We recently packed up our London home for sale, but before it all went into storage I pulled out a few things and brought them with me. The most random was probably The Forward Book of Poetry 2000, which I see was a present from my parents at Christmas 1999. This is a modest paperback anthology of a selection of poems in four categories: two poems from each of the five shortlisted ‘best collections’ of 1999, two poems from each of the five shortlisted ‘best first collections’, the five shortlisted ‘best individual poems’ and then 34 ‘other poems’. (A quick comparison with this year’s collection shows that the format hasn’t really changed, though the 2024 issue printed 50 ‘highly commended’ but not shortlisted poems, rather than 34. The average poem has got longer, too.) The chair of the judging committee in 1999 was Simon Armitage, who contributes a very brief foreword devoted largely to describing the procedure for inclusion. He was one of five judges but the book itself doesn’t tell us who the others were. (I quite admired this.) I had to do a bit of digging online to determine that in 1999 they were: Helen Dunmore (much missed), Penelope Shuttle, Erica Wagner and John Walsh.1
A few things struck me about this anthology. The five shortlisted authors of ‘best collections’ published in 1999 were Kate Clanchy (Samarkand), Jane Draycott (Prince Rupert’s Drop), Carol Ann Duffy (The World’s Wife), Paul Muldoon (Hay) and Jo Shapcott (who won for My Life Asleep, published by OUP).2 These are all names that are still well known in UK poetry, even if one of them (Kate Clanchy) has moved away from writing poetry herself. (Clanchy won an Eric Gregory award in 1994, the most prestigious post-university “upcoming establishment poet” accolade in the UK. She then published three collections between 1996 and 2004, the first of which won the Forward First Collection prize, before moving into fiction, memoir and a Clanchy-specific niche of publications about getting teenagers to write poetry.)
As you’d expect, the shortlisted best individual poems are a bit more of a mixture of the established and the less well-known: Caroline Carver (who’d won the National Poetry Competition, but I have to admit I didn’t know), Robert Crawford (for a poem in Poetry Review), Robert Minhinnick (for a poem first published in PN Review, ‘Twenty-Five Laments for Iraq’, which won), George Szirtes (for what is really a 12-sonnet sequence, ‘Backwaters: Norfolk Fields’, almost a pamphlet in its own right, published in The Rialto) and R. S. Thomas (then still just alive, for ‘Blackbird’, published in Agenda).3 There’s a rather pleasing link, too, between the end of the Szirtes sequence and the imagery of the Thomas poem, which must have been one of the very last he published. In the final part of his last sonnet, Szirtes is describing the East Anglian sky (the whole sequence is dedicated to W. G. Sebald):
It is eating you away until you’ve gone,
like the spider scurrying up its own spit
back to its natural centre in the dark.
And the sky remains enormous. Someone
is watching the house-martin, the blue tit,
the tiny insects making their tiny markin the grass, and the small rain that falls far
across the field as on a distant star.
While Thomas’ poem about the blackbird begins:
Its eye a dark pool
in which Sirius glitters
and never goes out.
‘Blackbird’ isn’t Thomas’ best poem, but for my money it’s still the best of these five; while the Szirtes sequence, though beautifully done (I recommend it), seems a bit of an unfair inclusion: does this really count as a single poem?
Clanchy, Duffy, Muldoon, Shapcott, Crawford, Thomas and Szirtes, at least, are all poets I remember reading in the late 90s. More surprising is the list of shortlisted authors for the best first collection: Matthew Caley (Thirst, Slow Dancer Poetry); Amanda Dalton (How to Disappear, Bloodaxe); Nick Drake (The Man in the White Suit, Bloodaxe, which was the winner); Christopher North (A Mesh of Wires, Smith/Doorstop) and Christiania Whitehead (The Garden of Slender Trust, Bloodaxe). Aside from Christopher North, of whom I’d vaguely heard, I couldn’t immediately place any of these poets, though they had all recently published acclaimed first collections in 1999, three of them with Bloodaxe.
