbrained first book”, though it contained many of the themes he would touch on for the rest of his career: alienation, outcasts and the nature of art. He frequently revised his own work, with one critic quipping that Mahon showed “scant respect for the artist as a young Mahon”.

“Mahon was fond of Heraclitus’s dictum that we can never step twice into the same river, and thanks to his endless self-revisions it often feels like we can never step twice into the same Mahon poem either,” Wheatley said. “A deeper explanation for this, however, is the abiding joyous freshness and surprise of his classic poems, which will endure and inspire.”

He followed Night-Crossing with Lives (1972), The Snow Party (1975), Courtyards in Delft (1981) and Antarctica (1985). The Snow Party features his most celebrated poem, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, which examines a cluster of mushrooms locked in an abandoned country hotel shed.

Mahon also worked as a journalist – for the BBC, New Statesman and even briefly for Vogue magazine – a translator and a screenwriter for television, adapting novels by Elizabeth Bowen and Jennifer Johnston.

A burst of productivity in the 2000s saw him publish four award-winning collections in five years: Harbour Lights, Somewhere the Wave, Life on Earth and An Autumn Wind; a body of work the Guardian called “one of the most significant developments in poetry this century”.

After living in France, England and New York, he settled in Kinsale, County Cork, where he lived for decades. He remained carefully neutral on Irish and Northern Irish politics, telling the Guardian in 2015: “I never put a name to my own position and I still can’t, which suits me fine.”

“When growing up, my bunch of friends would have thought of ourselves as anti-unionist because we were anti-establishment. We would have been vaguely all-Ireland republican socialists. But then, when theory turned into practice, we had to decide where we stood and I never did resolve it for myself … from time to time you get a kick from some critic for not being sufficiently political, or for being a closet unionist or a closet republican. There was a time when people – much more English people than Irish – would ask, ‘Why don’t these Ulster poets come out more explicitly and say what they are for?’ But there is all this ambiguity. That is poetry. It is the other thing that is the other thing.”

Click here to read this obituary in The Guardian

A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford by Derek Mahon

Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels
Seferis — 'Mythistorema'
For J.G. Farrell

Even now there are places where a thought might grow —
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped forever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something —
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door growing strong —
'Elbow room! Elbow room!'
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.

A half-century, without visitors, in the dark —
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flashbulb firing squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
'Save us, save us,' they seem to say,
'Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!'

Click here for a reading of the poem by Stephen Rea