‘Song is a strong thing’: On the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist
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Eleanor Among the Saints, Rachel Mann, Carcanet, 2024, 80 pages, £11.99.
Lapwing, Hannah Copley, Pavilion Poetry, 2024, 72 pages, £10.99.
Signs, Music, Raymond Antrobus, Picador, 2024, 96 pages, £10.99.
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One thing a poetry prize shortlist can reliably provide, beyond cheers from the offices of underfunded editors, is variety. Whether in subject, form, style or quality, a shortlist can at least set out the stall of contemporary poetry and say: this is, for better or worse, what’s going on. The T. S. Eliot Prize (along with its quartet of fashionable siblings, the Forward Prizes) remains one of the most reliable gauges for the situation in the UK, and three of the nominated books cover a range of historical, thematic and stylistic ground.
Rachel Mann’s second collection, Eleanor Among the Saints, tells the story of Eleanor Rykener, a medieval trans woman, seamstress and sex worker. Mann (theologian and archdeacon) writes in a tradition of trans poetry engaged with medieval worlds (such as Jos Charles’s feeld and Jay Bernard’s The Red and Yellow Nothing), with their shared preoccupations: beauty, the inner and outer selves, metamorphosis (‘wondrous edits’), the horrors and pleasures of the body and the relationship between the physical and the numinous. Clothing and darning imagery is central: ‘all these loops whipped, corded, / Doubled and open, thrill of flounce and picot.’ The care Mann takes with correspondences of sound – the assonance and alliterations within a line – can be heard across the book. Many of Mann’s decisions are also informed by the etymological depth of a word: ‘You know all the conjugations, the parts and trips of speech, / All fibres of the Book, the stitching and snipping.’ A con-jugation is a joining together; as language joins thoughts, as the body is sewn together by God and as medieval vellum was stitched into scripture for private and public worship. She also plays on ‘fabrication’, a making-up, but punning on fabric and texture: ‘All text is stitched, / Body too only subset of making,’ ‘Loom me into Law, woven from readings’ – the human body is a conduit for, and a consequence of, divine language. But the economy of the body is an economy of limit.
The poem, like the body, is a site of transformative potential where language behaves in lateral and magical ways.
The weight and seriousness of her language comes from more than her ready access to the thees, thous and Os of scripture. The poems sound wonderful aloud, full of clunking consonants and verbal patterns: ‘I saw the Devil’s bright arms drop his Spittleful, / Great glob of slag on Wyre.’ To Mann the poem, like the body, is a site of transformative potential where language behaves in lateral and magical ways, perhaps ‘a walk into gaps where words won’t go’ – with an eyebrow raised – ‘Not even pronouns.’ Sometimes Mann’s attempts at reflecting the strangeness of experience and sensation through oxymoron fall a little flat (‘Rain as cold as fire’ / ‘Whose very silence is call’), and the longer sentences, which are apt to stretch syntax and grammar to breaking point, can lose their subject by stacking up clauses, or dwell in abstractions so long that the reader has little to grasp. Once the Eleanor poems reach their conclusion, the more general religious poems occasionally err on the side of generic – the tonal and argumentative risk of the first section is never fully replicated by what follows.
Collections like these can be let down by the writer, low on ideas, dragging an interesting figure through anachronisms until the conceit or local interest wears thin. Thankfully, Mann does not let us down here. The figure of Eleanor is a starting point for reflections on faith, fear, redemption and the relationship between our world and the divine, and the result is a very impressive collection, and a worthwhile contribution to an apparent reemergence of serious religious poetry in the UK.
Similarly to Mann’s volume, Hannah Copley’s Lapwing is a book about transformation. This is established in her choice of epigraph from Gower: ‘or anon after he was changed / And from his oghne kinde stranged, / A lappenwincke mad he was.’ Her central image is the titular bird, from Middle English hlepan (leap) and wince (totter, waver): ‘leaper-winker,’ so called for the manner of its irregular flight, which stands in for a father lost to addiction. Unlike Ted Hughes’s crow, the lapwing does not speak his poems; somewhere, the central figure has lost himself and the poet writes in pursuit of her symbol, ‘last seen in his winter plumage…Almost raw looking.’ Copley explores the feeling of being lost for words and grasping for the most suitable, particular language. States of mind are described like physical spaces: ‘otherwise / known as diver found in its down in the centre / of some middle-of-nowhere.’ The bird is described ‘slowly tumbling / from high singularity / into the scrape of his thoughts,’ a particularly Hughesian turn in which metonymy and metaphor show natural figures in all their strange beauty and metaphysical power. John Clare, sometime resident bird-poet of the English countryside, is a clear influence too, not least in Copley’s interest in the sounds of birdsong: ‘the dull, incessant gossip of the coots: / chew-it, chew-it, chew-it.’ Her alliteration imitates the plosives of the lapwing’s peet-peet-peet call: ‘Plumage / primped and plucked to perfection,’ as well as bringing another of her sources, the ornate aural patterning of Old and Middle English, to the fore.
