Poetry for uncertain times: the 2019 TS Eliot Prize shortlist reviewed

If the 10 writers up for the UK’s richest poetry prize have anything in common, it’s that they’re worried. Here are poems anxious about the environment, fearing the rise of fascism, haunted by the inevitability of death. (Thankfully, there’s still room for the odd joke.) Last year I complained that this prize was ignoring new writers. This year, half the books are debuts.

An odd list, it omits what seemed obvious contenders: prize-winning work from JO Morgan, Robin Robertson and Danez Smith; Anne Wroe’s widely acclaimed Francis. There’s a poet laureate here, but not our one. By ignoring the big-hitters, however, it shines a light on some serious and seriously accomplished poetry, a solace itself in uncertain times. Take comfort from Ailbhe Darcy’s words: “We are not doomed yet.”

Insistence by Ailbhe Darcy (Bloodaxe)

How can we raise children in a dying world? That’s the question asked and elliptically answered in Insistence. This second book from Darcy, an Irish poet living in the US Rust Belt, ends with a long tour de force that overshadows everything else in it: “Alphabet” is an alliterative poem that sets insistent images of war and environmental catastrophe (“drones”, “drills” and “deathbringers”) against the poet’s love for her newborn child.

Us by Zaffar Kunial (Faber)

Kunial’s conversational debut explores how his identity has been shaped by his family’s heritage (father from Kashmir, mother from the Midlands). It’s Heaney-esque, sharing his quiet lyricism (“this light has trailed me longer than I knew”), his knack for showing a thought developing in the moment of writing, and his fascination with how etymology offers a glimpse through “the past’s/ dark, half open door”. He comes across as a bit of a young fogey (loving Dickens and George Herbert, cricket and Radio 4), and his self-questioning can slip into solipsism (several poems riff on his name), but Kunial is a talent to watch.

American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (Penguin)

“I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison/ Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.” These mercurial 14-liners, rhythmic but unmetrical, were inspired by Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets, but also recall the imaginative flair of Berryman’s Dream Songs. The addressee, that “assassin”, shifts throughout. He’s the reader, the US president, Hayes himself or even a potential lover (several sonnets are spoof lonely-hearts ads). Drawing on an alternative canon of “weirdos & worriers, warriors/ Poetry whiners & winos”, Hayes’s seventh outing is daring, state-of-the-nation stuff.

Feel Free by Nick Laird (Faber)

Laird’s fourth collection is a set of dispatches from “the heated, moist robot I currently inhabit”, finding “our lifelike life” not wholly unconvincing. This out-of-body quality can be oddly poignant, especially in poems about parenthood. Addressing his dead mother, he writes: “you kept on lying in there, past all metaphor/left by yourself on the cleared stage like a real corpse.” A former lawyer, Laird explores ideas of justice in “The Good Son”, a set of sonnets evoking Hamlet, the Troubles and the ways language can be misused.

The Distal Point by Fiona Moore (HappenStance)

In a list dominated by Faber and Penguin, the presence of a book from Scotland’s tiny HappenStance Press is a welcome surprise. The poems in this long-awaited debut are intimate, quiet, and expressed in the simplest language, but pack the same emotional punch as Elizabeth Jennings. Half are about the loss of Moore’s husband; imagining him in a Heaven he never believed in, she feels “almost disloyal”. Moore worked for 22 years in the Foreign Office, and draws on that experience in a sequence of globe-trotting political poems; a ghazal about a riot-loving Greek dog; a echoing visit to Auschwitz; a poem in the voice of North Korean cows.

Europa by Sean O’Brien

“The grass moves on the mass graves.” Europa’s first line captures the lyric style O’Brien has refined over four decades of prize-winning collections; smooth, haunting, gloomy as hell, though with an occasional flicker of humour. Despite the title, only a handful of poems deal explicitly with Europe. A Brexit-tinged portrait of “A mock-Tudor Midland roadhouse” in “Albion’s excluded middle” feels like easy caricature, but elsewhere O’Brien is on impressive form.

Shrines of Upper Austria by Phoebe Power

A young Cambridge graduate, Power has a gift for aloof yet vivid pencil-portraits of her characters; “20, cackle bright as a thin tree opening,/ diagonal, energy-black eyebrows”. Her shifting tone is often hard to pin down. “Austrian Murder Case” is a set of chintz-noir prose poems, where dark deeds lurk beyond a coffee shop’s “doily curtain”. Another sequence tells the story of her adopted Austrian grandmother, inhabiting her voice (“now I’m a bit mad at me mam”). Much of this book left me cold, but perhaps I’m wrong: it won First Collection at the Forward Prizes.

Soho by Richard Scott

This debut’s neon-pink cover hints at the electric shock of the poems inside. Learned and self-aware, Scott writes intense odes to shame and sex-toys. Expect lots of F-words, not least Foucault. “Verlaine in Soho” rewrites 15 of the 19th-century writer’s love-poems for the age of Grindr, while in an “aria” inspired by the music of Bellini, Scott (a former opera singer) addresses the moon: “wash my beard with translucence/ transmute my skin to semi-precious metal/ enter my mouth my anus with light”. A bit much? Yes, gloriously so. The book ends with a fizzy walking tour through the queer history of London, dedicated to Scott’s mentor Daljit Nagra – who is, as it happens, one of three judges on the prize panel.

Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith

Smith is the US poet laureate, and they’re lucky to have her. Her fourth collection finds room for surreal magic (God drives a Jeep; his angels are “grizzled,/ in biker gear”) and love (“Morning finds her curled like a prawn”, she writes of her four-year-old daughter). The best poems here, however, are set pieces in the distinctly American tradition of the found poem. One fillets a report on industrial pollution; others are assembled from 19th-century texts, including letters to Lincoln from former slaves who fought in the civil war.

Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan (Faber)

This Oxford don’s wry, pin-sharp debut does what it says on the tin. These three long-lined poems, often inventively end-rhymed, are cool and urbane, filled with novelistic detail and very quotable: “Dull as any family business/ Dying is what the dead pass on.” The cocktail-clinking first poem, “You, Very Young in New York”, recalls the sexually frank, bittersweet hipsterdom of HBO’s Girls; the second uses Heraclitus’s idea of stepping in the same river twice to respond to her father’s death; the third is a fiendishly well-observed account of a difficult pregnancy.

The winner will be announced on January 14. The shortlisted poets will read at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (0203 879 9555; southbankcentre.co.uk), at 7pm on January 13