The T. S. Eliot Prize 2024

Raymond Antrobus

In Signs, Music Raymond Antrobus balances anxiety and optimism in a searching exploration of fatherhood, writes John Field

Raymond Antrobus’s All the Names Given was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2021. Fathers were on his mind then as, in the first poem, the dream vision, ‘The Acceptance’, we glimpse the speaker’s father who ‘laughs and takes // my hand, squeezes, his ring / digs into my flesh’. His seeming tangibility amplifies the pain of his absence. In Signs, Music the speaker considers the past’s influence on his impending fatherhood. Spending time with this collection is warm, intimate and, at times, a laugh-out-loud funny experience.

Antrobus’s epigraphs balance anxiety and optimism. The quotation from Katherine Angel’s Daddy Issues is first: ‘It’s hard to reckon with where you come from’. But the second, from Lucille Clifton’s ‘blessing the boats’, reads like a wish or a prayer: ‘and may you in your innocence / sail through this to that’. Then, over the page, Antrobus drops us into a moment from the past so vivid it’s in the present tense. It’s untitled too, which adds to the effect that this is unfiltered experience. We’re in the garden, on a rope swing, on the branch that ‘held us all summer, / my parents months from their second separation, / my sister a year from running away from home’, the speaker ‘just rustling in the wind’ buffeted by external forces, and perhaps seeing himself as little more than the rustling static from his hearing aids – a tiny noise in a big world. The present tense reveals the child inside the man. It’s Wordsworthian, and this reads like a moment from The Prelude.

Much of the collection feels like pages from a journal – with poems firing like anxious, imagistic bursts. The first section, ‘Towards Naming’, explores a new dad’s hopes and fears. The world is seen through new eyes and the invisible is suddenly visible:

                             Outside a café in New York
                             I heard a toddler shout
                             I’m awesome!

In London, a baby in a pram is
facing away from the mother
sat sipping her coffee glaring
down at her phone.

I lock eyes with the baby.
The baby’s eyes shriek
                                                          What!
                                                          Will you be any better?

Perhaps the mother has faced the whole pram away from herself as a demonstration of her power to shape the world as she desires – or perhaps the pram is parked at the table in the correct motherly way and it is the baby rebuffing its mother, and inclining itself towards the speaker. There’s an intensity to the close here – surely the obvious spot in a poem for a mother and baby to share a moment – but she’s otherwise engaged.

In the second section, ‘The New Father’, the scene is reprised. It doesn’t start well as ‘I pass the bins stuffed with Star- / bucks and Burger King cups’ (look at that first line, also stuffed to the brim and beyond, overflowing into line two). There’s nothing bucolic about this scene, with ‘the fountain / the smell of chlorine’ but, unpromising as it is, ‘I turn my son / in his pram to face the scene’: father and son sharing a moment, sharing the world. It’s transformative and healing: ‘the sight has opened // my ears.’

The cycles that spring to mind when we think of families are rarely positive: cycles of addiction, cycles of abuse. But Antrobus offers something more positive. In the first section, the poet sings ‘Three Little Birds’ to his unborn son, just as his father sang it to him. Marley’s words of consolation and reassurance ring through us and, in the final poem, we’re back with music, fears about channels of communication between a deaf father and a hearing son set aside: ‘The first word my son signed / was music’. Faced with the challenges of being a new dad, some will be tempted to reach for a self-help book, but Signs, Music would be of better service. As Antrobus’s father advised him, singing Bob Marley’s ‘Three Little Birds’: ‘Don’t worry about a thing / ’Cause every little thing gonna be alright.’

Raymond Antrobus’s Signs, Music (Picador Poetry, 2024) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.

Hannah Copley

Hannah Copley’s Lapwing is a sombre skein of poems interweaving environmental threat, adversity and abandonment, writes John Field

The lapwing, a once common sight, is now a Red List species which means, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), that it is threatened with extinction. In her quote accompanying the announcement of this year’s Eliot Prize Shortlist, Mimi Khalvati, Chair of judges, noted the ‘strong strain of elegy’ running through the selection. Hannah Copley’s second collection, Lapwing, is a sombre skein of poems. Some of these explore the challenges of the natural world, while others present a human character struggling against life’s adversities.

