T.S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Announcement

The T.S. Review is pleased to share this announcement with you, below.

I am glad to see so many of the excellent poets who have supported the Oxfam Poetry Series in London over the last few years, by donating their readings, featured on this year's list, such as Polly Clark, Pascale Petit, John Stammers, Sinead Morrissey and David Harsent.

It is also interesting to see the shortlisted poets so evenly spread among the major publishing presses.

It seems a particularly strong list, though, the judges have chosen to not represent any writing by either more experimental UK poets, or those who work in the margins of performance based poetries. It represents the main stream of current British poetry, in its more lucid, lyric, form.

There is a neo-classical tendency at the moment, in the UK,which worships form, wit and order at the expense of the less-controlled aspects of imagination, content and vernacular insight - the diction of the margins, be they multicultural, multimedia, or multilingual.

That's a pity, since it would be good to have a rapprochement between various schools, or views, of poetry, in order to achieve more of a balance in the flow of the poetic tradition in Britain - at the moment, the canon has become skewed by various poetics, who cannot seem to find a common ground for their heterogenous tenors and vehicles. Surely, the ground for all poets is language?

George Szirtes gave his T.S. Eliot lecture last evening, which I was unable to attend, lecturing myself elsewhere, but I look forward to reading the full essay at some point. His theme, the figure of the skater, seems to tease out just such concerns as I voiced above.

T S Eliot Prize Shortlist Announcement

The Poetry Book Society is pleased to announce the Shortlist for the T S Eliot Prize 2005, to be awarded to the writer of the best new collection of poetry published in 2005.

Now in its thirteenth year, the T S Eliot Prize is 'poetry's most coveted award' (Jane Wheatley, The Times). Judges David Constantine (Chair), Kate Clanchy and Jane Draycott chose the following ten collections:

Polly Clark, Take Me with You, Bloodaxe

Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture, Picador

Helen Farish, Intimates, Cape

David Harsent, Legion, Faber

Sinead Morrissey, The State of the Prisons, Carcanet

Alice Oswald, Woods etc., Faber

Pascale Petit, The Huntress, Seren

Sheenagh Pugh, The Movement of Bodies, Seren

John Stammers, Stolen Love Behaviour, Picador

Gerard Woodward, We Were Pedestrians, Chatto

The judges will make their final decision on Monday 16 January 2006, when the prize of £10,000 will be presented by Mrs Valerie Eliot at an award ceremony in London.

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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