TS Eliot Prize Poetry Readings

Perhaps John Burnside (pictured) already knew he would be announced the 2011 TS Eliot prize winner on Monday for his book, Black Cat Bone, because he was certainly chirpy at the readings the night before. ‘I don’t usually drink water because fish breed in it,’ he quipped at the lectern before moistening his throat.

This year, the Southbank’s Royal Festival Hall saw 1,700 poetry-lovers heavy breathing before the eight-strong shortlist of poetic cream. The list was already mired in controversy because organisers The Poetry Book Society have just taken on a three-year sponsorship deal from hedge fund Aurum. Nominees Alice Oswald and John Kinsella pulled out on ethical grounds leaving Carol Ann Duffy, Leontia Flynn, David Harsent, John Burnside, Sean O’Brien, Bernard O’Donoghue, Esther Morgan and Daljit Nagra.

Nagra kicked off proceedings and dutifully stuck to host Ian McMillan’s diktat of no more than ten minutes per poet – unfortunately not setting an example to the rest of the anarchists, some of whom pranced through their entire books or fancied themselves as comics for the night. Nagra read two long poems with customary mish-mash, English/Punjabi flavour, one on star-crossed lovers and one on Shakespeare’s globe/globalisation, which were very enjoyable.

Leontia Flynn, too, was a pleasure, delivering poems about Facebook or her father’s Alzheimer’s with a scatty, conversational charm from her book Profit and Loss. There were occasional frissons of excitement: Harsent’s radio voice was lulling but the audience perked up when he started reading about, ‘the little widget of her arsehole, damson‐sweet’.

Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy read last from her book The Bees and was particularly dry and quite funny, grimacing at mentions of royalty to remind the cynical poetry crowd that her hands are tied when it comes to having to write public poems. And then it was over and the melee spilled out to network, gossip or get their clammy books signed by the poets, in anticipation of the winner’s announcement the following day.

The TS Eliot Prize Readings took place on Sunday 15 January at:

Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
Waterloo
SE1 8XX

Photo by Adrian Pope