On the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist 2025
.
Infinity Pool, Vona Groarke, The Gallery Press, 2025, 64 pages, £10.50.
The New Carthaginians, Nick Makoha, Penguin, 2025, 112 pages, £10.99.
Stay Dead, Natalie Shapero, Outspoken Press, 2025, 104 pages, £11.99.
.
Apart from a couple of exceptions, the shortlist for the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize is a more meagre offering than usual; unacceptably so, given some of the riches available for nomination. It is easy to bemoan the quality of poetry’s decline, when in fact the quantity of good stuff published each year has stayed relatively constant, if you know where to look and whose judgement to trust. A decision made by committee has its obvious advantages – a variety of readers, interests and predispositions ought to result in a celebration of a wider range of work, some of which (the quieter, the more esoteric or the more unfashionable) can be given more limelight due to one judge’s insistence. The list this year, however, appears to be playing it safe; one suspects that some compromises in the three-person judging room has left us with some third, fourth and fifth-favourite choices. But so it goes, and attendance at the reading ceremony (Southbank Centre, January 18th 2026) is not yet compulsory. The three kindly sent to me by The London Magazine cover, I think, much of the shortlist’s range.
Thankfully, after decades of receiving Irish awards – and having just been appointed Irish Professor of Poetry following Paul Muldoon’s tenure – Vona Groarke is coming to be more appreciated in England. Infinity Pool is her ninth collection of original poetry, alongside translations from Irish (including Woman of Winter and the Lament for Art O’Leary) and non-fiction (such as a life of Ellen O’Hara). An infinity pool, of course, is designed to make its edges indistinct, and thereby to give the false impression of being part of its broader landscape – they are popular at expensive beach hotels, where a pool seems to converge with the reach of the sea beyond (or the sky, for those infinity pools atop skyscrapers designed for a Final Destination-like event). In the title poem she dreams of the image, ‘a blue rectangle not quite blank’, a trick of vision where you cannot ‘tell / the edge, the stitching or the seams’. For Groarke the image is not one of garish wealth but one of expansiveness and illusion, a symbolic centre for a collection of poems about landscape and limit.
With her lyrical landscape meditations, Groarke has the careful quality of a poet like Elizabeth Bishop or Wang Wei.
The book opens with a poem of transformation through flight and descent, ‘Stanstead to Knock, December 21st’, down from a world where ‘What seemed impossible… namely hurt, namely flaw, / clumps to a mizzing afternoon’. I learned recently on landing at Knock Airport that the primary motivation for its construction was to encourage tourists to visit a nearby shrine, and the poem certainly has a religious tenderness (‘I am open, riddled with light’, ‘a light I myself am so in need of’) as the poet presumably returns home for Christmas, an occasion which already straddles the boundary between the exalted and the quotidian. Through a kind of reverse transfiguration, the poet moves from the ‘sunlit evermore’ with its ‘private sun’ – a lovely image, evoking both how the sun is blocked out by the clouds and so only available to those above them, but also imagining its bronze brilliance as a kind of icon for private worship – down into the humdrum world of baggage carousels, ‘stepping out // into lives we chose, even bought tickets to’. It is a subtle and beautiful poem, and a designation of the terrain.
Her voice is doubting and sensitive, filled with questions and sidesteps: ‘I would. Wouldn’t I?’ In ‘Snapshot’ she observes a picture of herself with mother and father, but the security of the photograph’s suspended capture destabilises the longer she looks at it: ‘proof / of them having been here, together, once,’ the key word here being once – not just ‘at some time’ but one time only. With her lyrical landscape meditations, she has the careful quality of a poet like Elizabeth Bishop or Wang Wei, a precision of words ‘such that they answer / each by each when called upon’ (‘With the moon in full spate such that’). One of the book’s strengths is this Bishop-like dedication to precision; the poems have undergone an apprenticeship of seeing, and the accuracy of the vision gives them a quality that is something like verification – or what Heaney has called ‘deep access’. This can be seen in her poems about water and the sea, including multiple poems on the Protean Atlantic, a Proteus which she, Menelaus-like, tries to pin down: ‘Imagine the Atlantic as an Actor,’ mechanic, journalist, filmmaker, artist, poet. In ‘Inner Space’ she defines interiority as being like ‘the environment beneath the surface of the sea’, where only ‘a chance remark, something of nothing’ can set the mind on its dive inwards, as she goes down ‘through whatever current slaps dabberlock, / bladderwrack or a mermaid’s purse of words’. Or ‘An Poll Gorm’ (‘The Blue Hole’), in which she swims with her ‘one and only body’, describing the sea as a vast, radiant mind – her own mind: ‘I quiet to its quiet,’ ‘my life thus far… is what’s under me.’ The speaker emerges from this temporal suspension ‘licking salt from my forearm / so that my tongue is stars in darkness’, and then returns into time, ‘losing / less than I thought, growing old’. She is more occupied than usual with age in this book, or more accurately with time and presence: ‘What will stop when the bells stop, what continue?’ Infinity Pool is a fine book, and a contribution to an already exceptional bibliography – a collected poems ought to be in the offing, and would be a major contribution to Irish poetry.
