Here are links to my reviews of the collections shortlisted for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize
Joelle Taylor, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, 2021
C+nto & Othered Poems
‘This is a collection that walks the revolutionary road of this country’s finest radical writers as it explores the lives of women from the butch counterculture.’
Raymond Antrobus
All the Names Given
Raymond Antrobus’s latest collection, All the Names Given, explores both the gaps between sound and silence, and the uneasy relationships between those who have been silenced and those who have silenced them.
Kayo Chingonyi
A Blood Condition
In A Blood Condition, Chingonyi explores absence and loss with a spirit of generosity and thankfulness.
Selima Hill
Men Who Feed Pigeons
‘Relationships and friendships are placed under the microscope and Hill finds both comedy and tragedy in the prosaic details of everyday life.’
Victoria Kennefick
Eat or We Both Starve
‘Victoria Kennefick’s debut collection reads the world through Catholic culture and, in its echoes and reverberations, we grasp something of how history’s long shadow influences the individual.’
Hannah Lowe
The Kids
‘Lowe once taught English Literature in a London Sixth Form and The Kids is her barometer, one she taps regularly through the school year, charting the kids’ highs and lows.’
Michael Symmons Roberts
Ransom
Ransom is both a dazzling cinematic treatment of confinement and release, and a contemplation of the divine.
Daniel Sluman
single window
single window celebrate human dignity and, above all, reminds us that love is the drug — that love is enough.
Jack Underwood
A Year in the New Life
A Year in the New Life embraces the anxieties we face. It acknowledges the cruelty and indifference of both the universe and human nature but, somehow, despite this, it smiles at us.
Kevin Young
Stones
Stones is a hymn to the dearly departed. He resists that timeless human urge to aggrandise the dead with magnificent edifices, but his humble memorial creates something far more affecting.
Poor Rude Lines 