Copley’s first epigram, taken from John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c.1386), follows on from Tereus’s rape of Philomela when, in Gower’s version, he is punished by being transformed into a lapwing. The myth usually sees him transformed into the extravagantly feather-crowned hoopoe, but Gower goes for the understated English alernative: ‘on his hed ther stant upriht / A creste in tokne he was a kniht’. We’re reminded of nature’s centrality to our understanding of the world, and of ourselves. Set against this, Copley’s opening poem, ‘[Description]’, reads like a missing person’s report. We’re told that the lapwing was ‘Last seen in his winter plumage’ before being given a list of his aliases: ‘Peewit, Plover, Tew-it’. We worry about losing a single member of our flock but, here, an entire species is missing. Lapwing sightings, rendered as prose poems, are interleaved through the collection. Given that these are sightings of what is, in effect, a missing person, one might assume that they would trigger interventions by the avian equivalent of emergency services. However, these poems are forensic in tone and deed: a lapwing is spotted ‘Loitering near the military base in October […] Stalked and collected […] Archived as a study skin and partial skeleton’.

In Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane comments on Oxford University Press’s cull of words relating to the natural world from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. ‘And what is lost’, he writes, ‘along with this literacy is something precious: a kind of word magic, the power that certain terms possess to enchant our relations with nature and place’. Lapwing re-energises language. The lapwing is ‘Peewit, Plover, Tew-it, Lhapwynche, / Peet-Peet-Peet, Toppy, Kievit, Lappewincke, Pater, / Vanellus, vanellus, Phillipeen’. In a climate crisis, Copley reminds us that the relationship between word and world is political. If we can’t name it, we can’t see it. Lapwing’s language is also a language of spells, and reading it conjures the world. In ‘She thought it was just the regular carnage –’ we see ‘red kites circling the field like clock hands’ – even the speed of this image is pitch perfect.

The collection’s acknowledgements include website URLs offering help to people living with alcohol addiction, or those trying to support someone living with alcohol addiction. They’re unexpected, and pose questions about the poems presenting Peet, a daughter processing her father’s vanishing. An early one of these, ‘On the difficulty of care’, opens: ‘They once found him lulled beneath the concrete base / of the pylon, raggedy feather rucked / in leaf mould and mess.’ ‘Once’ suggests that this father is found sleeping rough regularly, the worse for drink. The next stanza jump-cuts to a lapwing lavishing care on its brood with ‘proffered crane fly, / larvae, a dozen wetland molluscs’. The chicks are served a feast. Care ought to be an instinctive rhythm, and this compounds the pain of finding one’s father ‘lulled’ asleep: a reversal of roles in which he is the infant or, like John Keats’s knight-at-arms, intoxicated, delirious and lullèd asleep ‘On the cold hill side.’

Lapwing offers little respite, and no easy answers. The collection’s final sighting of a lapwing presents it, ‘Eyes glassy in Fitzwilliam Street, standing at his full height between a swan and a European woodpecker’, reduced to a museum exhibit.

Hannah Copley’s Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry / Liverpool University Press) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.

Helen Farish

In The Penny Dropping Helen Farish demonstrates how memory, and the act of writing a poem, can both distort and make sense of the past, writes John Field

The Penny Dropping, Helen Farish’s fourth collection, views a relationship through the distorting, grieving lens of memory. An individual poem might account for a bad day, but this book-length sequence articulates the challenge of carrying on when the world has been upended. The confessional tone of these elegiac, stoical poems speaks to the human condition. Farish’s ‘I’ is also us – the human spirit endures with courage, dignity and humour.

‘Things We Loved’ opens the sequence at the beginning of the relationship, in Morocco. It is rendered in technicolour as light plays across the Atlantic ‘in one of its opal moods’ and the medina is dusted with ‘powdery pastels’. It’s a breathless list, running over 27 lines, with just two full stops across the whole poem. Even reading this feels like a whirlwind romance. Memory – the act of writing a poem – constructs the past in this way, but whether experience did follow experience in this relentless manner we cannot say. In ‘The Halcyon Days’, the unexpected warmth of winter is ‘gifted by Zeus’ – a Classical god, fickle and fictitious. The speaker acknowledges that those days ‘have acquired / the quality of myth’ and, as myth, the original experience is buried beneath layers of archaeology.

‘A Hundred Days’ counts the distance between the couple’s final holiday and their break-up. Given the title, we’re invited to view the relationship as geopolitical, as historical – fated, inevitable and tragic. The speaker tells us that she’s ‘always loved the title of that film about Anne Boleyn, / Anne of a Thousand Days.’ We see that her own number is reduced by a factor of ten. Our lives may be little, but that doesn’t stop them feeling like affairs of state. The couple visit the chateau at Ancy-le-Franc, hindsight casting its pall on the playfulness of their ‘posing like kings and queens / haughty on the roomy velvet chairs’. ‘[T]he photos of our last holiday / are full of fun, mischief even’ – but photos are their own myth-making, an archive of our best selves, and are not the place to look for an objective history. The final line of this one’s cut short: ‘I had a hundred days left. A hundred days, / and then the axe fell.’ The poem’s levity sharpens the blade of this violent severing.

