Tag: T.S. Eliot Prize
-
No pain, no poetry: nostalgia in Karen Solie’s ‘Wellwater’ and Vidyan Ravinthiran’s ‘Avidya’
For the first time, in 2025 the Forward Prize for Poetry was jointly awarded. From an initial glance, Karen Solie’s Wellwater—which also won the 2025 T.S. Eliot Prize—and Vidyan Ravinthiran’s Vidya have little in common. Wellwater charts the speaker’s memories of growing up in ?Edmonton, Canada, whilst also reckoning with the damage the anthropocene is…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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.
-
Dancing the night away: Joelle Taylor’s ‘C+nto & Othered Poems’
Joelle Taylor’s C+nto & Othered Poems (The Westbourne Press, 2021) won the 2022 T.S. Eliot Prize. It offers a searing history of butch culture in the 1980s and after, with both tragedy, epiphany, and liberation tracking across its 121 pages. It is a collection that stores tragedy at its core, especially in the magisterial scene…
-
Pre-reading and re-reading Michael Longley’s ‘The Candlelight Master’
As I read the contents of Michael Longley’s ‘The Candlelight Master’, two things struck me. First, that I was pre-reading the poems by virtue of their mapping in the contents. Second, that I was pre-reading the contents by virtue of my prior knowledge of Longley’s poetry. This blog is about the first of these.