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Last evening the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021 – Shortlist was announced.
It shows an eclectic mixture of established poets, none of whom has previously won the Prize, and relative newcomers.
Judges Glyn Maxwell (Chair), Caroline Bird and Zaffar Kunial have chosen the 2021 T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist from a record 177 poetry collections submitted by British and Irish publishers.
The list comprises one debut collection; work from six men and four women; one American; one poet from Ireland; as well as poets of mixed race ancestry, including Jamaican, Jamaican-Chinese and Zambian. Eight publishers are represented, with two titles from small presses.
Here are the ten poets who have been shortlisted by the judges:
Raymond Antrobus – All the Names Given (Picador)
Raymond Antrobus is the author of To Sweeten Bitter and The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins/Tin House) and All the Names Given (Picador 2021). In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize. Other accolades include the Ted Hughes Award, PBS Winter Choice and Sunday Times Young Writer of the year award, as well as being shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and Forward Prize.
Kayo Chingonyi – A Blood Condition (Chatto & Windus)
Kayo Chingonyi is the author of two pamphlets. His first full-length collection, Kumukanda, (Chatto & Windus 2012) won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Poetry Collection Prize. His most recent collection is A Blood Condition (Chatto & Windus 2021).
Victoria Kennefick – Eat Or We Both Starve (Carcanet)
Victoria Kennefick’s pamphlet, White Whale (Southword Editions, 2015), won the Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition and the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Times, Ambit and elsewhere. Her debut collection Eat Or We Both Starve was published by Carcanet in 2021.
Selima Hill – Men Who Feed Pigeons (Bloodaxe)
Selima Hill is a prodigiously prolific poet, who has produced nineteen books of poetry, all published by Bloodaxe. Her 1997 collection, Violet, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. Bunny (2001), won the Whitbread Poetry Award, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her new collection is Men Who Feed Pigeons (Bloodaxe 2021).
Hannah Lowe – The Kids (Bloodaxe)
Hannah Lowe’s first poetry collection Chick (Bloodaxe 2013) won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry, and was selected for the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets 2014 promotion. Her second collection was Chan and her third collection, The Kids, (Bloodaxe 2021) was a Poetry Book Society Choice.
Michael Symmons Roberts – Ransom (Cape Poetry)
Michael Symmons Roberts’s eight poetry collections have all been published by Cape and include Corpus, which was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize and the Griffin International Prize. Drysalter was the winner of the 2013 Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. His eighth poetry collection is Ransom (Cape Poetry, 2021).
Daniel Sluman – single window (Nine Arches Press)
Daniel Sluman co-edited the first major UK Disability poetry anthology, Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back, (2017) with Sandra Alland and Khairani Barokka. He has previously published two poetry collections, Absence has a weight of its own (2012) and the terrible (2015), both Nine Arches Press. His third poetry collection, single window, was published in 2021 by Nine Arches Press.
Joelle Taylor – C+nto & Othered Poems (The Westbourne Press)
Joelle Taylor has published four collections of poetry: Ska Tissue (2011, Mother Foucault Press), The Woman Who Was Not There (2014, Burning Eye Books) and Songs My Enemy Taught Me (2017, Out-Spoken Press). She founded SLAMbassadors for the Poetry Society in 2001 and is the host of London’s premier night of poetry and music Out-Spoken. C+not & Othered Poems was published in 2021 by The Westbourne Press.
Jack Underwood – A Year in the New Life (Faber)
Jack Underwood was a winner of the Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and his debut pamphlet was published by Faber as part of the first Faber New Poets series in 2009. His debut poetry collection, Happiness (Faber, 2015), won the Somerset Maugham Award. He is a senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His second collection, A Year in the New Life, was published by Faber in 2021.
Kevin Young – Stones (Cape Poetry)
Kevin Young is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including Brown; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015; Book of Hours, Jelly Roll: a blues, Bunk and The Grey Album. He is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the poetry editor of the New Yorker. Stones (Cape 2021) is the first of his poetry collections to be published in the UK.