In 1976, two Palestinians of the PFLP and two Germans of the RZ hijacked a plane flying from Tel Aviv to Paris and redirected it to Uganda. Upon arrival, they received support and refuge from Idi Amin, Uganda’s answer to Hitler; during the subsequent international crisis, the young Nick Makoha fled the country; The New Carthaginians traces the history of the crisis, Uganda itself and the active space that has existed for half a century between the poet and his home country. With the historiographical metafictive humour of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red or the epic narrative sweep of James Merrill’s The Book of Ephraim, The New Carthaginians is a journey through time and mind, moving through multiple lateral dimensions often within the same poem (or the same footnote).
One longs for a little democratic trust to be once again part of the poet and reader’s pact.
The structuralist distinction between plot (the events of a linear chronology) and narrative (the way the elements of that story move in play) is useful to describe the book’s movement. Makoha lays down the necessary information for the uninformed: ‘Who understands the world? The year is 1976. It will be a long summer. […] They are moving to a changed destination, a foreign city that houses the room in which I was born.’ The book’s characters are a trinity of the poet himself, a Black Icarus and a Virgilian spiritual escort in the form of the resurrected Jean Michel Basquiat (with a supporting cast of Moses, guide through exile, and Leonardo da Vinci, patron saint of painting, planes and perspective). Alongside are extensive footnotes – which, in true metafictional fashion, often obscure, contend with or disrupt narrative rather than providing clarification, and nod towards the ways in which the horrific events of this story happen beneath the surface of the page. As he says in the prologue, ‘I apologise in advance / for not telling you everything.’ And then, later in the book (‘The Long Duration of a Split Second’), ‘To begin the story again, what was once a village on a rock they will call Jerusalem.’ In ‘Julius Caesar’, the poet warns against the false idols of dictators and movie stars; in reference to The Last King of Scotland, a biographical film about Amin, ‘Crossing a runway is not / like crossing the street, especially when your Black king is a counterfeit / played by Forest Whitaker.’ The reader is encouraged throughout to question social and poetic traditions: as in ‘Riding With Death’, ‘Death will not greet you with trumpets and drums. Watch death and its small entourage!’
Throughout, the sky is a place of exile but rebirth; like Gibreel and Saladin falling transformed into the English Channel, ‘Each flight / a reincarnation. And now I am the sky’ (‘Codex© of Birds’). In ‘Icarus talks to the poet on Rodeo Drive about leaving’, Makoha invokes one of the earliest poets-in-exile, Ovid, who ‘knew exile was a way of saying, / my country is beautiful, or the distance // kills me’. One gripe is that, alongside lots of great lines (‘Night pins / itself to the plane’ (‘AMS’)), too often the speculative, collage-like assembly of disparate images resorts to off-putting pithy phrasing from the Kaveh Akbar school of gnomism: ‘No warrior asks to be the smoke without the fire’ (‘Warrior’), ‘But isn’t a country / also a space?’ (‘CODEX©’), ‘But the function / of the eyes in this world is to draw whatever is placed in front of it’ (‘The History of Black People’). Makoha explains his technique in the endnotes: a poetic version of the ‘exploded collage’, as practised by Basquiat on canvas, ‘allow[ing] for multiple codices of information and insight to be displayed all at once, free of social hierarchies’. Although distinct from early-twentieth-century modernist technique in a number of ways (‘a sampling of experience, the way a DJ samples music’ is a good way of describing it), when he goes on to tell the reader how the ‘seemingly nonsensical use of language, symbols, numbers and images are in fact a code for those willing to engage’ (my italics), something which readers of English-language poetry have known at least since 1922, it comes across as pretentious or even a little defensive. One longs for a little democratic trust to be once again part of the poet and reader’s pact.
