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

Jackself by Jacob Polley REVIEWED BY ROSANNA HILDYARD Jackself is a scarecrow made up of lean meat and fat, frost, daws, lanterns, digestive biscuits, roundabouts and cow parsley. Jackself is Polley’s alter ego in this series of narrative poems, which work equally well individually as they do patchworked into a collection. Jackself is a wild pagan figure, a wodwo from ancient England, Jackself follows a snotty teenager growing up around the crumbling farms of Lamanby, in Cumbria. Although Jackself is a hodgepodge of tones and references, it forms a remarkably coherent collection when read end to end. It is structured as a poetic bildungsroman , charting Jackself’s loss of innocence as he comes to terms with grief. Jackself is the love story of two friends: Jackself of Lamanby and Jeremy Wren, who bully and wrangle with each other, go fishing in Lamanby’s deserted tarns, and stay out at night to drink white cider and Malibu together ‘way out among the hedgerows’. ...

Jessica Mayhew reviews Burying The Wren* by Deryn Rees-Jones *shortlisted today for the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize Rees-Jones prefaces her collection with a quote from the Roethke poem ‘In a Dark Time:’ “In a dark time, the eye begins to see/ I meet my shadow in the deepening shade.” In Burying the Wren , the eye does indeed begin to see, observing the minutiae in the hugeness of grief, to the “pointillist’s dream” in a field of poppies. This first poem opens up the poet’s close gaze: ...where a seed might sing, imagining a life pushed into form, pure colour.” (Three Glances at a Field of Poppies) This poem reveals an impressionistic view of a poppy, effectively using the interplay of dark and colour. However, this third glance also unpacks the creative act, moving from imagination to form. This idea flows through the collection; in ‘A Scattering,’ we are presented with a moment in time, the scattering of the poet’s husband’s ashes. The children are suspen...

Good news - three good poets will be judging the T.S. Eliot prize this year... see press release excerpt below, verbatim; nice to see Leontia Flynn will be in contention: The Poetry Book Society is delighted to announce the judges for the 2011 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry. Gillian Clarke will be Chair of the judges and the other two members of the panel will be poets Stephen Knight and Dennis O’Driscoll . The judges will meet in October to decide on the ten-book shortlist. The four Poetry Book Society Choices from 2011 are automatically shortlisted for the Prize. The Spring 2011 Choice was Night by David Harsent (Faber) and the Summer Choice was November by Sean O’Brien (Picador). They will be joined on the shortlist by the PBS Autumn Choice, Profit and Loss by Leontia Flynn ( Jonathan Cape ), and the Winter Choice, which will be announced in August. The T S Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings will take place on Sunday 15 January 2012 in the Royal Festival Hall.   The 20...

Spending time among firs and mountains in sub-zero Nordic conditions puts poetry competitions blessedly out of mind, and in touch with what makes poetry sing originally - the elements confronted by the human body. Returning to London, I attended the TS Eliot awards tonight, and was pleased to hear that my favourite poetry collection of 2010, White Egrets , won. It is to be hoped The Guardian fixes its link soon, as there was no poet Brian Roberston up for an award, but rather Robin Robertson .

The TS Eliot Prize  - there were apparently 123 eligible books this year.  I'd like to see the longlist of the other 113 - it would be far more refreshing.  What's set in?  Acclaim fatigue.   Heaney and Walcott , with their Nobels, don't need the attention or the money.  Either, of course, has a book good enough to win such a prize.  As do all of the other eight on this list. It seems sad the big news angle is that one of the poets is a "recovering heroin addict"!  Most poets I know are recovering from, or entering into, one addiction or another, at any given time, or facing some life crisis - as are we all.  That is the media's fault, the media that has managed to almost kill poetry dead in the UK with its stop-start attention.  Is it good that Annie Freud and Fiona Sampson and Pascale Petit - three of the best poets now writing in England - are noted?  Yes.  I think most exciting is the presence of Brian Turner here - a ...