At the start of this week the winner of the T. S. Eliot prize was announced in London: for my non-British readers, this is by far the biggest single poetry prize in the UK, awarded in January to a collection published in the previous year. I’m well behind the curve, since I hadn’t read any of the collections before this week. (Though I did rather enjoy Jeremy Noel-Tod’s list of alternative suggestions.) I thought I’d cut to the chase and start with the winner, Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello.
For my French readers, Allen-Paisant’s book offers an intriguing way in to contemporary British poetry, since Self-Portrait contains quite a bit of French — including quotations from Hélène Cixous and Aimé Césaire, references to French literature, and bits of French conversation. Part of it is “set” in Paris, where Allen-Paisant spent some time as a doctoral exchange student at the École Normale. Several of the poems also mention his natural facility with French, and the emotional importance of this second language. I was initially quite attracted by this feature of the collection, both because it’s not particularly common in contemporary UK poetry (which can sometimes feel almost doggedly monolingual both in fact and outlook), and because the choice of a French-facing Anglophone poet struck me as fitting for this particular prize: T. S. Eliot (like most of the modernists) was very much influenced by French poetry, and even wrote several pieces in French. Ultimately, though, I found the collection quite disappointing and the ‘Frenchness’ of it fairly superficial. (Though if you know Paris well, you can enjoy tracking him around: at the opera, in the student café, on a date in the Marais, ‘On the Bus to Gambetta’.)
Similarly, the book uses the figure of Othello as a structuring device, especially in the middle section. This is often quite moving, but it’s not really about Othello in any meaningful way. The author might say, I think fairly, that Othello is also not really about ‘Othello’, that whole aspects of the character are somehow outside the play, and that his book is partly a commentary on that. (One set of aphorisms begins ‘What Shakespeare did not write about. The story he was unable to tell.’) I think this is true, but it still leaves Self-Portrait as having less to offer us on Shakespeare than we might have expected.
Perhaps it’s naive or old-fashioned to say so, but what bothered me most about this collection is its relentless self-concern: it really isn’t about anything other than a series of the poet’s own experiences. We don’t even see these experiences through other perspectives, and nor is the single perspective really varied by shifts in tone: we don’t find bits of song, or satire, or comic verse. I mean, I suppose, that we hear one person only, and that person is in roughly the same mood all the way through.
The book reminded me quite a bit of Anthony Anaxogorou’s collection Heritage Aesthetics (Granta, 2022), which I reviewed last year. I didn’t love Anaxogorou’s book — at the most basic level it’s not really “my thing” — and I’m not honestly sure he is (ultimately) really a poet at all: but the force of his style is undeniable, the sheer all-guns-blazing rhetorical extravagance of it sweeps you along. Anaxogorou’s collection is also rather monotonously about himself, but leavened a little by some other characters who seem real, at least: especially the poet’s own son, and his father. Allen-Paisant’s book is even more one-note than that.
Technically, Self-Portrait seems undercooked. He does have an ear in there somewhere — you can hear the music lurking in several of these poems — but it doesn’t seem entirely under his control. Here is the opening poem, one of the ones in which that nascent (or suppressed? I’m not sure) feel for the sound of the verse is most evident.
Ringing OthelloHow could I resurrect you to speak,when your burial is in no groundthat I can pilgrimage to, except thatI have been to Venice and knownyou walking in that place, as if somethinghad been left undone. Presumptuous to thinkthat I could make you speak.Who am I?But I feel sometimesthat our destinies conjoin, that your life,unfinished, is lived also through mine.Your silence is a haunting, brothers are wanting,people are waiting to hear. I conjure youfuriously.
When one or more draft poems has an underlying music like this you can do different things with it. You can leave it as it is: a musicality which is present but intentionally undeveloped or evaded — that bathetic final ‘furiously’, in which the surprising avoidance of any of the cadences we might have expected here makes the word seem to mean almost its opposite. You could develop it, into more formally patterned poems, even a series using the same patterns or variants of it; or move away from it, write it out. Reading this first poem, I was quite interested: I found the evasive semi-music of it engaging and I wanted to see where this would go — what variations would he work on this aural ‘idea’. But although there are several other poems in which we hear a similar ghostly music, the ‘idea’, as it were, isn’t really developed.
