Tag: poetry
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Gizzi the space man: Peter Gizzi’s ‘Fierce Elegy’
In Fierce Elegy (2023), Peter Gizzi’s 2025 T.S. Eliot prize-winning collection of poetry, the poet does many astounding things. These include his use of form, the contiguous suturing of images, and—as I will briefly show—his elaboration of space. Spatial forebear While I was reading Fierce Elegy I was reminded of the early modern English poet,…
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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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To poem: dynamic memory in Anthony Joseph’s ‘Sonnets for Albert’
Anthony Joseph’s “Sonnets for Albert” won the 2022 T.S. Eliot Prize, featuring fifty love-themed sonnets with a focus on memory and familial relationships. The poems are evocative rather than elegiac, intertwining personal and cultural memory, creating dynamic “poem-memories” that generate new meaning and understanding.
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Cellular vulnerability in ‘The Magic Border’ by Arlo Parks
Arlo Parks won the Mercury Prize in 2021 for her debut LP and then went on to release another album and a debut book of poetry in 2023. She doesn’t necessarily separate her poetry from her song lyrics. Parks suggests that her writing process is an exploration of self, referring to it as ‘cellular’. Some…
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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…