Vart tionde år (2014 var det tredje gången) väljer The Poetry Book Society, med hjälp av en erfaren jury, ut 20 brittiska poeter som de tror kommer att bli betydelsefulla röster i framtiden. Utnämningen går under namnet "Next Generation".
För tjugo år sedan, 1994, fanns en av mina favoriter Carol Ann Duffy bland de utvalda.
Den tredje kandidatlistan presenterades 10 september av juryordföranden Ian McMillan. Alla poeter, med fotografier, presenteras på Next Generation Poets.
Jag har redan läst in mig på några av dem. Här får ni några smakprov.
KATE TEMPEST (f. 1985) grew up in South-East London, where she still lives. Starting out as a rapper, she toured the spoken word circuit for a number of years, and now works as a poet and playwright. Brand New Ancients won the Ted Hughes Prize for innovation in poetry, and is published by Picador. Source: Publishing company
Ur Brand New Ancients, by Kate Tempest
(London : Picador, 2013.)
The editor looked over his glasses.
He had a smile like dog shit hidden in grass,
complexion the colour of marshes.
He says take a seat and he passes a fat little hand
out for Tommy to grasp.
Tommy is nervous, all that he’s ever wanted to be
is an artist, a wordsmith, a cartoonist,
and even though he kind of hates the fact
that this gross little man has the power to do this,
he’s 26, he knows well enough to smile in all the right places,
this might be the chance, and he’s not gonna waste it.
He takes himself out to celebrate,
allows himself the pleasure of a steak,
a nice glass of wine,
a giggle ripples up and down
the middle of his spine:
You did it! says his heart.
Shut the fuck up says his mind.
***
JEN HADFIELD's second collection, Nigh-No-Place, won the 2008 T S Eliot Prize. With family in Canada and England and a deep love of her adopted home in Shetland, it is perhaps no surprise that her writing is often drawn to the contradictions of travel and home, the music of voices, and the importance of land and place. Source: Scottish Poetry Library
Blashey-wadder, by Jen Hadfield (f. 1978)
(From Nigh-no-place. Tarset : Bloodaxe Books, 2008.)
At dusk I walked to the postbox,
and the storm that must've passed you earlier today
skirled long, luminous ropes of hail between my feet
and I crackled in my waterproof
like a roasting rack of lamb.
And across the loch,
the waterfalls blew right up off the cliff
in grand plumes like smoking chimneys.
And on the road,
even the puddles ran uphill.
And across Bracadale,
a gritter, as far as I could tell,
rolled a blinking ball of orange light
ahead of it, like a dungbeetle
that had stolen the sun.
And a circlet of iron was torn from a byre
and bowled across the thrift.
And seven wind-whipped cows
clustered under a bluff.
And in a rockpool,
a punctured football reeled around and around.
And even the dog won't heel since yesterday
when - sniffing North addictedly -
he saw we had it coming -
and I mean more'n wet weak hail
on a bastard wind.
***
DALJIT NAGRA (f. 1966). My parents are Sikh Punjabis who came to Britain from India in the late 1950s. My elder brother, Daljinder, and I were born and grew up in Yiewsley, near Heathrow Airport. We moved to Sheffield when my parents bought a shop in Gleadless Valley in 1982. Source: daljitnagra.com
Look we have coming to Dover!, by Daljit Nagra, tre verser.
(London : Faber, 2007.)
So various, so beautiful, so new…’
- Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’
Stowed in the sea to invade
the lash alfresco of a diesel-breeze
ratcheting speed into the tide, with brunt
gobfuls of surf phlegmed by cushy come-and-go
tourists prow’d on the cruisers, lording the ministered waves.
Seagull and shoal life
Vexin their blarnies upon our huddled
camouflage past the vast crumble of scummed
cliffs, scramming on mulch as thunder unbladders
yobbish rain and wind on our escape, hutched in a Bedford van.
Seasons or years we reap
inland, unclocked by the national eye
or stab in the back, teemed for breathing
sweeps of grass through the whistling asthma of parks,
burdened, ennobled, poling sparks across pylon and pylon.
...
***
REBECCA GOSS was born in 1974 and grew up in Suffolk. She studied English at Liverpool John Moores University and has an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University. Her first full-length collection, The Anatomy of Structures, was published in 2010 by Flambard Press. Source: Publishing Company
Welcome, by Rebecca Goss
(From Her Birth. Chicago : Carcanet Press Ltd., 2013.)
Welcome
to Molly, 2010
For those secret hours, she was just ours.
No-one else knew about my breaths
(deep, hard, long) to spill her, soft as mole
into the light. Her crawl across my chest to drink
untold, we let the world stay furled in sleep
to hold her. As dawn swelled behind curtains
we thought of a name. It came in chorus,
as if we had always known and carried it
under tongues for nine months, only now
its round vowel released into the room.
With your lips at her ear, you let syllables
slide into flooded canals, named her
over and over while outside, Mersey gulls
swooped semi-dark, cawing their applause.
***
Avslutningsvis presenterar jag min "vinnare", bland de tjugo.
HELEN MORT was born in Sheffield in 1985, and grew up in nearby Chesterfield. Five-times-winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. In 2010, she was Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. She lives in Derbyshire. Source: Publishing Company
Beauty, by Helen Mort
(From Division Street. London : Chatto & Windus, 2013.)
‘. . . is nothing but the beginning of terror’ – RILKE
When Beauty stumbled down my road, tapped at my door
I saw her from the lounge and hid – her eyes were raw
from smoke, her cheeks like dough from where she’d wept
and worse, I didn’t like the company she kept:
a red-faced drunk who towed a dachshund on a string.
Her mouth was slack. She never said a thing,
just stood and waited, dropped ash in my rose bed,
though as they walked away, she slowly turned her head.
For all she had a face made delicate by rain,
I told myself I’d never think of her again.
Besides, I spent the next year drinking in The Crown.
One Saturday, I rose to leave as they sat down.
She wore a hat. Her eyes were brighter than before
(although I didn’t doubt that it was her I saw,
the stale light slung across her shoulders like a shawl,
her silhouette drawn sharp against the wall),
and though I grabbed my coat, I stood and stalled.
I knew I had to ask what she was called.
At last she spoke. I felt my hair rise all the same:
it’s not the face we shrink from but the name.
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