A later poem, ‘Triggers’, returns to the listing seen in ‘Things We Loved’, a sense of loss triggered ‘Every time I eat Pasta alla Gorgonzola; / every wedding I’ve been to’. The absolutism of ‘every’ makes a prison of the wounded mind, where grief finds new outlets, builds fresh associations. The serendipity of ‘a stag sleeping / outside my kitchen window’ would bring joy to most lives but, ‘When I returned / he’d vanished’, and, once again, the labyrinth of memory reconfigures, revealing the minotaur of loss and grief at its heart.

‘The Joke’ presents the speaker as an older woman, a whole lifetime away from Moroccan sand and sweat, but still travelling to hotels with a photo of her love at her bedside. The staff think: ‘Her son, how handsome’ but the speaker’s still addressing the absent second person: ‘You are frozen in the photo at twenty-four, / and I am sixty’, imagining him as in on the joke, but the question remains who the joke is really on. Like memories, the man in the photo is frozen, incorruptible – and this is a sign of sanctity: the exhumed corpse smelling of roses and miraculously undecayed. The speaker says: ‘I pat you on the head each time I pass’. Time, it seems, has transformed her from lover to mother, from fellow traveller to venerator of a saintly icon.

Memory is fragile. As we cultivate and reinforce it, we create a myth which interacts with the details of daily life, transforming it into one huge shrine. The candour and courage of The Penny Dropping should not be underestimated. This is confessional poetry of the highest order.

Helen Farish’s The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe Books) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.

Peter Gizzi

Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy is ‘worldly-wise, generous, warm and human’, writes John Field

When we think of something ‘fierce’ we’re probably thinking of something formidably violent – a wild beast – and, if we combine this with ‘elegy’, perhaps we’re raging against the dying of the light à la Dylan Thomas. However, ‘fierce’ is a slippery term to define – not only are we raging against the night, we’re ardent and eager, we’re high-spirited, brave and valiant. Although it’s spare and elliptical, Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy, his tenth collection, is also worldly-wise, generous, warm and human. To read it is to spend time with a mind skipping from thought to thought, full of laughter and pain. It’s breathtaking.

Gizzi’s epigraph, ‘Only in connection with a body / does a shadow make sense’, is taken from Rosmarie Waldrop, a long-standing friend at Wesleyan University Press. It’s a yin and yang sort of statement, reminding us that to think of life without death is impossible, but also (and reassuringly) that we cannot think of death without remembering life.

The collection is set in a world of arresting visual beauty. In the opening poem, ‘Findspot Unknown’, the speaker is ‘watching one single birch / become lightning stunning the sky’. Perhaps we catch an echo of Dylan Thomas’s forked lightning in ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’, but here even the smallest things (‘one single birch’) have the power to stun. Despite this beauty, despite this power, Gizzi is clear that the self and the universe are separate: ‘Landscape is a made thing, / to see the mind seeing itself.’ Fierce Elegy resists the Romantic urge to read the self through the landscape. Gizzi picks this up again later in the collection in ‘Romanticism’:

Why not consider the squirrel
in its leafy surround?
It may be in a state
of impersonal grief
for all I know.
Nature morphing
and dying and
looping all around it.

It’s a complex vision, but it is not without warmth, without a thought for the world beyond the self. Yet Gizzi acknowledges the difficulty of crossing the divide between the self and the world: ‘What is the real / but a reflecting pool’. Like it or not, humanity is narcissistic. No matter how hard we look, we tend to see ourselves staring back.

Death is another division. In the playfully titled ‘I’m Good to Ghost’ the speaker opens with ‘It was all so Orfeo / the other night’, referencing the Middle English narrative lay ‘Sir Orfeo’. A chivalric reimagining of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, ‘Sir Orfeo’ is a powerful rendition of grief. For Gizzi, it’s a less frantic trip to wrestle Eurydice from the jaws of Hades, to try and snatch her from the shadow in order to live a life wholly in the light. Gizzi’s speaker’s loss is smaller, more prosaic: she’s disappeared ‘between the rug / on my floor and / the sun setting / out the window, / between the radiator / and a dusky / kaleidoscopic light’. The boundaries between life and death are blurred as the speaker wonders ‘Where do you go / when I don’t see you? / Or who am I when / you’re not around?’ We’re taken back to the epigraph and are reminded of the Gordian knot tying death to life, and life to death.

