I’ve spotted the shortlists for this year’s Forward Prize, published today. I’ve only read only one of those books – Emma Jones’s The Striped World, so I can’t really say anything about the line-up. What a useless blogger I am!
I'm glad that Salt have a nomination with Sian Hughes’s The Missing. Has anyone read Meghan O’Rourke’s Hatlife? Who will be publishing it in the UK? I can't find it on amazon.co.uk.
It's just struck me - not a single nomination for any book from Bloodaxe or Carcanet! Is it the first time that's happened? However, that's not the product of a daring move into unusual territory - in fact, quite the opposite. The main prize nominees have come from the big trade publishers - Picador, Cape and Faber, with only one independent (Arete, run by Craig Raine). The First Book has one each from Faber, Picador, Seren, Salt, CB Editions, and whoever is due to publish the UK edition of Meghan O'Rourke's book.
13 comments:
Not to worry, Rob, I've only read three of the books across the two (book) categories - the Jones and Mariner (reviewed both for TLS) and Porter's latest.
Can't say I've read Hatlife, but I'll no doubt go looking for it now.
I've got Meghan's book at home - it's Halflife, btw - I bought it in the USA a couple of years ago, so that seems like it's due for UK publication this year? Otherwise a bit odd. I mean, I KNOW I have it, I remember buying it in the USA, & I know I haven't been there since 2007.
Well... very glad from my point of view to see Reid and Maxwell on it - though have read neither book as yet - and also great news that Salt has one on the first collection list!
Interesting: main list dominated by older men, first collection list dominated by women.
And a shame the only woman on the main list had to be from the US, not the UK - would rather seem to prop up the fracs in the letters page of Poetry Review! Also, Sharon Olds... whatever happened to women being just as intellectual as men? And which UK women have had collections this year?
Also, with DP the youngest at 45, seems rather a backlash to the Jen Hadfield TS Eliot win...
Anyway, I always find the prizes etc a bit dispiriting. I can't help it. Something so reductive. And regime-propping. No matter who's ont he loist or how much I love them.
Who would Michael have wanted to win that best poem prize? He loved CK Williams... but then, Farley...
There. And that is MUCH more than I ever say about a shortlist. Damn.
Halflife! That's the Graundiad's (sic!) fault, not mine...
Huh. Didn't notice Maxwell mentioned when I first skim read the article. I think Hide Now is a strong collection, perhaps even his finest.
And Halflife... makes more sense. Though Hatlife still has a nice - if odd - ring to it.
"Also, with DP the youngest at 45, seems rather a backlash to the Jen Hadfield TS Eliot win..."
That seems a very charitable assessment. I've got nothing against any of those poets or their books individually but put together, it amounts to a selection of middle-aged, middlebrow poets from commercial lists that seems about ten years behind the times. Maybe it should be called the Backward Prize.
That said, the first book list is quite interesting. I haven't got Meghan O'Rourke's book
... but have liked quite a few poems of hers that I've read.
Hatlife, great titles that never were no.357!
Well, I agree with what Katy and David have said - same old, same old. And one of the few surprises is, err, a close friend of a judge. Halflife was published in the UK late last year - Norton have a UK branch - I remember now seeing it on the Poetry London new books pile (they share an office with P School). I recommend it. Still, it means we have two two-year old books by US poets on the list - it doesn't strike me as right.
I also noticed the gender split - which UK women poets have published strong collections this year - Draycott, Hill? Haven't read them yet. Greta Stoddart? Crowther, of course, but the judges won't even have opened a Shearsman book. Not sure the new Morrissey will be out in time to have been included - that will be a strong book. The Oswald books were pamphlets really.
I've read Jane Draycott's new book - good, I think. I enjoyed Selima Hill's book a lot.
But I guess these shortlists all come down to the tastes of individual judges.
Does say a lot about the dullards who chose this dull list that they won't even have opened a Shearsman Press book...
I loved Claire Crowther's book. And am looking forward to Sinead Morrissey's.
Don’t hold back, Steven. It’s not like you to be so timid in expressing your views!
I don’t think the shortlisted poets are all ‘dull’, but the main list is certainly predictable. I get the feeling that the judges didn’t really have to read all those entries at all – they could have just picked the Cape, Faber and Picador collections from the shelves and slotted them into the shortlist as a given. ‘Sorry, everyone else! No spaces left! But we’ll leave a few slots on the First Collection list…’
To me, there does seem to be something reductive about Josephine Hart’s statement that “increasingly people are turning in these challenging times to a place they can find wisdom and beauty and without wanting to sound too pious – truth.” Poetry can contain such things but it can surely can work on readers in many other ways too. I was thinking about this in regard to Selima Hill’s book. It’s bizarre stuff. But it’s not the kind of poetry that wins prizes. The book charts the effect of Asperger’s Syndrome on a family’s relationships. Wisdom, beauty and truth don’t really come into it. The poems disturb and fascinate, and are also, at times, very funny, but they work in different ways to your average prize-winning poems.
I’m with you, Katy and Roddy, on both Claire Crowther and Sinead Morrissey – both excellent writers.
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