Eyewear salutes Philip Gross, for winning the latest TS Eliot Prize (worth £15,000) for poetry, for his collection The Water Table, from Bloodaxe - the publisher whose Jen Hadfield also won last year. The Eliots is becoming exciting, since dark horses and underdogs are seemingly now as likely to win as poets with names like Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. This instability of critical consensus is a good thing for UK poetry, and it is refreshing for a fine serious and dedicated poet like Gross to win.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
Comments
I couldn't agree with you more! It is so refreshing when an outsider wins one of these coveted poetry prizes. Does this mean that the hermetic cliques of British poetry - which are way past their best-before date - are belatedly being broken up?
Best wishes from Simon