Forward Poetry Prize shortlist unveiled
Date: July 17, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments
Shortlist for the 2007 Forward Poetry Prize has been announced. The literary prize, created in 1991 to promote contemporary poetry, is Britain’s richest and arguably most sought-after poetry prize.
This year, which the chairman of the Forward Arts Foundation described as “exciting … with new poets being shortlisted alongside some of the most respected of their generation”, also includes the 26-year-old Luke Kennard on the shortlist for the Best Collection, making him the youngest ever to be nominated.
BEST COLLECTION (£10,000)
Domestic Violence
by Eavan Boland
Eavan Boland’s new collection turns to the domestic interiors in which the dramas of women’s lives are played out: seductions and quarrels, anger and grief, the care of children. In her attentiveness to the humdrum realities of suburban life, Boland makes them luminous with the power of live myths. Looking back over her own life, back through the lives of the women who preceded her, Boland arrives at the deep structures of memory where, as she writes, legends are made new ‘not by saying them, but by unsettling / one layer of meaning from another’. This is a collection from a poet at the height of her powers, writing with authority and grace. …
You can read more about Domestic Violence at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Gift Songs
by John Burnside
To the Shakers, a good song was a gift; indeed the test of a song’s goodness was how much of a gift it was. In their call to “labour to make the way of God your own”, Shaker artists expressed an aesthetic that had much in common with the old Japanese notion, attributed to Hokusai, that to paint bamboo, one had first to become bamboo. In his tenth collection, John Burnside begins with an interrogation of the gift song, treating matters of faith and connection, the community of living creatures and the idea of a free church - where faith is placed, not in dogma or a possible credo, but in the indefinable - and moves on through explorations of time and place, towards a tentative and idiosyncratic re-ligere, the beginnings of a renewal of the connection to, and faith in, an ordered world. The book closes with a series of meditations on place, entitled “Four Quartets”, intended both as a spiritual response to the string quartets of Bartok and Britten (as Eliot’s were to Beethoven’s late quartets), and as an experiment in the poetic form that the finest of poets, the true miglior fabbro, chose as a medium for his own declaration of faith. The poems in this collection are true gifts: thrillingly beautiful, charged with power and mystery, each imbued with the generous skills of a master of his craft. …
You can read more about Gift Songs at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
The Drowned Book
by Sean O’Brien
Many of the poems in Sean O’Brien’s new collection take their emotional tenor and imaginative cue from his acclaimed translation of Dante’s Inferno, and occupy a dark, flooded, subterranean world, as dramatically compelling as it is disquieting. Circumstances have compelled O’Brien to return repeatedly to the elegiac form, and “The Drowned Book” contains a number of powerfully moving poems written in memory of fellow poets and artists. “The Drowned Book” again shows O’Brien a master of the authoritative line, and underscores his pre-eminence among contemporary English poets. …
You can read more about The Drowned Book at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Birds with a Broken Wing
by Adam Thorpe
Adam Thorpe’s fifth collection finds purpose in the discarded, the secretive, the failed. Juxtaposing creation and destruction, hope and grief - a small boy deep down a lead mine; an unlit, nocturnal path set against the ‘insomniac’ motorway; industrialised apples against wrinkled windfalls - his poems argue for bewilderment and ‘the slight bruise of doubt’. Whether walking an abandoned road or considering a friend’s suicide, his poems remind us of our abdications, of our collapsed relationships with nature, with history, with ourselves. There are, however, all the vestiges of connective tissue - memories and mementoes, sudden, miraculous leaps of beauty. The book is full of such traces, delicate and fugitive: the poet’s grandmother retrieved through her ninety-year-old bookmark of rose petals; the unvoiced suggestion of his mother’s voice on an answerphone; the memory of a vanished native chief in a Canadian mountain’s shadow…
You can read more about Birds with a Broken Wing at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
The Harbour Beyond the Movie
by Luke Kennard