As a reader of a prize-winning collection I expect variety and a display of skill. That might mean a range of forms, used effectively; but equally a poet might write in a limited range of forms which he or she has perfected, and use those forms to approach a range of subjects. Allen-Paisant’s collection is, superficially, quite formally varied — mostly a mixture of prose poems, aphorisms, and free verse in a wide variety of shapes — but a lot of these different forms don’t actually sound all that different (at least to me, as a reader) and, as noted above, they don’t really reflect different perspectives.
There’s a lot of repetition in the collection, both within poems and between them — at the simplest level, we get told several things more than once. This can be effective, but it can also seem sprawling, especially as there are some phrases that seemed to lapse into cliché: Oxford is indicated by its ‘dreaming spires’, for example, and sometimes we are offered a series of synonyms when just one might be more effective. Here’s the start of ‘To Find Mama’s Voice’ (Mama is his dead grandmother):
I look for Mama’s voice in Dropboxand old devices, anywhereI may have inadvertentlycaptured the soundback when I didn’t thinkher voice would be everywhereand yet nowhere to be found.The real thing?I hear it all the time —right here, filling the space.What if I could produce the grain,the texture and timbre by some fluke,one day, by some intervention, some freakof nature, and something was on hand to record?
Like many of the poems in the book, this is a moving and recognisable scenario, neatly evoked. The first stanza is rather good, although (typically) it suggests a metrical structure which is not pursued. But what is added by the pile-up of near synonyms in the second stanza — ‘grain’, ‘texture’, ‘timbre’; ‘some fluke’, ‘some intervention’, ‘some freak / of nature’? It seems like padding to me.
There’s quite a lot like this, where the writing feels uneven or undigested. One poem set in Prague contains both the (frankly) awful phrase ‘her thighs mantled in coital light’ and the (in context, I thought, rather good) final sentence: ‘The rest of the night I was the ancient king / laughing over the city I was gable and arch’. In one poem ‘The Night of the Death’ — about receiving the news of his grandmother’s death while in Paris — the poet tries I think to use a broken style to suggest the difficulty of recalling strong feelings, and the emotional disruption of the news. The ‘story’ of the poem is touching, but as a poem it risks feeling merely unfinished.
So overall I was quite underwhelmed with the collection, which I found interesting in itself, since it’s just won a huge prize, and not for the first time: it was already the winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and is in the running for the 2024 Writers’ Prize as well. (Plainly, no-one is going to ask me to judge anything any time soon.) So why did it win? What were the judges won over by that either I didn’t see, or didn’t value in the same way? I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days. Here are some aspects of the book which put me off, but might be seen, conversely, as points in its favour:
— as poetry collections go, the book is highly unified — the aesthetic is more, perhaps, like a themed pamphlet than many full collections. It’s got a clear subject — broadly, the author’s experience as a black Jamaican man in Europe — pursued from various angles. The ‘sameiness’ of it — which bothered me — is another side of this coherence. Is there a move towards wanting poetry collections to be clearly “about” something?
— As well as a clear theme, there’s quite a bit of explicit or implied narrative. By the end of the book, a careful reader has garnered an outline of certain events and stages in Allen-Paisant’s life, and the collection offers some of the satisfactions of a novel, memoir or (perhaps especially) that distinctively French category of autofiction.
— I can see how you might experience Self-Portrait as offering a glimpse of different worlds (Jamaica, Oxford, Paris; Shakespeare, French literature, French culture) in a way that expects quite a lot from readers, but not too much. (Almost none of the French is translated, for instance, although its inclusion has also been carefully judged: you won’t miss out on anything essential if you don’t understand it; the same is true of some Jamaican terms and references.) So elements that seemed a bit superficial to me — because as it happens I speak French, and live in Paris, and know Shakespeare well — might from another perspective seem perfectly judged.
— evidently the judges of the competition don’t have the same qualms that I do about literary work which is so relentlessly self-centred. And I think it’s fair to say, too, that Allen-Paisant’s book is part of a more general trend towards the ‘poetry collection as memoir’. This is not what I look for in a book of poetry: for me, a really good poem — whatever its original occasion, whatever its emotional or literary ‘source’, and whether or not it is explicit about what that might be — is one readers can take away with them: almost, as it were, for their own purposes. For me, none of those poems were in that category: but perhaps that just isn’t a category that either the author or the judges had in mind.