Anaphora is an organising principle: ‘Come cuckoo,’ she summons, ‘come endless sound, come parch, come hunger, / come pluck.’ The phrase ‘otherwise known as’ appears throughout: ‘Otherwise known as nickname, posture… otherwise felt as a leap, as / tombstone shiver, as an ever-constant wince’ (a play on the title’s etymology). The dominance of this phrase implies a sense of identity having become unmoored and not-quite-itself. These fugues are less effective when the phrases compared actually work as synonyms, such as ‘Litany, otherwise known as requiem, otherwise / known as send off.’ They are stranger and more powerful when the otherwise-ness of the lapwing is summoned in slant likeness. (The last instance of this device is pulled off very well, and makes for a grand and moving finale.)
In a book-length poem or sequence, success lies in the poet’s ability to sustain by modulation (this is not necessarily formal variation; Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets manages this across over 120 pages). One way Copley does this is by contrasting the more imaginative and rich flights of language with blunt returns to earth: ‘What does it feel like to forget your child’s name?’ However, even in a shortish volume (66 pages), a notable portion of the poems felt like surplus fantasias on images, sounds or ideas explored elsewhere. There is much to like here, but I was left wondering if these poems in denser concentration may have made a more effective pamphlet.
Poems which require very little work on the part of the reader make for poems in which there is nothing to do.
While Copley’s book attempts to locate the mythic traces of a family history, Raymond Antrobus’s new book takes the form of two sequences on the poet’s own new fatherhood: his anxieties preceding the child’s birth (‘Towards Naming’) and following (‘The New Father’). The former comprises a series of narrative vignettes – nervous conversations with friends and family, encounters in coffee shops – in which very little of import happens. ‘Outside / four men sit around a table and when a dog / passes them, they lean over and ruffle / its fur and ears.’ There is an attempt at making these moments relevant to his theme (‘No one asks the dog’s name’), but there is a dryness of ideas, punctuated by flashes of artifice (‘a mistake / (a mist ache)’). On a kind barista: ‘he knows the way to live – as if he knows / the grace we deserve to give ourselves.’ This diction – bromides on self-care and the necessity of tenderness – is pervasive and trying. While the blurb claims that the poet’s vulnerability is ‘disarming’ it is, in fact, entirely pedestrian, and the tenor on offer here occupies the dominant space in much contemporary poetry.
The poet seeks to communicate the significance of the seemingly prosaic events which make up a life. Sharon Olds is the poet par excellence of this mode, but Antrobus lacks the command of line and diction which makes her successful poems so successful; her risks (which can result in failure) are missing. There is no purchase, which there is in Olds’s best (and even in Bishop’s worst). Some poems very nearly risk something, such as when the poet wonders if he, in fact, wanted a daughter rather than a son: ‘I’m afraid of how / the world won’t trust you / before you know why.’ This is followed by a poem in which the poet feels nervous in a gender-neutral bathroom, but then ‘I relax, let it go,’ ‘I hear nothing crack / or scream, nothing // except… my own / flowing / fluid.’ The reader is glad that this is settled, and we move on to something else. The poet trusts his readers so little that some images contain their own exegesis: ‘The kitchen walls / were damp and peeling (like in the film ‘Repulsion’).’ There are lifts, like the simile of a child biting his fingers ‘like a pirate / bites a gold coin / to see / if it’s real,’ or the poem about a prisoner reading to his wife, the best poem in the whole book. Unfortunately, the blunders (steam rising ‘like a vowelling ghost’) are present on nearly every page and make for challenging reading.
Recently I have been teaching Langston Hughes, who said ‘Song is a strong thing.’ Song and strength – musical intelligence matched by a muscularity of thought, which combined make a kind of energy – are amply provided by some books on the Eliot shortlist this year; from others not. Re-readability is a fairly unrivalled standard: poems which require very little work on the part of the reader make for poems in which there is nothing to do, and after which there is nowhere to go.
You can hear readings from the shortlisted writers at the Southbank Centre on Sunday, January 12, hosted by poet Ian McMillan. Tickets for the event can be found here.
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Dominic Leonard is a poet from West Yorkshire. His writing has appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, the TLS, PN Review and elsewhere. In 2019 he received an Eric Gregory Award and in 2022 he won the Oxford Poetry Prize. He lives and teaches in London.
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