The T. S. Eliot Prize is run by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. The T. S. Eliot Prize is the most valuable prize in British poetry – the winning poet will receive a cheque for £25,000 and the shortlisted poets will be presented with cheques for £1,500. It is the only major poetry prize which is judged purely by established poets. The 2021 judging panel are looking for the best new poetry collection written in English and published in 2021 in the UK or Ireland.
Chair Glyn Maxwell said:
‘Judging the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021, I am lucky enough to be joined by two of my favourite younger poets, Caroline Bird and Zaffar Kunial. We are delighted with our shortlist, while lamenting all the fine work we had to set aside. Poetry styles are as disparate as I’ve ever known them, and the wider world as threatened and bewildered as any of us can remember. Out of this we have chosen ten books that sound clear and compelling voices – of the moment, yet also below and beyond it. Older and younger, wiser and wilder, well-known and lesser-known, these are the ten voices we think should enter the stage and be heard in the spotlight, changing the story while there’s a story to be changed.’
The T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings will take place on Sunday 9th January 2022 in the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London as part of its literature programme. The shortlist readings are the largest annual poetry event in the UK and will be hosted once again by Ian McMillan.
Tickets for the Readings in the Royal Festival and the simultaneously streamed event are now on sale from the box office: 0203 879 9555 (Open from 10am – 2pm Monday to Friday). Website: www.southbankcentre.co.uk
The winner of the 2021 Prize will be announced at the Award Ceremony on Monday 10th January 2022, where the winner and the shortlisted poets will be presented with their cheques.
Last year’s winner was Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart and the judges were Lavinia Greenlaw (chair), Mona Arshi and Andrew McMillan.
The T. S. Eliot Prize, which former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has described as “the Prize most poets want to win”, is an annual prize for the best new poetry collection published in the UK or Ireland.
T. S. Eliot Prize 2021 – Shortlist Announced
# For more information click for the T S Eliot Prize website
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Die wilde Rose
Da droben auf einsamer Höhe
Die wilde Rose blüht,
Und wer sie von Ferne gesehen,
In heißer Sehnsucht erglüht.
Zu ihr über Felsen und Klüfte
Ein kühner Jäger klimmt.
Schon ist er in nächster Nähe –
Das Auge in Thränen ihm schwimmt.
Er will sie erfassen und pflücken.
Da strauchelt jäh sein Fuß;
Des Abgrunds finstere Tiefe
Empfängt ihn mit kaltem Kuß.
Da droben auf einsamer Höhe
Die wilde Rose blüht,
Und wer sie von Ferne gesehen.
In heißer Sehnsucht erglüht. –
Louise Aston
(1814-1871)
Die wilde Rose
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“We are homesick everywhere,” writes Tishani Doshi, “even when we’re home.”
With aching empathy, righteous anger, and rebellious humor, A God at the Door calls on the extraordinary minutiae of nature and humanity to redefine belonging and unveil injustice.
From a microscopic cell to flightless birds, to a sumo wrestler and the tree of life, Doshi interrupts the news cycle to pause in grief or delight, to restore power to language. A God at the Door invites the reader on a pilgrimage―one that leads us back to the sacred temple of ourselves. This is an exquisite, generous collection from a poet at the peak of her powers.
In an era of pandemic lockdown and brutal politics, these poems make vital space for what must come next―the return of wonder and free movement, and a profound sense of connection to what matters most. A GOD AT THE DOOR by TISHANI DOSHI invites the reader on a pilgrimage―one that leads us back to the sacred temple of ourselves. This is an exquisite, generous collection from a poet at the peak of her powers.
Tishani Doshi is an award-winning writer and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. Born in Madras, India, in 1975, she received a masters in writing from the Johns Hopkins University, and worked in London in advertising before returning to India in 2001, where a chance encounter with the choreographer Chandralekha led her to an unexpected career in dance. She has published seven books of fiction and poetry, the most recent of which are Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Poetry Award and a Firecracker Award; and a novel, Small Days and Nights, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Tata Best Fiction Award, and The New York Times Bestsellers Editor’s Choice. She has interviewed over a hundred writers about the craft of writing, and has published essays in The Hindu, Granta, The National, The New York Times, The Guardian, Lithub and Corriere della Sera. She is a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at New York University Abu Dhabi, and otherwise, lives on a beach in Tamil Nadu, India.