I try to avoid publishing pieces here which are too negative: I want to share enthusiasm and reading suggestions, not disrecommendations. But it’s striking to read such a highly honoured collection and find it so . . . well, middling. If you’ve read it, and loved it, do let me know what you most liked about it.
In the meantime, and on a more positive note, here are a few disparate but more whole-hearted recommendations.
— Allen-Paisant is a scholar as well as a poet, and he is particularly interested in the links between poetry and philosophy. If this is your thing, too, I can recommend Denise Riley’s most recent collection Lurex (Picador, 2022). Here is a philosophical intellect and imagination working in (and out of, and through) a genuine mastery of form. Tight, challenging, something new each time, and with her ears fully open.
— Among poets (still) on Twitter, by far the most gifted in that medium is Ian Duhig (@ianduhig) whose formal mastery extends to a charming and unusual way with a tweet. His new and selected poems was published by Picador in 2021. I gather from the blurb that he has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize four times, without winning it. I suppose I can’t say for sure that if you don’t already own it, you should buy his book in preference to any, or indeed all, of this year’s shortlist, since I’ve only read three of this year’s so far. But I’ll say it anyway. Duhig makes most contemporary poets look like solemn amateurs.
Here’s the wonderful (funny and also obscurely moving) ‘The Lark in the Clear Air’:
All dewy-eyed, my sister told me howshe once got up before the dawn to seeher birthday rising on the Glen of Aherlow.She skipped up frost fields like bleaching sheetsbut heading back, she paused to catch her breath,and saw her footprints rounded everywherelike ginger biscuits on a tablecloth.She gently hummed The Lark in the Clear Airi,
judged her run-up to some cooling cow shit,guessed when its crust would be Mass-wafer thinthen took off, flew and landed slap-bang in it,to feel the quick give of that eggshell skinthen buinneach surging hot between her toes.“Tomorrow she shall”, as her old song goes.
— A new online journal with an interesting format is Only Poems: featuring just one poet at a time, they have the space to publish a representative selection of the work, plus an interview, several of which are fascinating. I wouldn’t want all poetry publishing to go in this direction — there’s something a bit insidious about the mania for biographical information — but at its best it’s a rewarding structure and gives readers an unusual chance to get to know a new voice. They have published mainly US poets so far — including a couple I already knew and admired, Amit Majmudar and Jane Zwart — so this is a good way in if you are from outside the US and interested in reading more contemporary American poetry.
— I have to admit I didn’t take Clive James seriously for years for the simple (and horribly snobbish) reason that I thought of him as a TV and radio personality. Then at some point I tried his poetry and didn’t (if I’m absolutely honest) think that much of it. But James was a hugely enthusiastic reader of poetry, and his Poetry Notebook, though essentially a collection of pieces of literary journalism, is well worth your time. Compared to, say, Donald Davie, James is a well informed journalist, rather than a scholar; but neither literary journalism nor scholarship are of any use at all without taste. James had that unusual combination of taste and the ability to convey it with bracing verve. I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s a great read and — the true test of any literary criticism — prompted me to add several items to my shopping list of books.
And finally, the three online articles I’ve most enjoyed in the last week:
— Colin Gorrie explaining how classical Chinese poetry works.
— a supremely lovely essay on one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, Richard II.
— A. E. Stalling’s excellent review essay on the recent edition and biograghy of Anthony Hecht. (I also enjoyed reading Andrew Neilson on the same topic in the TLS.)
Slightly off topic, but I was similarly iffy about Clive James until I came across the songs he wrote with Pete Atkin - their first two albums are a lot of fun, occaisionally quite beautiful (though there isn't a medium he can't be long-winded in!). Really I think he was a lyricist - I wonder if there wasn't some self-imposed snobbery on his part in not embracing that though of course that kind of partnership means sharing the plaudits.... I enjoyed Poetry Notebook too, though found it got a bit one note. I don't think he's a particularly good advocate for Larkin, for instance, despite admiring him so much!
Lots of readers want books of poems to be novels or memoir. I suppose this trend will only increase.