There’s a palpable sense of consolation to the collection. The final poem, ‘Consider the Wound’, works with the language of Matthew 6:28–29: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ Gizzi’s speaker has sorrow on his mind: ‘consider its eerie call and every shape of pain // wounds of the field, how they grow, they toil not, / neither do they spin’. Yet, as the collection reaches its finale, the natural world quickens the pulse and the self hungers for fresh experience. Yes, ‘death is happening’ but, in a brilliant moment of standing up and carrying on, ‘all that was left is where I am now’. Fierce Elegy is somehow elemental and existential.

Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy (Penguin Poetry) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.

Gustav Parker Hibbett

Gustav Parker Hibbett’s High Jump as Icarus Story is both a dazzling and sobering exploration of freedom and injustice

In High Jump as Icarus Story, Gustav Parker Hibbett’s debut collection, the high jump becomes a dazzling conceit, used to explore the Blackness, the queerness and the maddening contrariness of life. After all, Icarus revels in the freedom and possibility afforded by the wings fashioned by his father. However, those wings have their downside…

In ‘High Jump as a Flow State’, we experience this tension. The speaker opens ‘By some accounts’, signposting the fact that other interpretations of their career as a high jumper are available. However, they choose to present themselves to the reader first as ‘an artist’, implying a certain disregard for success as they pursue a higher calling. No sooner has this thought been shared, than it is complicated by market forces, as ‘Coaches from other places would / approach my dad at State, tell him / with that form they’d have me jumping / six, eight inches higher within months’. With a deal brokered between two adults, the young athlete looks more like a Victorian child apprentice, sold into a form of servitude, than anything resembling the artist they had dreamed of becoming. Yet, look at the enjambment running through the stanza and across the stanza break – this is a person who thinks and feels that they are free. That flow state is presented as a ‘diamond / needle in a record’s groove’ – it might sound cool, effortless, musical, artistic but, if the needle is the jumper, then it’s running on a fixed track. It’s in captivity. We revisit this territory in ‘Colouring Book’. The speaker ‘saw colouring as a test, dexterity / predicting concentration’. They ‘didn’t know you could ignore / the lines’. Discipline and dedication now look like a lack of imagination, the mind stuck in a rut, rather than locked into a jazzy groove.

‘grendel’ draws our attention away from those heroic aerialists: Daedalus and Icarus. Instead, we’re considering the monster, Grendel, here unworthy even of a capital letter. The speaker tells us that, when studying Beowulf in class, all ‘i think about    is grendel / armless    slinking back    across the / the moors    to tell his mother    golden / hero beowulf    came all this way    to send him / to whatever heaven    monsters go to’. Perhaps we catch an echo of ‘harmless’ in the speaker’s ‘armless’ and, given how the poem pivots to consider the victims of America’s gun-toting vigilantes, meting out their extrajudicial ‘justice’, then perhaps we’re also reminded of Gaige Grosskreutz, one of the men who chased Kyle Rittenhouse after he had shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum in Kenosha, Wisconsin, 2020. Grosskreutz lost ninety per cent of his bicep for his trouble. ‘golden’ reimagines Beowulf as an entitled member of the Aryan Herrenvolk. Grendel is ‘made to bear    the fears / of other people’ – the word ‘monster’ is profoundly troubling…. perhaps its etymology is rooted in the Latin monstrare, ‘to demonstrate’. In this sense, every time someone is made an example of, we might think of them as having become a monster.

And now we come to ‘In which I attend my own lynching’. Many of the poems leading to this point have revelled in the high jump (In ‘High Jump as Life lessons’, ‘you are building something      that will take you       stratospheric’). However, ‘the dangling, empty rope all frayed and prickled’ reimagines the high jump in sickening fashion. ‘I see myself appear / over the hill, I am bloody, carried by a crowd’ – a warning to others, an expression of dominance, a grotesque exhibition – a monster.

In High Jump as Icarus Story, Hibbett achieves a work of extraordinary breadth and power. It’s celebratory poetry which pulses with life and wears its scholarship lightly. Yet, at the same time, Hibbett pulls no punches as they hold their mirror to our world.

Gustav Parker Hibbett’s High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.

Rachel Mann

In Rachel Mann’s Eleanor Among the Saints, language is underpinned by trans history and the liturgy. It’s a collection of struggle, but also of consolation, writes John Field

Through its engagement with Christian history and liturgy, Eleanor Among the Saints, Rachel Mann’s second collection, provides the reader with a lens through which to read trans identity.

Binary readings of gender are challenged by medieval texts such as The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1430s). This is not just a work of Christian mysticism, it is earthly, emotional writing, anchored in the practical challenges of day-to-day life. Kempe visits a Doctor of Divinity and, once she has shared the revelations God has made to her, he tells her that she is ‘sucking even at Christ’s breast’ (itself a more literal paraphrasing of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love). Kempe’s language was by no means an unusual way of reaching for the ineffable. By working in dialogue with these Christian treasures, Mann is able to contextualise her ‘imaginary archive’ of the life of a medieval trans person, Eleanor ‘John’ Rykener, helping the reader to glimpse the shadows of trans identity through history.