Clearly this is partly just my ignorance, since a bit of research demonstrated that all five have made careers as writers of various kinds, if not only or in some cases primarily as poets. Matthew Caley has published many subsequent collections and translations. Nick Drake has published three subsequent collections, as well as novels, plays and libretti. Christopher North’s shortlisted entry was only a pamphlet and perhaps the weight of expectation was quite heavy, since he published no full collection until 2010, though two more since. Amanda Dalton also left a long gap before a second collection, published by Bloodaxe in 2012. Like North, she has published several since then, including one out this year, and is also a playwright. Christiania Whitehead, fascinatingly, does not seem to have published any poetry after her shortlisted collection, or at least no further book.4 She became a successful academic, a medievalist — as one might have guessed from the poems themselves — and professor first at Warwick and then more recently at Lausanne. Here’s the final stanza of Whitehead’s ‘Angels’, a poem which overall I thought was a bit too clever and conscious of its own conceit. But I liked this final scene very much:
At last, lazily, while the girl — and we —
ache to know which flower it will be,
and which speck of soft visitation
within the womb, the miscreant
gives up his posture of absence
and attends to the task in hand. Hyacinth?
Auricula? No, it’s the lily to beat all lilies
that he dabs gently from the soil
and turns on the diagonal, mounting
the steps before that outdoor, non-
perspectival prie-dieu with
growing certitude and charm.
All the same, it’s noticeable that none of the authors of the “best first collections” are now, 25 years on, what we might broadly term a “major” UK poet, and in fact a quick review of the other shortlists between 1994 and 2005 suggests this is quite a consistent pattern. There are a few names which are now high-profile, and some years had a higher predictive hit-rate than others, but in general being shortlisted for — or even winning — the “best first collection” doesn’t seem to mean that much, longer term.5
I suppose there are different ways of thinking about this. It might be that it’s just quite hard even for experienced readers to spot the most promising authors on the basis of a first collection. Conversely the pressure might be more the other way: when judging that year’s crop of collections by established poets, the committee is under pressure to shortlist mainly or entirely a handful of well-known poets who have already been widely acclaimed, so surprises are rare. And of course, some authors of genuinely excellent first collections will go on to do other things, while the most original poets might tend to be passed over at the first collection stage. Winning or being shortlisted for a first collection prize must create certain opportunities, but perhaps it also creates quite a burden of expectation. I know I have a few readers who have themselves won such prizes in the past — do comment if you would like to.
Are the poems in the rest of the book better than the ones excerpted from the “first collections”? Not all of them by any means, but on average I’d say, yes they are. I found things to like and admire in all of the ‘first collection’ poems, but I didn’t like any of them unreservedly. First collections, after all, are usually about showing that you have mastered the conventions, whatever they happen to be at the time. Even Milton’s first collection, the 1645 Poems which strenuously trumpets his youth (though in fact he was 36 by the time it was published), contains a lot of excellent but essentially conventional verse, in both Latin and English. Abraham Cowley, a genuine prodigy, published Poetical Blossoms (1633) at 15 — an astonishingly fluent collection which is unsurprisingly largely conventional in form and themes (and includes a poem of thanks to his schoolmaster). Reaching farther back, Horace’s Epodes are genuinely surprising — I mean both that they are not much like anything else from the time, but also, more remarkably, still not much like anything else — but with an ancient poet we are missing a lot of context: if we had more of Horace and Virgil’s contemporaries, perhaps the extraordinary variety and originality of their three early collections, Horace’s Epodes and first book of Satires, and Virgil’s Eclogues, would seem a bit less remarkable.
What about more recent first collections? I thought at once of Geoffrey Hill’s For the Unfallen: Poems 1952-1958, published in 1959 when Hill was still only 27, because after I wrote about Hill’s Pindarics, several people got in touch to say that despite his very long and extremely prolific career, they preferred Hill’s earliest collections over any of the later work. It’s true, perhaps, that the later Hill sometimes seemed to be trying to write out or write against the enormous lyric gift — comparable indeed to Cowley’s own — on display in the early books. Talking of lyric gifts, perhaps my favourite lesser-known “first collection” is Robert Duncan’s The Years as Catches, which contains some truly lovely poetry, including the lyric I wrote about here.6 Do comment with your own favourite first collections, if you have one.