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You can read more about The Harbour Beyond the Movie at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Beasts of Nalunga
by Jack Mapanje
Jack Mapanje returns to his concern for ordinary people in Africa and in the world at large. These new poems are boldly lyrical narratives, cunningly crafted in mesmerising spirals. His voice is still ironically cheerful, his tone impotently angry but confidently measured with wit and humour, however bleak. He fears the saying ‘once a prisoner always a prisoner’, and questions why prisons refuse to go away. …
You can read more about Beasts of Nalunga at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
BEST FIRST COLLECTION (£5,000)
Twenty Four Preludes and Fugues on Dimitri Shostakovich
by Joanna Boulter
Joanna Boulter’s first full-length poetry collection takes the form of a long sequence based on the life and turbulent times of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Taking Shostakovich’s “Preludes & Fugues” as her starting point, the poet puts together a deeply-considered and thoroughly-researched account of the composer’s life, with the ‘preludes’ written in free or invented forms in the third person, and the ‘fugues’ in any strict poetic form in the first person as the voice of the composer himself. The effect of these poems is cumulative and together they make an original contribution to the assessment and celebration of the life and work of Shostakovich. …
You can read more about Twenty Four Preludes and Fugues on Dimitri Shostakovich at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Galatea
by Melanie Challenger
In Galatea, her first collection, Challenger casts a poet’s sensitive eye across the hours of a tumultuous century to create startling poems whose voice - resolute, compassionate, original - both celebrates and mourns the tensions of human nature. Drawing her themes from the Pygmalion myth, Challenger portrays her subjects in trembling poise between action and inaction, consummation and defeat. …
You can read more about Galatea at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Look We Have Coming to Dover!
by Daljit Nagra
Taking in its sights Matthew Arnold’s ‘land of dreams’, the collection explores the idealism and reality of a multicultural Britain with wit, intelligence and no small sense of mischief. Nagra, whose own parents came to England from the Punjab in the 1950s, conjures a jazzed hybrid language to tell stories of aspiration, assimilation, alienation and love, from a stowaway’s first footprint on Dover beach to the disenchantment of subsequent generations. By turns realist and romantic, these charged and challenging poems never shy from confrontation, but remain, always, touched by a humorous zeal and an appetite for living. …
You can read more about Look We Have Coming to Dover! at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
Andraste’s Hair
by Eleanor Rees
Bridging the divide between experimental, performance and traditional poetries the poems in “Andraste’s Hair” draw on myth, memory, folksong and murder ballad. Often set in a mythical Liverpool, a city of metamorphosis and magic, grotesque and beautiful, its buildings are a backdrop for visions and apprehensions of the past. Liverpool at night is a place where boundaries are crossed in search of knowledge, sexual, historical, and emotional - between life and death. Natural and urban landscapes - woodland, city park, dock, terraced street, the river, provide settings for an exploration of the conflict between instinctive and cultured knowledge, between abstract thought and felt experience. The poems are active and forceful - looking for answers they never find. Realities are established and than subverted. Women become trees, cities become men, roads become rivers, night becomes dawn, and the world is constantly transformed, constantly in flux. Collaborative processes inform the structure of many poems; fusion and the loss of self are preoccupying themes. The poetic voice is remade to articulate what has been discovered in the act of writing. Sometimes erotic, sometimes fierce, sometimes vulnerable the poems fuse a musical sense of language with a grounded vision of the world. …
You can read more about Andraste’s Hair at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.
BEST SINGLE POEM (£1,000)
“The Hut in Question” by David Harsent (published in Poetry Review)
“Thursday” by Lorraine Mariner (published in The Rialto)
“Dunt” by Alice Oswald (published in Poetry London)
“The Day I Knew I Wouldn’t Live Forever” by Carole Satyamurti (published in The Interpreter’s House)
“Goulash” by Myra Schneider
“The Birkdale Nightingale” by Jean Sprackland (published in Poetry Review)
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