On Sunday night 2,000 people gathered at the Royal Festival Hall in London to hear the 10 poets shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize read from their collections. Simon Armitage, who has become a bit of a national treasure, joked on stage about how nerve-wracking it was (no doubt it’s terrifying) and how all the shortlisted poets had washed their hair for the occasion. His work, The Death of King Arthur, is a reworking of a 14^th century poem of which the only extant copy lies in Lincoln Cathedral. 

Like Simon Armitage, Sharon Olds has been shortlisted for this prize on previous occasions.  Perhaps neither of them will win tonight, but my vote goes for Olds.  In 1997, after 20 years of marriage, her husband left her for another woman. In her shortlisted collection, Stag’s Leap, Olds creates a narrative of the emotional fallout from this.  She is, she says, “half on the side of the leaver”, her husband, who must carry “books on his head like a stack of posture volumes”.  Olds waited for her children to become adults before publishing this volume. 

Sean Borodale’s collection, according to Ian McMillan who hosted the evening,  “changes what a poetry book can do”. Bee Journal is also a manual of bee-keeping. “Black bees, like models made of tar and grit, get stuck./The queen inside them all; they, wall and bedding, cluster/walls’ eyes, measuring and smelling, fitting …”. This is a first collection and Borodale is still very young - so I hope for his sake that he does not win. It would put his second collection under intolerable pressure.

Gillian Clarke was the first to read, from her book Ice.  Of all the poems we heard, I loved these the best - rooted in Wales (like me), containing memories and metaphors of the frozen landscape.  Freeze, 1947 looks back to the big freeze of that year when “on doorsteps bottled milk stood stunned”. Ice is also a metaphor for finding clarity and giving solidity to histories that might otherwise evaporate.

Julia Copus’s poetry contains the most remarkable ideas at its heart.  Away from the normal dreams and traumas of actual parenthood, these poems focus on imagined or longed-for parenthood with a sequence based on a couple who are receiving IVF.  Another poem is based on a real-life event of a man who awoke from 17 years in a coma to find that he had 11 grandchildren!  The World’s Two Smallest Humans is a collection in four parts, dealing with childhood, teenage disaffection, the end of relationships and the inability to have children.

Paul Farley was introduced by Ian McMillan as “a poet who understands the juxtaposition of high and low culture”. The Dark Film work ranges over ideas of memory as film, urban childhood, the poor and dispossessed throughout history. Farley had the best punchline of the evening with his poem about the Queen.

Jorie Graham takes no prisoners with the complexity of her work. I heard someone complain that she uses long sentences.  Mmmm.  Whitman never did that, of course. It is as well not to get too hung up on narrative meaning when reading Graham’s poems, but to savour the words and the sounds and images in P L A C E:

“every leaf has other plans for you say the minutes also the/ seconds also the tiniest/fractions of whatever atoms make this a hot breezeless day,/in which what regards the soul is what it has given back/(when the sky is torn)(when the seas are poured forth)”

Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie writes beautiful and deceptively simple lyrics about nature. The Overhaul tracks the seasons to explore time, memory and our relationship with nature.  I loved a poem she read about the moon shining through her study window, but sadly made no notes about it.  However, here is a line from The Stags:

“Below us, in the next glen, is the grave

calm brotherhood, descended

out of winter, out of hunger, kneeling,

like the signatories of a covenant;”

Jacob Polley’s collection, The Havocs, deals with the darkness at the heart of contemporary life and how it creeps about the edges of our vision. Polley’s reading was heartily well-received, making me think that if the audience could have had the vote, here would be the winner. He chose to read a dark poem of a conversation taking place between an obviously teenage son and his mother in which you can feel the youngster’s frustration at his mother’s fussing, and at the same time feel the mother’s heartache at her inability to protect her boy from the violence of the contemporary world.  This is from The Doll’s House :

“Be brave. To live is not to fear

despite the scale of what’s at stake.”

I understand that these darker poems are balanced by others in the collection - and imagine they would need to be.

Deryn Rees-Jones explained that her work is informed by what happens when the body fails and words don’t seem to be enough. The sequence of poems chosen for the reading from Burying The Wren was a conceit around the idea of woman as dog:

“Look I’m swallowing sorrow

No-one can hear me in spite of the howls”

I’m sorry to say that, for me, this was the low point of the evening.  A beautifully crafted poem in many ways no doubt, but the repetition of the word “dog” was so extreme over several pages,  that I just wanted it to end.

The shortlisted titles were: The Death of King Arthur by Simon Armitage (Faber);
Bee Journal by Sean Borodale (Jonathan Cape); Ice by Gillian Clarke (Carcanet);
The World's Two Smallest Humans by Julia Copus (Faber); The Dark Film by Paul Farley (Picador); P L A C E by Jorie Graham (Carcanet); The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie (Picador); Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds (Jonathan Cape); The Havocs by Jacob Polley (Picador); Burying the Wren by Deryn Rees-Jones (Seren)

Simon Armitage's last collection, Seeing Stars (Faber), was shortlisted for the 2010 TS Eliot prize. He was also shortlisted for the 2002 TS Eliot prize with The Universal Home Doctor, and the 1995 prize with The Dead Sea Poems. He also won the very first Forward prize (Most Promising Young Poet), and won again in 1995 with The Dead Sea Poems.

Sean Borodale's Bee Journal was nominated for the poetry category of the Costa Book awards in 2012, and he has recently been selected as a Granta New Poet.

Gillian Clarke won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010 and was made Wales' national poet in the same year.

Julia Copus won an Eric Gregory award in 1994 and first prize in the 2002 National Poetry Competition.

Paul Farley's first collection The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best First Collection) in 1998, and the Somerset Maugham Award in 1999. He was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize in 2002 with The Ice Age, which won the Whitbread Poetry award in the same year. In 2009, with co-author Michael Symmons Roberts, he won the Jerwood prize for non-fiction with Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness.

Jorie Graham's many honours include a John D and Catherine T MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 won the 1996 Pulitzer prize for poetry. P L A C E won the 2012 Forward poetry prize for best collection, making her the first American woman to win the prize.

Kathleen Jamie won an Eric Gregory award in 1981. Her collection The Queen of Sheba won the 1995 Somerset Maugham award, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize in the same year, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize in 1996. Her next collection, Jizzen, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize in 2000, and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize in 1999. Her Selected Poems, Mr. and Mrs. Scotland are Dead: Poems 1980-1994, was shortlisted for the Griffin prize in 2003. The Tree House was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize in 2004, and won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) in the same year. She won the Costa poetry prize earlier this month.

In 1980, Sharon Olds' Satan Says won the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center award. In 1984, The Dead and the Living won the Lamont Poetry prize, and the National Book Critics Circle award. The Father was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize in 1992 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. Her last collection, 2009's One Secret Thing, was also shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize.

Jacob Polley won an Eric Gregory award, and the BBC Radio 4/Arts Council First Verse award, in 2002. His first book, The Brink (Picador 2003), was a Poetry Book Society Choice, and went on to be shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys prize. He was selected as one of the Next Generation Poets in 2004.

Deryn Rees-Jones won an Eric Gregory award in 1993, and an Arts Council of England Writer's award in 1996. The Memory Tray (1994) was shortlisted for the Forward prize for best first collection.