The collection’s first section, ‘Eleanor Among the Saints’, considers Eleanor Rykener. In ‘Embroidering a Priest’, the opening poem, the speaker imagines Rykener as embroiderer. It reminds us that the priest, the local patriarch, is seen in the sanctuary, the sleeves of his alb a flummery of lace, his chasuble blazing with embroidered silks. Mann catches the ambiguity of this as her speaker comments on the ‘thrill of flounce and picot’. ‘Flounce’ is feminine – we’re at the hem of a lady’s skirts, watching their loose open pleats bounce as she moves. It’s a yonic image, whereas the ‘picot’, while also ornamental, is phallic. Picots give the lace an ornamental edge of twisted loops of thread – it’s borrowed from French: point, pointed weapon. The poem’s opening echoes Genesis, the beginning of all things, except, instead of light, ‘In the beginning, hem and line of thread’. Flounce and picot are both incarnations of thread. Masculine and feminine threaded together, not opposites.

In ‘Eleanor and Rolandina in the City of God’, we’re imagining her as sex worker (she was arrested in 1394 and questioned about prostitution and sodomy). Even Mann’s London is gloriously ambiguous. It’s fitting that the poem opens with gates: ‘Ald and Bishop, Moor and Cripple, Alder, New and Lud’, reminding us of the feminine aspects of urban topology. Identity resists absolutes as there are still Roman ‘temple traces, half the churches recycling’ but, in Eleanor’s revelation of future London, we see something ‘Risen’ too: ‘glass, concrete, towers’.

The second section, ‘Praise’, engages with the rhythms of Church liturgy: its calendar of feasts, the hours of its days. In ‘A Morning Prayer’ we see a city gridlocked by rush hour traffic where ‘half-hidden faces // Recede in rear-view mirrors, and what was once / Shall never be again, smaller and smaller’. We catch echoes of the Gloria: ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen’. However, it has been negated, implying a degree of hopelessness – of Godlessness. However, halfway through the poem, the opening of the Anglican Morning Prayer cuts through: ‘O Lord / Open thou’. In the liturgy, this would read as ‘open thou our lips’, but Mann’s ‘open thou’ is instead an appeal to God to open himself – an appeal for acceptance, for an embrace. The day is a ‘new day held in old’ as the ancient rhythms of the Divine Office provide foundations and scaffolding to support daily living.

Sleepless nights fill the final section, ‘A Charm to Change Sex’: ‘Awake at 4 a.m. and conclusions to be drawn’; ‘Awake at 4 a.m., and young again’. Early in the sequence ‘Seven Proof Texts on a Transitioned Body’ concealment and shame present themselves as obstacles to a Christian life as Matthew 7:7’s ‘seek and ye shall find’ becomes both playful and troubling: ‘Seek and ye shall hide’. However, by the end of the sequence, the speaker, like the priest in ‘Embroidering a Priest’, achieves a kind of ontological difference: ‘transfiguration is fluid – / Yellow, red, brown; bags of liquid God, pierced one’. Gender-affirming surgery evoking the wounds of Christ: a reminder that all suffering is an imitation of Christ.

In Eleanor Among the Saints, Rachel Mann’s language is underpinned by trans history and the liturgy. It’s a collection of struggle, but it’s also one of consolation. It’s both a literary achievement and an important pin in the map for trans people – for people.

Rachel Mann’s Eleanor Among the Saints (Carcanet Press) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.

Gboyega Odubanjo

Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo is ‘a monumental work’ that ‘removes comfortable distance’ and ‘examines humanity’s darkest deeds’, writes John Field

Together with the T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted and posthumously published Adam, Odubanjo has left us three pamphlets, with Aunty Uncle Poems winning both the Michael Marks Award and an Eric Gregory Award. The Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation for low-income Black writers was established in Odubanjo’s memory in 2023. This year’s Chair of judges, Mimi Khalvati, said that through this year’s Shortlist there ‘runs a strong strain of elegy, responding to our dark times with testaments of loss and grief’. Viewed in these terms, Odubanjo’s Adam is the epicentre of the shortlist.

