TS Eliot Prize 2021: who will win the biggest award in poetry?

Each year, the T S Eliot Prize offers poets a chance to win a huge sack of cash, and critics a chance to generalise about trends in poetry. So here goes: long fragmentary narratives are in, love poems are out (though Natalie Diaz unfashionably flies the flag for sensual abandon). Who’ll win the ￡25,000 prize? If I were judging, it’d be Sasha Dugdale or Shane McCrae. But I’m not, so I’d bet on Diaz, with a side-flutter on Bhanu Kapil.

I’m sore about the omission of Timothy Donnelly’s superb The Problem of the Many, and wouldn’t have minded a bit of light relief (Caroline Bird, say, or Matthew Welton) but otherwise this is a strong and unusually ambitious list. Like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, half the nominees are university dons, but this year the books feel donnish. Chilly, prickly, with a bracing air of Eliotic intellectual rigour (especially Life Without Air), they’re all worth reading, even if – especially if – they turn out not to be your cup of tea.

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (Faber, ￡10.99)

In hard-hitting political poems and lush songs of queer lust alike, Diaz draws inspiration from the desert-and-river landscapes of her birthplace, Fort Mojave Indian Village, Colorado. The best are very moving, though metaphors such as “Your hips are quartz-light and dangerous,/ two rose-horned rams ascending a soft desert wash/ before the November sky untethers a hundred-year flood” may strike some readers as a bit over-ornate.

Deformations by Sasha Dugdale (Carcanet, ￡11.99)

A collection dominated by two big set pieces, both gripping: a PTSD-warped, modernish reimagining of the Odyssey, and a queasily ambiguous sequence in shifting voices about artist and child-abuser Eric Gill. Unpuzzling the latter requires a lot of legwork from the reader, but rewards it. Dugdale is the real thing. Read the full review.

Shine, Darling by Ella Frears (Offord Road, ￡10)

The Prufrock and Other Observations problem: if your debut contains a show-stopper, it makes the “other observations” look flimsy. “Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity”, a guilt-haunted lyric essay about (among other things) the poet’s near-abduction, is one of the best long poems of recent years, yet sits oddly amid fun but slighter poems, many written to fulfil writer-in-residence briefs. Themes include sex, Cornwall, and sex in Cornwall. Read a poem from Shine, Darling.

RENDANG by Will Harris (Granta, ￡10.99)

Harris reflects on stray conversations, and his Indonesian heritage, leaving space for us to draw our own conclusions in a debut too subtle to do justice to in a couple of sentences. I found it easier to admire than love, but admired it greatly. Read a poem from RENDANG.

Love Minus Love by Wayne Holloway-Smith (Bloodaxe, ￡10.99)

With a tyrannical father, a hard-drinking mother and an eating disorder, life is a dark joke. That’s the subtext of this hip yet heartfelt second collection, billed as one long poem (really a lot of short, untitled ones). The unpunctuated coming-of-age/coming-out angst recalls prize judge Andrew McMillan, but with laughs – sometimes real humour, sometimes a cruel “[canned laughter]” that interrupts like a stage-direction at the most vulnerable moments. (It's a glib/bruised clash of tones I tried, and failed, to capture in a shorter version of this review.) Read it for two very fine poems about a falling baby and the world’s tallest cow.

How to Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil (Liverpool University Press, ￡9.99)

Spindly, untitled poems tell a fierce yet wry parable of an immigrant welcomed as a “guest” by a mother, who then resents this newcomer’s growing bond with her daughter. Sharp and disquieting, Kapil’s is a wholly original voice.

Life Without Air by Daisy Lafarge (Granta, ￡10.99)

Beneath the surface of labcoat-y modernism and Latinate diction, these stand-offish, surreal poems have intriguing things to say about sexism and kinds of repressive relationship (marital, maternal). The most direct, personal and unbuttoned poem is an eight-page address to the philosopher Zeno.

How the Hell Are You by Glyn Maxwell (Picador, ￡10.99)

I love Maxwell, but I do wish he’d stop wanging on about The Blank Page. He’s said all he has to say about having said all he has to say. Still, he has a lovely ear for rhyme. Includes what was perhaps the first Covid poem to hit bookshops.

Sometimes I Never Suffered by Shane McCrae (Corsair, ￡10.99)

The soul of Jim Limber, a Civil War-era African-American, guides us through Heaven in vividly voiced sonnets, and in a short verse drama encounters his adoptive dad, Confederate president Jefferson Davies, who’s in Hell. A few thousand years earlier, “The Hastily Assembled Angel… built to monitor earth” is sent here without proper training, so just sits on a metal folding chair and watches the Flood (in artfully stuttering iambic pentameter). Bizarre and brilliant.

The Martian’s Regress by J O Morgan (Jonathan Cape, ￡10)

A Martian’s on a mission to study a ruined planet (this one) abandoned by his pollution-happy ancestors (us), sentient sex-doll in tow. In the eerie myths and songs about Mars’s grim society that serve as interludes to this story, Morgan makes ugly things beautiful. Read the full review.

All 10 poets will read at the T S Eliot Prize ceremony at 7pm on Sunday. For tickets, visit southbankcentre.co.uk