Unlike last year's unexpected recognition of Jorie Graham and Denise Riley, there were no surprises at the Forwards last night with Michael Symmons Roberts' Drysalter winning Best Collection and Emily Berry's Faber debut Dear Boy getting Best First:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/01/drysalter-wins-forward-poetry-prize
I was an admirer of Corpus in particular but I have the sense as time goes on that Symmons Roberts is writing the same poem over and over again: and wasn't that "urge to find the immanent in the ordinary material world" an over-familiar trope in the first place? In this Guardian poem, from the predictable Biblical title on ('Through a Glass Darkly'), you can see the prize-winning qualities of what's held to be "real poetry": the reverential Burnsidean tone, the parsing of vague spiritual intimations onto a natural landscape in a way that's actually never far from a kind of pathetically-fallacious melancholy ("I pray for days like these"),the neatly-spaced inventory of metaphors and the clincher of a last line, snapping closed the poem's nebulous Pascal's Wager with a textbook, stars-as-heaven cliché.
Come back Jorie Graham, we need you!
ictus
Showing posts with label emily berry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label emily berry. Show all posts
Wednesday, 2 October 2013
Wednesday, 10 July 2013
Forwarding
Delighted to hear that a poem from Human Form has been Highly Commended in the Forward Prize 2013 and will be reprinted in the Forward anthology which comes out on October 1st when the winners are announced. 'At Llantwhit Beach' doesn't seem the most natural choice and there would be quite a few others in the book I would nominate in its place but I'm certainly not complaining. It's nice that Claire Trevien - fellow Penned-poet I launched with - also had a poem Highly Commended, 'The Shipwrecked House II'. Interesting that both poems are ostensibly about the sea - do the judges perhaps think in terms of themes for the anthology?
There's an article about judging the competition by Sheenagh Pugh here.http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jul/08/judging-forward-prizes-for-poetry and the full shortlist can be read here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/08/forward-poetry-prize-shortlists-2013.
The choices for Best Book seem fairly predictable and something of a step back from the bolder list last year when Jorie Graham's PLACE won. The First Book six seem a bit more adventurous: I'm only familiar with Emily Berry's book so can't comment too much on the others.
There's an article about judging the competition by Sheenagh Pugh here.http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jul/08/judging-forward-prizes-for-poetry and the full shortlist can be read here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/08/forward-poetry-prize-shortlists-2013.
The choices for Best Book seem fairly predictable and something of a step back from the bolder list last year when Jorie Graham's PLACE won. The First Book six seem a bit more adventurous: I'm only familiar with Emily Berry's book so can't comment too much on the others.
Thursday, 23 May 2013
Unexpected Body Combinations
I was immensely pleased to come across a first review of Human Form this week in the Los Angeles Review of Books, part of an excellently-written piece on recent British debuts by Lytton Smith:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/answers-on-a-postcard-departures-or-some-accidental-british-debuts
It's as close to feeling "This is the reason I write" as it gets when someone seems to understand and intuit what you were trying to do as accurately as Lytton Smith seems to have done in his analysis of Human Form; in fact - as I'm always loathe to offer interpretations of my own work (since in a way if I knew what the poem meant I wouldn't have had to go to the lengths of writing it - as another poem about poetry says "What's made of it/I waive") - he explains it far better than I could do and in passages like the following perfectly sums up what (only semi-consciously) I was hoping/groping to articulate:
'Human Form', the book’s title poem, reconfigures the child’s appearance in its parents’ bed as “a cubist scrum” within and into which “we struggle into consciousness / like a many-limbed Lakshmi.” This “new / configuration” unfolds in a triplet of sestets whose ragged lines are the unexpected body combinations, the “ruffled, parodic / Trinity” of human forms. Behind the ostensible neatness of British poetic form, just as behind the castle-like British home, we find something rather more difficult to parse.
I also greatly admire the general thrust of Smith's argument (the other debuts he looks at are by Emily Berry, Heather Phillipson and Warshan Shire) which holds these quite disparate British volumes as evidence for an American readership that we've moved decisively beyond the "dreary, disheartening" conservatism that UK was formerly dogged with (and still is in certain quarters) eg. "the careful prosody retailed by the major houses (especially Faber) run[ning] the gamut from the quotidian to the banal by way of the Minor Epiphany"(GC Waldrep's words). If this new adventurousness is characterised, as Smith says,by "a stumbling-upon experience and trying to make something of it ... autobiographical, and biographical, and found, but all at a glance or aslant... it is idiomatic to its immediate cultural geography in the way William Carlos Williams also was to his", we are certainly on the right lines.
At a time when it's sometimes said that poetry reviews no longer much matter and have little impact on book-sales, and when your ability to advertise yourself on Facebook and Twitter is supposed to be a measure of your worth as a writer, it's reassuring to read a review that's so insightful, well-thought-through and composed with it's own inventive care for language - futhermore, one that argues so persuasively and so positively for the burgeoning health of British poetry.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/answers-on-a-postcard-departures-or-some-accidental-british-debuts
It's as close to feeling "This is the reason I write" as it gets when someone seems to understand and intuit what you were trying to do as accurately as Lytton Smith seems to have done in his analysis of Human Form; in fact - as I'm always loathe to offer interpretations of my own work (since in a way if I knew what the poem meant I wouldn't have had to go to the lengths of writing it - as another poem about poetry says "What's made of it/I waive") - he explains it far better than I could do and in passages like the following perfectly sums up what (only semi-consciously) I was hoping/groping to articulate:
'Human Form', the book’s title poem, reconfigures the child’s appearance in its parents’ bed as “a cubist scrum” within and into which “we struggle into consciousness / like a many-limbed Lakshmi.” This “new / configuration” unfolds in a triplet of sestets whose ragged lines are the unexpected body combinations, the “ruffled, parodic / Trinity” of human forms. Behind the ostensible neatness of British poetic form, just as behind the castle-like British home, we find something rather more difficult to parse.
I also greatly admire the general thrust of Smith's argument (the other debuts he looks at are by Emily Berry, Heather Phillipson and Warshan Shire) which holds these quite disparate British volumes as evidence for an American readership that we've moved decisively beyond the "dreary, disheartening" conservatism that UK was formerly dogged with (and still is in certain quarters) eg. "the careful prosody retailed by the major houses (especially Faber) run[ning] the gamut from the quotidian to the banal by way of the Minor Epiphany"(GC Waldrep's words). If this new adventurousness is characterised, as Smith says,by "a stumbling-upon experience and trying to make something of it ... autobiographical, and biographical, and found, but all at a glance or aslant... it is idiomatic to its immediate cultural geography in the way William Carlos Williams also was to his", we are certainly on the right lines.
At a time when it's sometimes said that poetry reviews no longer much matter and have little impact on book-sales, and when your ability to advertise yourself on Facebook and Twitter is supposed to be a measure of your worth as a writer, it's reassuring to read a review that's so insightful, well-thought-through and composed with it's own inventive care for language - futhermore, one that argues so persuasively and so positively for the burgeoning health of British poetry.
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