At the British poetry world’s biggest annual prize, a strong shortlist including three former winners battle for the prestige and the cash. The victorious poet, however, comes as something of a surprise.

Dan Eltringham

T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize Readings, Southbank Centre, Sunday 17th January 2010

All quotation from the performances.

‘It was a cold coming we had of it/Just the worst time of year/For a journey,’ intones Simon Armitage, speaking as he walks onto the reading platform, northern vowels flattening the familiar lines from Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi.’ In the refined surroundings of the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall (pictured, left) this business-like dispensing with formalities such as a proper introduction makes people sit up. After that, the format is simple – the ten poets competing for the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry each read a handful of poems from their nominated volume, presumably in a last attempt to persuade the panel of their case, as the final judges’ meeting takes place the following day. There is a photograph of Eliot with head slouched over on his hand, expression ambivalent, watching over tonight’s performances. The event is very much in-house – Eliot, as we are reminded, founded the Poetry Book Society (PBS) – and the evening is peppered with compeer Daljit Nagra’s repeated plugs for PBS membership. Eliot’s beneficently smiling photograph only confirms the curious twin sense of establishment and coterie that surrounds the poetry world as we find it here.

First to read is Phillip Gross, whose volume The Water Table centres round the ‘body of water’ that is the Severn estuary, and on the protean quality of that estuary’s position ‘between’ land and water, solid and liquid. Gross’ reading has a strange and engaging awkwardness, coupled with a serious concern for the practicalities of living with and using his favoured element. Gross is followed by the Irish poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, whose poems range across subject matter as diverse as Irish history, a story-telling cat who will speak ‘in Irish or Russian,’ and a witch emerging from a wardrobe into a flooded house. Her similes are sometimes slightly laboured – ‘The silk scarves/Came flying at her face like a carwash’ – in a way that suggests the badly digested influence of Martian poetry, but such instances are minor flaws. Next is Fred D’Aguiar. The poems he reads from Continental Shelf revolve around family lore in his native Guyana, for example the extremely local specificity of cure-all product ‘Limocol,’ which demands an explanation about the same length as the poem. There are some pleasing metaphorical moves which vary the slightly flat textures – children who ‘speak in water trickles’ – and the impression of a land where ‘If there is/mercy…it is accidental’ is deftly conveyed.

Jane Draycott also writes about the domestic – her daughter learning to drive in her car, and an improvisation on the ‘Girls’ Book of Model Making’ – but her more interesting material is a translation of the opening stanzas of the Medieval poem Pearl, by the same poet that wrote the earliest known English version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Hugo Williams is typically sharp in introducing his poems, commenting that the ‘main thing in this book,’ West End Final, is a sequence of twelve ‘pillow poems’ that are spoken by a man, lying in bed, watching a woman undress. Williams quips that he first wrote one, and then eleven more the same, but with ‘different words.’ The witticisms continue, albeit unintentionally, as the poem ‘Marital Visit,’ concerning his bachelor existence in London, is prefaced with the explanation that ‘my life lives in France.’ He swiftly amends this to ‘wife,’ and earns a laugh. With Williams, it seems, the poems and the life are interchangeable material for his creation of a career-long mythology of self. When it’s as engaging as in West End Final, this approach is completely justified.

Following the interval, poems from Sharon Olds’ One Secret Thing are read by Jo Shapcott, with Olds unable to be present. Her poems are full of a seriousness it is hard to deny when executed with her technical skill, but it’s a shame not to hear them from the poet’s mouth. Following Shapcott onto the stage is one of the three previous winners of the prize on this year’s shortlist, Hungarian poet George Szirties. Perhaps it is just because we heard it read out so recently, but Szirties’ first poem, ‘Seeking North,’ with its structural focus around a journey to frozen places and historical and textual basis on the travels of Sir John Mandeville, bears strong similarity to ‘Journey of the Magi.’ Even if the comparison is suggested by Armitage’s opening reading, it is stronger for it. Szirties displays a consistency of voice across these poems, and reads them with practiced assurance. Alice Oswald seems less comfortable, and quite serious, but there is surely a performative quality to the austerity of her reading. She is the only poet who doesn’t talk around her poems, tapping her right boot while reading to keep time, and reciting incongruously childish lyrics from her illustrated Weeds and Wildflowers. Christopher Reid is probably the favourite, his The Scattering the recent recipient of the Costa Prize. It is a series of poetic meditations on the death of his wife, Lucinda Gane, and is replete with detail that builds a slow and sombre awareness of ‘the precise cadence/into silence/that argued the end.’ It is discomforting, and very moving, to listen to so much being revealed so publicly. Last to read is Sinéad Morrisey, whose set piece is an imagined letter in verse between the characters Amelia and William, as an alternative ending to Thackery’s Vanity Fair. As somebody sitting behind points out, this conceit might have been disastrous, but she manages to create a blend of kitschy Victorian humour and genuine emotion, contained between and behind self-consciously mannered lines. In doing so she wins the only round of applause for a single poem, which might suggest some kind of movement in the camp of this PBS-recommended poet for the Eliot prize? Not to be, however.

After Phillip Gross’ The Water Table was announced the unexpected winner of the £15,000 on Monday evening, what further reflections arise? Even if ‘water’ is a shop-worn theme in English poetry, Gross’ concern for the pragmatic life of a community which both exploits and is dependent upon the element constitutes a fresh take on the alluvial. The panel’s choice probably also reflected a current vogue for writing and reading literature in terms of human and nonhuman interaction, and the processes that link them. Certainly Gross’ detailed examination feels more purposive than Oswald’s sometimes fanciful anthropomorphizing, which is perhaps its nearest comparison. Gross was favoured, it seems, because his book has a clear delineating idea that binds the whole. Simon Armitage, one of the three poets that comprised the judging panel (the others were Colette Bryce and Penelope Shuttle), commented that The Water Table is remarkable because it is ‘so obviously a book.’ The establishment of such a firm conceptual frame, which also acts as a limiter, forces the poet’s ingenuity, and crucially drives him away from a concern with biographical self. The other poets would probably argue that they too had produced books, but Armitage’s comment is astute, and the choice of an outside bet such as Gross indicates real depth in current British poetry.