Stay Dead is Natalie Shapero’s fourth collection and her first published in the UK. Blurb quotes describe her as having a ‘cutting, sardonic voice’ (Stay Dead) and ‘sharp, sardonic wit’ (Popular Longing), and as being ‘sardonically expressive’ (Hard Child). After double-checking I knew exactly what this popular word meant (and discovering a cool, blurry etymological link to the island of Sardinia), I think it is broadly accurate to apply to Shapero’s poetry, minus the implication of cynicism; it is funny and dark, and knocks at the thin partition between tragedy and comedy. Our lives may feel tragic but this must be great entertainment for the gods: ‘yeah, / I realise I’m not an insect—it’s just that we have so much / in common’ (‘No Comets Seen’).
Shapero contends with various and evocative ideas, but there seems to be no gap between the first intimation of an interesting thought and its articulation as poetry.
She uses the language of painting and performance to explore superficiality and the challenge of expression, as in ‘Capacity Crowd’: ‘I never saw myself / represented in art until that movie / where the one guy is fed to the wood- / chipper: bye!’ Frequently she contrasts apocalyptic visions and abjection with contemporary idiom and self-effacing irony:
Have I told you I like your flashlight?
Your trusty one gallon
of water per person per day on the bottom shelf?
It’s honestly cute that you think
you know what’s coming. Have I told you
about when I died and came back
and everyone begged me
to please stay dead? It wasn’t, they promised me, personal—
(‘Oh Boo Hoo’)
This bathetic movement is characteristic of nearly every poem, and it becomes wearily repetitive; the wry voice grates as similar observations are repeatedly made in similar syntax. (It is worth mentioning that the book is very similar in content and style to Hard Child, whose material is nearly a decade old.) The poems are let down by the poet’s inclination towards relentless self-explication and an overreliance on punchlines, comic or otherwise. In a book that is, in large part, about the experience of intense depression (‘When you’re slight / enough to be ended by a single drop, a single drop’s a storm’ (‘Really Raining’)), it could be argued that both tendencies are intentional stylistic traits of a speaker’s personality, but the lack of surprise cannot be overcome. Here is an example, from ‘Play In’:
My hang-up with movies is the messaging
that comes with being filmed out of sequence. It makes actors
confused—they start thinking that in life
they can go ahead and die and then just be fine the next day.
Also sometimes you only get a slice
of the script if you get a lesser part; you can be in the thing
and not even know what the plot is.
And then the punchline all of this was for: ‘Well, I get enough / of that in my own life already.’ Once spotted, this belabouring tendency is hard to ignore, as in ‘Careful’:
I like it when a single actor appears
across multiple shows. It suggests that so much
is survivable.
A little specious, but fair enough. But we’re not done:
Last week this guy
was a mid-level gangster getting brutally
clubbed and then launched off a bridge; this week
he’s a prep school teacher, snacking in the lounge.
I’m happy for him. He really turned it around.
Later, in the same poem, she does it again: ‘I’m considering religion, but only the ones / with many miracles still to come.’ Fine, but just to be sure: ‘I don’t / want one where the miracles already / happened.’ Repetition and pleonasm have rhetorical potential, but this reads more like carelessness than cubism. She contends with various and evocative ideas, whether for philosophical enquiry, joke or both, but there seems to be no gap between the first intimation of an interesting thought and its articulation as poetry: ‘Every time I’ve seen the moon, I’ve thought it was the Earth and I’m / somewhere else gazing at it, gauging whether I’ll make it / back someday’ (‘Really Raining’), or ‘in truth I don’t know if I am / a person, or if I’m just an anthropomorphic iteration / of the knowledge that the idiom CUT TO THE CHASE / originated in film editing; it’s just what you do // when your action movie borders on the overlong— // I’ve bordered on the overlong’ (‘Big Basin’). This is very laboured stuff, and does not just border on the overlong.
.
.
Dominic Leonard is a poet from West Yorkshire. His writing has appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, the TLS and elsewhere. In 2019 he received an Eric Gregory Award, and he won the 2024 London Magazine Poetry Prize. He lives and teaches in London.
This review will feature in our upcoming print issue. To read this and more, buy our latest print issue here, pre-order our next or subscribe to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.