Tag: Forward Prize
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Parallel forms in Victoria Chang’s ‘with my back to the world’
Content warning: this post discusses suicide Victoria Chang’s with my back to the world won the 2024 Forward Prize for Poetry. It’s a collection of poetry that is ekphrastic at its core: all the poems respond to fine art. Chang is only looking at one painter throughout the collection. Agnes Martin was an American abstract…
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The between spaces in Jason Allen-Paisant’s ‘Self-Portrait as Othello’
Jason Allen-Paisant won the 2023 Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for “Self-Portrait as Othello,” joining poets Sean O’Brien and Seamus Heaney in this rare accomplishment. His collection explores identity, racism, and coming-of-age in a foreign country, using space on the page to enhance the thematic caesurae and embodying the struggle of the ‘other’ in…
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Mirror mirror: the ‘reverso’ poem in Kim Moore’s ‘All the Men I Never Married’
All night a bird beats its wingsbehind the wall. In the space between roomsit has the quietest scream. (I realise I cannot livewithout desire.) At first I think it’s trappedbehind the wall. Is it another birdthat moves, that seems to fall and rise again?I am hiding somethingin the mirror. In the morningI am searching for…
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Top 5 blogs of 2020
The new year will soon be heralded by new blogs from me. But for now, here’s a list of my Top 5 blogs of 2020 according to views. Apart from anything else, the list provides an interesting snapshot of last year’s popular and thought-provoking books … Enjoy, and thanks for reading this blog in 2020!…
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(Post-)postmodernist elegy: Stephen Sexton’s ‘If All the World and Love Were Young’
Stephen Sexton’s If All The World and Love Were Young (Penguin, 2019) has proven phenomenally successful, having won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and being shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. And yet, it is not an easy poetry collection, proving both difficult in terms of its style and allusive references, and…