When we think of Adam, we think of apples, snakes. The title of Odubanjo’s opening poem, ‘The Garden’, invites this reading but, instead of a pastoral idyll, we encounter something dark. The UK is described as ‘the land where streets are paved with cousins’ and we’re reminded of Dick Whittington, a lone child, an economic migrant, travelling to a London he hopes to find paved with gold but, instead of Whittington’s happy ever after, we find a city built on bones. The poem descends into nightmare as ‘your uncle’s adam. your mother—adam floating. your cousin—adam bleeding in the masquerade. / and still there’s more arrivals—they’re greeted with cups of river and given a week to change their names to adam.’ Addressed in the second person, it’s as if the traumatised reader is experiencing waking hallucinations. The endless stream of arrivals brings Dante’s Inferno to mind, throngs of sinners waiting to be ferried across the Acheron.

It is at this point that we cross the threshold into the collection proper, a note explaining that, ‘On 21 September 2001, the torso of a black boy was discovered in the River Thames, near Tower Bridge in central London, clothed only in an orange pair of girls’ shorts’. Named Adam by the investigating detectives, forensic evidence suggests that his home was near Benin City, Nigeria, but that he had spent a brief time in Germany and, shortly after his arrival in the UK, he was drugged and ritually killed. An early poem, ‘Breaking’, brings breaking news to mind, as if the murder of Adam were important. However, it opens with ‘looks like it’ll be a rainy week ahead thank you     now the body / of an unidentified boy’ and we sense the distasteful tonal shifts of the news media. It becomes absurd, grotesque, as, ‘coming up / goat arrested for armed robbery’.

The collection views Adam from multiple perspectives, including his own. ‘London Is the Place for Me’ works with the 1948 song of the same name by Aldwyn Roberts, AKA Lord Kitchener, which is associated with West Indian and West African expatriates. The song’s sunny calypso vibe is matched by the speaker’s tone: ‘cool as a lord i landed in the mother / blitzed and tipsy on the foreign extra’. It reads as excitement. However, as the BBC’s 2021 summary of the case explains, small amounts of the Calabar bean and ground-up seeds from the Datura plant had been fed to Adam – plants used in West African witchcraft. With this knowledge, everything darkens, and the image of Adam, ‘cruising and reclining in old albion / trafficating through the big city’ implies depraved international crime (explored in greater detail later in ‘Traffic’).

Each section of Adam opens with a reference to the Book of Genesis and Christian history’s scapegoating of Adam and Eve for humanity’s evil. These read like aphorisms: ‘if adam is naked and someone owns a pair of orange shorts from woolworths and covers adam what then is shame.’ By engaging with Christian tradition, Odubanjo requires his reader to confront something more disturbing about the impetus to scapegoat others for sin. The comfortable distance between the reader and West African witchcraft is removed.

Adam is a monumental work. Although it examines humanity’s darkest deeds, it celebrates the sanctity of life and the dignity of all people.

Gboyega Odubanjo’s Adam (Faber & Faber) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.

Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North is ‘reflective, but resists the temptation to judge and exact retribution’, finds John Fields

Last year, Phillips won a Pulitzer Prize for Then the War and Selected Poems, 2007-2020. He has authored seventeen collections of poetry and garnered a slew of awards. In Scattered Snows, to the North relationships are fragile and we feel the bite of mortality. However, the title reminds us that bad weather is patchy and localised.

Phillips opens with ‘Regime’, where we read that, ‘As I took off / my clothes, I / watched him taking // his own off.’ Although the speaker ‘watched him’, we are not told whether this is reciprocated. Nor do the subjects undress one another. Phillips find solitude, perhaps even loneliness, within an ostensibly intimate situation. His lines are terse and monosyllabic. We’re struck by the cold white space of the page. It’s subtly negative. We’re told that the sound of the rain was not, for once, the sound of the wind shaking the rain from the trees, but we’re never told what it actually was. We’re told more about absence than presence. ‘Regime’ is built from tercets, but the final stanza is cut short: ‘It’s hard / to believe in them, / the beautiful colors // of extinction; but / these are the colors.’ ‘Extinction’ detonates in that final couplet and we reappraise the relationship in its shock waves. The speaker resists the temptation to view the end using the usual clichés. If we only had the courage to look at life’s wreckage, we would see its ‘beautiful colors’. The snows are scattered and shafts of light illuminate the landscape. We re-examine the enigmatic title, ‘Regime’. Perhaps it speaks to our hubris, Ozymandias’s statue in the desert and the toppling of empires. Or perhaps we think of healthy living, a dietary regime – or a river’s pattern of flow.

A few poems on, in ‘Sunlight in Fog’, and we’re meditating on rivers, ‘how the river, running always away // the way rivers tend to, stands as proof that reliability / doesn’t have to mean steadfast’. Phillips’s lines have lengthened out and the knot of the double negative points to the thorny complexity of relationships. The collection has warmed in tone, as that little aside, ‘the way rivers tend to’, injects a conversational humanity. Perhaps the poem interacts with ‘Regime’ as, once again, we’re reflecting on a difficult relationship, the speaker confiding that ‘I’ve forgotten / entirely what it felt like to enter his body’ but ‘to look away had become / impossible’. It casts the speaker as a kind of Narcissus, staring into the river ‘running always away’, dependable in its undependability. The speaker has lost sight of the beloved as the self is reflected back from his eyes.