The best bit of the anthology, perhaps inevitably, is the “other poems” section. In his preface, Armitage explains that here each of the five judges simply submitted a bundle of their favourite poems, no questions asked. Here, I suppose, we catch a glimpse of the poems individual judges most liked, without having to defend or debate either the relative value of the rest of the collection (for the collection prizes), or a strict ranking (for the individual poem prize).7 Many of the poets in this section are well known today, whether or not they were at the time — including John Burnside, Ciaran Carson, Gillian Clarke, Michael Hofmann, Jackie Kay, August Kleinzahler, Roger McGough, Andrew Motion (later Poet Laureate), Les Murray, Pascale Petit, Michael Symmons Roberts, Jeffrey Wainwright.
Most of the poems I liked best were from this section, not from any of the shortlists, and in some cases I was surprised. I don’t love Motion’s poetry, which very often seems to me underpowered; but his understated and prosaic style is very effective in the long poem included here (‘Serenade’). I think this is perhaps my favourite poem of his and I’m glad to have revisited it. (I haven’t quoted from it because it really works cumulatively, and is much too long to quote in its entirety.)8
The ‘other poems’ also include quite a few quirky pieces which were perhaps not quite serious or entirely successful enough to be in the running as a “best poem”, but which might certainly prompt you to follow up the poet if you didn’t know them already. There’s a long poem by Peter Porter in Herbert-style verses, ‘To my granddaughters sweeping Spelsbury Church’, which I enjoyed reading, even though I don’t think it quite works — there are a few too many themes in play (Herbert, the Earl of Rochester, church-visiting, Catholicism, Italy vs. England, the experience of being a grandparent), and even the powerful structure of the form is not quite enough to bring it all together. Still, here’s one of the best verses:
When Martha and Amelia raise
A little dust to rightly praise
The magnitude of other days,
They’re only playing—
It’s Grandad’s pompous paraphrase
Which is dismaying.
One of my favourites from this section was a poem called ‘Pickings’ by Adam Thorpe, whom I think of as a novelist rather than a poet (the acknowledgements tell me it comes from his 1999 Cape collection, From the Neanderthal):
‘She’s much too deep,’ I say —
my kids in hope she’ll rise
one day, tucked on a spade,like the small flask I earthed
once but did not breakmarked Prix 3 Frs,
‘La Miraculeuse’.
A couple of the poems in this section are beguilingly weird. I liked Sophie Hannah’s ‘Next Door Despised’ a lot, although I couldn’t always follow it:
Next door despised
your city. They would much prefer a town.
Your tree — they’d like a twig.
Your oil rig,
your salmon satin crown,
so can you cut it down and cut it down?Next door began
a harsh campaign. They hired a ticket tout
to sell your oily tree,
your haddocky
crown for a well of drought,
and then they bricked it up and shut it out.
The poem is from her Carcanet collection Leaving and Leaving You. Hannah was still in her 20s in 1999 — though this was, impressively, already her third full collection — and like Thorpe I’m familiar with her name today as a novelist more than as a poet.
Perhaps it’s true that even most good poets don’t write good poetry their whole lives, and a “snapshot” anthology like this, drawn from a single year, is always unlikely to contain more than one or two poems which really stand the test of time. But revisiting it made me regret that we don’t have more (any?) venues, whether online or in print, dedicated to curating and republishing poems which still seem good a few decades on, even — or especially — if the poets in question ended up concentrating on other things.9
And finally — a quick plug. I’ll be reading at the online launch event for the poetry journal Black Iris tomorrow, Friday 28th June, 7pm UK time, as I had a couple of poems in their first issue. I understand that anyone can “come”, and though you do have to reserve a ticket (here), it doesn’t cost anything.