(. . . . .)
What if god on the other side of the wall
was equally alone and in need of company
What if we replaced god with home
What if I was ready to become nothing
What if I understood there was no me
Would you carry me to this divinity
A God at the Door
by Tishani Doshi
Format: Paperback
88 pages
ISBN: 9781556594526
2021 Copper Canyon Press
$16.00 list price
♦Forthcoming 9 November 2021
# new poetry
Tishani Doshi
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What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because ‘you fit the description of a man’ – and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground?
In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham.
He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives.
Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: ‘I have never loved anything the way I love the endz.’
Raised on the North Peckham estate in South London, Caleb Femi is a poet and director. He has written and directed short films for the BBC and Channel 4, and poems for Tate Modern, the Royal Society for Literature, St Paul’s Cathedral, the BBC, the Guardian and more. He has been featured in the Dazed 100 list of the next generation shaping youth culture. From 2016 to 2018, he served as the Young People’s Laureate for London. He recently wrote the liner material for Kano’s 2019 album Hoodies All Summer. This is his first book.
Poor
by Caleb Femi
Paperback
5 Nov. 2020
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Language: English
160 pages
ISBN-10 : 0141992158
ISBN-13 : 978-0141992150
Dimensions : 13.2 x 1.2 x 20 cm
£9.99
# new poetry
Caleb Femi
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Plainte sur la mort de Sylvie
Ruisseau qui cours après toi-même
Et qui te fuis toi-même aussi,
Arrête un peu ton onde ici
Pour écouter mon deuil extrême.
Puis, quand tu l’auras su, va-t’en dire à la mer
Qu’elle n’a rien de plus amer.
Raconte-lui comme Sylvie,
Qui seule gouverne mon sort,
A reçu le coup de la mort
Au plus bel âge de la vie,
Et que cet accident triomphe en même jour
De toutes les forces d’Amour.
Las ! je n’en puis dire autre chose,
Mes soupirs tranchent mon discours.
Adieu, ruisseau, reprends ton cours
Qui, non plus que moi, se repose ;
Que si, par mes regrets, j’ai bien pu t’arrêter,
Voici des pleurs pour te hâter.
Marc-Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant
(1594 – 1661)
Plainte sur la mort de Sylvie
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Boys will be boys
“Boys will be boys,” and boys have had their day;
Boy-mischief and boy-carelessness and noise
Extenuated all, allowed, excused and smoothed away,
Each duty missed, each damaging wild act,
By this meek statement of unquestioned fact–
Boys will be boys!
Now, “women will be women.” Mark the change;
Calm motherhood in place of boisterous youth;
No warfare now; to manage and arrange,
To nurture with wise care, is woman’s way,
In peace and fruitful industry her sway,
In love and truth.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(1860-1935)
Boys will be boys
Suffrage Songs and Verses
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Die Tänzerin
Denn tanzen muss sie.
Dem tollen Rad verflochten
Gliedert sie Chaos,
Schwendet Quellen,
Stampft zuckende Krater.
Im Drang
Des großen Taktes
Tanzt sie Gestirne.
Bess Brenck-Kalischer
(Betty Levy, 1878-1933)
Die Tänzerin
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A revelatory new portrait of the courageous woman who saved Dostoyevsky’s life—and became a pioneer in Russian literary history
In the fall of 1866, a twenty-year-old stenographer named Anna Snitkina applied for a position with a writer she idolized: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A self-described “emancipated girl of the sixties,” Snitkina had come of age during Russia’s first feminist movement, and Dostoyevsky—a notorious radical turned acclaimed novelist—had impressed the young woman with his enlightened and visionary fiction.