‘If Grief is Mostly Private and Always Various’ works with Sir Thomas Wyatt’s (1503–1542) ‘Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind’. Wyatt was imprisoned in the Tower of London, one of the many accused of having committed adultery with Anne Boleyn. Indeed, he may have witnessed her execution. Phillips shows us the sea, snow falling into it ‘like words from / a severed head held aloft, upside down, and shaken’. It’s a reference to an untitled image by the German photographer Michael Schmidt, which Phillips describes the poem as being ‘in conversation’ with. The poem presents an unsettling image, as we usually imagine a severed head held aloft by the hair, but this one’s inverted and shaking it seems too disrespectful, even if it is the head of a traitor.

Scattered Snows, to the North is reflective, but resists the temptation to judge and exact retribution. Instead, the speaker contents himself by looking carefully. After all, as we’re reminded in the collection’s final poem, ‘Rehearsal’, ‘the dark lay / like – defiantly – a ship at anchor’ and ‘They swam out to the dark ship’. Darkness awaits, and our relationships with one another must be savoured.

Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North (Carcanet Press) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.

Katrina Porteous

John Field finds Katrina Porteous’s Rhizodont to be ‘a thrilling meeting of ideas and language’, blurring ‘the boundary between man and machine, between planet and technology.’

Rhizodont, Porteous’s fourth collection, is a hymn to the Earth, a love letter to the North East. The dialect of Northumberland washes it in a tide of language and, across these shifting sands of words, we step out of time and survey the planet from a geological perspective. The rhizodont of the title, a fossil fish which became extinct 310 million years ago, recalibrates our sense of time and reminds us that the Earth’s cycles of erosion, extinction and creation transcend us. The result is a thrilling meeting of ideas and language as Porteous blurs the boundary between man and machine, between planet and technology.

Porteous opens (and intersperses the collection) with ‘Susurrations of the Sea’, a sequence written for BBC Radio 4. In the second of these poems, ‘Ingredients’, we’re addressed in the second person, the speaker reaching out to us, showing us our primal urge to mark the environment, ‘When you crunch your footprint / Into sand, or splash / Among the chill pools’. In the Paleolithic period humanity’s impact on the environment was of a low order, but Porteous shows this impact changing as the collection unfolds. For example, in ‘Coastal Erosion’, a sobering nod to Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’, we read ‘That what will survive of us is not love but chip forks, / Booty that Liam and Reece grab on their Pirate Litter-Pick – // Bottle tops, take-away cartons, lids, straws, nappy-liners’… the list of our detritus goes on… and on. However, it is not a scene without hope, as Liam and Reece’s good offices demonstrate.

Back in ‘Ingredients’ and Porteous imagines the Earth’s historical and future iterations as connected in space and time: ‘Every wave contains an imprint, / An echo of the last, / Of the next, a foretaste’. Porteous’s vision is not as bleak as the one we’re shown in Matthew Arnold’s ‘On Dover Beach’, the sea a melancholy long withdrawing roar. Instead, it thrums with life: ‘Can you hear its pulse / In the deep roar, its ceaseless / Boom and bass?’ There’s an energy and life in this music of time that Arnold does not account for – and then there’s the title, ‘Ingredients’ – it’s constructive, not destructive.

People and planet converge. In ‘A Short Walk from the Sea’s Edge’ we see the erosion and reconstruction of language. As mentioned in the review of Hannah Copley’s Lapwing, Robert Macfarlane has commented on our loss of the words used to describe the natural world. Porteous makes a similar observation as ‘Our Billy’s Chloe […] doesn’t know stobbie from skyemmie’ – these are North Eastern dialect words for an unfledged pigeon and a weak, sickly one. She reminds us that as language contracts in one area, so does our ability to see, to discriminate. However, as the sea erodes the coast in one location, it constructs it in another – and so Chloe has her own words, ‘Gels, Acrylics, Apps – / Incomprehensible to Billy’s ears’. Similarly, in the landscape, ‘hogweed and scrub willow are slowly erasing that hard-drive’. Running in the background, logic is operating a dynamic, responsive system and, like it or not, humanity is a component as ‘among sparty ground, green seggs, gigantic ferns / And spidery horsetails, the coal is beginning again’. Actions provoke reactions. The planet is an intelligent machine.