My favourite judging line up was definitely the first year, 1992, in which Stephen Spender (well into his 80s) chaired, and the other members were John Bayley, Margaret Drabble, Mick Imlah and Roger McGough. I wonder what difference it would make if competitions went back to asking a significant number of non-poets onto their judging panels. That year, the best collection prize went to Thom Gunn for The Man with Night Sweats (Faber) and best first collection to Simon Armitage for Kid.
Although oddly, only Clanchy, Draycott and Duffy are listed on the Forward Foundation’s own website.
If you want to compare, this year the shortlisted best collections were Jason Allen-Paisant, Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet, which won; you can read my review of it here); Mary Jean Chan, Bright Fear (Faber); Jane Clarke, A Change in the Air (Bloodaxe), Kit Fan, The Ink Cloud Reader (Carcanet) and Elisabeth Sennit Clough, My Name is Abilene (Salt).
The collection was reviewed in PNReview in 2000, which you can read here if you are a subscriber. Otherwise, I couldn’t find out much about it.
A few obvious exceptions — Lavinia Greenlaw was shortlisted in 1994; Kate Clanchy and Alice Oswald in 1996; Jane Draycott, Matthew Francis, Roddy Lumsden and Robin Robertson in 1997; John McAuliffe in 2003; Matthew Hollis and Jacob Polley in 2004.
The book was not in fact the first of Duncan’s to be published, though it contains his earliest poems, written between 1939 and 1946, when Duncan was in his 20s.
It’s not clear whether the 50 ‘highly commended’ poems in this year’s edition were selected in the same individual way, or whether they represent a more consensual process.
Unfortunately ‘Serenade’ does not seem to be readable anywhere online, though do let me know if you know differently, and I’ll update accordingly. There’s a good and I think fair short review of Motion’s recent Collected Poems by Henry Oliver of The Common Reader here. I prefer Motion’s prose writing. His biography of Larkin is still the only biography I have ever managed to finish, though my favourite book of his is probably still his unforgettable short (and first) novel The Pale Companion.
Unfortunately the wonderful Twitter account which did just this, ‘Forgotten Good Poems’, run by Peter Vertacnik, is no longer being updated. The full archive is still available though.
Back in 1993 I had the somewhat dizzying experience of having a pamphlet I'd collated, stapled and hand-folded myself and published via my press Scratch be shortlisted for the Best First Collection category of the 2nd Forward Prize. (Anthology 1994). That was Helen Kitson's Seeings Believing. Helen went on to publish a debut full-length with Bloodaxe, before not publishing for some years, then writing novels. Her trajectory more or less follows what you describe. First collections are like a knockout cup win, rather than building a championship winning team, maybe. I remember Margaret Drabble and Liz Lochhead were judges that year, and were very nice to country mouse me at the prize do - in those days drinks at the Groucho rather than a reading - unlike one of the other judges who I recall pretty much turning on his heels when I was introduced to him! Helen's book was very much a wild card and unexpected selection to everyone, and I think that category gives judges that freedom to back a hunch - reputations have yet to be made to be respected by the judges perhaps. Scratch had four poems in the anthology that year - and after that never hit again despite publishing some fine pamphlets by the likes of David Morley, Matthew Francis and Ruth Valentine.
I tend to agree with your comments re first collections. I also think under the surface of the patterns you can also see the implicit hierarchy of publishers, that although frayed, still holds sway.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the years, how first collections are always different from the subsequent ones because they can draw on material that has been written over 5, 10, however many years the writer has been going beforehand, and the others are then the results of 3-5 years work between books.
Regardless, I find debuts often try too hard to display a breadth of technique/topic, and the better ones are more cohesive or focus on a particular context. Maybe Ocean Vuong’s first book was the last debut I was absolutely blown away by, but speaking as a current judge for the forwards, I feel like debuts sometimes contain a palpable degree of the writers’ anxiety or second guessing under the surface of the words that can bleed through to the reader.