Yet in person she found the writer “terribly unhappy, broken, tormented,” weakened by epilepsy, and yoked to a ruinous gambling addiction. Alarmed by his condition, Anna became his trusted first reader and confidante, then his wife, and finally his business manager—launching one of literature’s most turbulent and fascinating marriages.
The Gambler Wife offers a fresh and captivating portrait of Anna Dostoyevskaya, who reversed the novelist’s freefall and cleared the way for two of the most notable careers in Russian letters—her husband’s and her own. Drawing on diaries, letters, and other little-known archival sources, Andrew Kaufman reveals how Anna warded off creditors, family members, and her greatest romantic rival, keeping the young family afloat through years of penury and exile.
In a series of dramatic set pieces, we watch as she navigates the writer’s self-destructive binges in the casinos of Europe—even hazarding an audacious turn at roulette herself—until his addiction is conquered. And, finally, we watch as Anna frees her husband from predatory contracts by founding her own publishing house, making Anna the first solo female publisher in Russian history.
The result is a story that challenges ideas of empowerment, sacrifice, and female agency in nineteenth-century Russia—and a welcome new appraisal of an indomitable woman whose legacy has been nearly lost to literary history.
Andrew D. Kaufman is an associate professor, General Faculty, lecturer in Slavic Languages and Literatures, and assistant director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia. A PhD in Slavic languages and literatures from Stanford University, Kaufman is the author of Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times and Understanding Tolstoy, and a coauthor of Russian for Dummies. His work has been featured on Today, NPR, and PBS, and in The Washington Post, and he has served as a Russian literature expert for Oprah’s Book Club. Kaufman is the creator of Books Behind Bars, introducing incarcerated youth to the writings of Dostoyevsky and other authors.
The Gambler Wife:
A True Story of Love, Risk,
and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky
by Andrew D. Kaufman
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 08/31/2021
Hardcover
Pages: 400
ISBN-13: 9780525537144
$30.00
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KINDERBOEKENWEEK 2021
worden wat je wil
6 t/m 17 oktober 2021
Meer informatie: https://kinderboekenweek.nl/
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Achter de dijk
Achter de dijk ligt
water. Ik weet het.
Er gaan boten doorheen
en de meeuwen kennen
het getij.
Zo af en toe duikt
er wel eens een
zekerheid op.
Bert Bevers
Achter de dijk
Gedicht
Uit: Het verlangen naar heimwee, Dijkpers, Bath, 1982
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Master Suffering pendulates between yield and command; the bodies of this book are supplicant yet seething—they want nothing more than to survive.
But how does a woman survive?
One’s own healthy body helps, but illness is one of the masters of this book.
Faith can be a salve for the inscrutable ailments of the body, but God is unreliable in these poems.
The female bodies of Master Suffering want power; they want to control and to correct the suffering they witness and withstand.
CM Burroughs is Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia College Chicago. She is the author of two collections: The Vital System (Tupelo Press, 2012) and Master Suffering (Tupelo Press, 2020.) Burroughs has been awarded fellowships and grants from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Cave Canem Foundation. She has received commissions from the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Warhol Museum to create poetry in response to art installations. Burroughs’ poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies.
Master Suffering
Poems
by CM Burroughs
Format: Paperback
Published: Jan. 2021
Tupelo Press, Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-946482-38-9
$18.95
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Grey Eyes
She glanced across the path to me,
Grey eyes!
Her looks were kisses plain to see.
I gave her glances back to her —
Glad eyes!
She saw the lifting of despair.
From memory a face looked out,
Dim eyes!
No years could sour that love to doubt.
My soul would nevermore be lone —
Bride’s eyes!
Hearts still were waiting for my own.
Our souls uncurtained then, perchance —
Deep eyes!
Each built an epoch in a glance.
Out of her fellowship so free
Light eyes!
She gave some gladness unto me.
And I gave? As we turned apart —
Dead eyes!
I saw the shudder in her heart.
Arthur Adams
(1872-1936)
Grey Eyes
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