Poems in the collection’s second section, ‘Invisible Everywhere’, explore some of the technologies scientists use to observe and understand the planet. The final one of these, ‘Remote Sensing’, considers the ice cores drilled to see deep into the Earth’s history and, in it, human intelligence is mirrored by the planet’s self-awareness: ‘Sometimes the world understands itself from very close.’ The Earth too possesses an alphabet and its behaviour mirrors our own (or our behaviour mirrors it back): ‘Snapping its endless selfies, firing them down / In waves to disembodied listening devices’. If ‘Coastal Erosion’ showed Liam and Reece recycling, the final poem returns to this idea as the planet is asked: ‘What are you doing, so close to the Sun? Recycling, // I have forgotten its name, a planet in space’. And perhaps we wonder what it’s recycling – and whether it’s us.

Katrina Porteous’s Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.

Karen McCarthy Woolf

Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Top Doll is a bravura, polyphonic exploration of obsession, mortality and an unflinching look at the history of slavery in America, writes John Field

It was back in 2011 that Karen McCarthy Woolf first came across Huguette Clark’s obituary, the initial inspiration for her novel-in-verse. Heiress to one of the wealthiest of all Americans, William A. Clark, Huguette lived a closeted life on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and left behind extensive collections of dolls, furniture and paintings. In Top Doll McCarthy Woolf voices some of Clark’s dolls, viewing the world through their unclosing eyes.

The character of Dolly affects an amalgam of English and French, telling us ‘Dans le catalogue I am described as French composition’. This seems to suggest an alignment with ‘Huguette / so fiercely private [who] spoke English with a French accent’ (‘Obituaries as Found’) and invites us to see Dolly as, in part at least, Clark’s mouthpiece – and perhaps we wonder about the home life in which a child would feel the need to displace so much onto their porcelain pal. Dolly witnesses acts that belong behind a closed bedroom door: ‘In the mirror I am seeing the derrière / of Mr Husband, it is a fat white dome / bright as the moon! Maman is delirium / with fear and we must make her torture / to end. Regarde! How she is writing / and scratching with fingernails his pale back’. This opening sequence reads like a baroque horror – heightened by Dolly’s pre-recorded speech, activated by pulling her chatty string: ‘I don’t want / to go to bed yet’ and ‘Please change my dress’. As the innocence of childhood collides with ‘Mr Husband’s most violet / passions’ they assume a horrific quality. Throughout Top Doll McCarthy Woolf voices Dolly in coronas of sonnets, their first and last lines concatenating to create a bravura rococo flourish, poetic form helping to present her as immaculately turned out.

The voice of the General offers a contrast. He’s no bisque porcelain Parisian like Dolly but ‘testament to dear ample-Bosomed Miss Bessie’s estimable skills with needle, thread, thimble & dexterous Fingertips that did fashion this invincible Body’. He’s voiced in prose. He’s blunt. He witnessed the worst excesses exacted on enslaved African Americans on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon Line, ‘where servitude gave way to iron Collars & Cuffs, Bloodhounds & Auction Blocks’. It’s an unflinching narrative and, where a person might be able to turn away, or close their eyes, the General has no choice but to stare.

Lady Mamiko, a Japanese doll, witnesses Clark’s decline in the final days before her hospital admission. Clark’s apartment, the largest on Fifth Avenue, comprised forty-two rooms spread across two floors and, in her final days, perhaps it was more of a liability than a luxury. Lady Mamiko comments that ‘Sometimes she gets lost because there are many rooms and many doors, some with mirrors and even though she is the architect of our citadel and aware of every detail, age is oblivious and exacts its price.’ Lady Mamiko’s prose is interspersed with haiku which reimagine Clark’s experience as a fragile moment of Japanese gothic: ‘There are many doors / in Chrysanthemum Castle / and dark passages.’

The novel’s final regular voice is Miss Ting, a Jamaican rag doll who left the UK in 1981 as Charles and Diana were getting hitched. ‘Miss Ting nah ooh an aah h-over no blondie-fairy-tale princess wid side-eye H’attitude same way nuff ah di Barbie-dem ah look upon di General’. Even within the confines of the apartment, Miss Ting is subject to the vacuousness of the world. Dolly ‘finds it quite extraordinaries how in Jamaica they also have television. Miss Ting rolls her eyes, spurred into action by irritation’. Rag doll she may be, but she’s no door mat.

As these reviews have noted before, Mimi Khalvati, this year’s judging chair, commented that, ‘Throughout these collections runs a strong strain of elegy, responding to our dark times with testaments of loss and grief.’ And so Top Doll, a polyphonic, experimental and elegiac exploration of history, oppression, obsession and escapism, offers an appropriate close to this year’s reading of the shortlist.

Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Top Doll (Dialogue Books) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.