TS Eliot prize: A few regrets about egrets

Last night Derek Walcott, previous winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, was awarded this year’s T. S. Eliot prize for the best collection of poetry published in the UK or Ireland. Walcott’s winning book, White Egrets, tackles the big themes: art, world politics, personal loss. Walcott’s assurance comes through with every topic he turns his pen to, in one poem raging at the literary giant Conrad for the belittling term with which he names Africa, “Here’s what that bastard calls ‘the emptiness.”’ Elsewhere he shows the connection between global events and the mundane, "'So the world is waiting for Obama' my barber said…'I wish him luck,' and luck waits in each/ gable-shadowed street that leads to the beach." It's a beautiful book, full of empire, history and bird metaphors.

Besides Walcott, there were nine other poets shortlisted for this year’s award, including one other Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney. On Sunday the shortlisted poets came to The Royal Festival Hall to give readings from their collections. Walcott was busy, but to give the man his due it was his eighty-first birthday, and the South Bank is a fair way from St. Lucia.

The first poet to read was Simon Armitage, and this is how he began:

I am a sperm whale. I carry up to 2.5 tonnes of an oil-like balm in my huge, coffin shape head. I have a brain the size of a basketball, and on that basis alone am entitled to my opinions.

Certainly Armitage’s bizarre, imaginative book, Seeing Stars, departs from recognised forms, but “if they’re not poems” he jests to the audience, “you’re not getting your money back.” When I asked him if it was a conscious decision to move away from the style of his previous books, he replied “conscious in the sense that I didn’t arrive at it when I was in a coma.”

Armitage set a high standard that was matched throughout the evening. Brian Turner, a soldier poet who served in Iraq, writes about the Iraqi people with a compassion that is as beautiful as it is painfully futile. Pascale Petit’s ambitious book, What the Water Gave Me, is a verse biography of Mexican painter Frida Khalo, with each poem taking its title from a Khalo painting. The book charts Khalo’s struggle with suffering and art, and offers an implicit commentary on the relationship between words and pictures. All ten poets seemed worthy of the prize as their poems evoked audible reactions in an enraptured audience.

In the end, Walcott’s victory was, for me, a slight disappointment. It was always likely the prize would go to either Walcott or Heaney; Anne Stevenson described their books as the “bench marks by which we judged all the others.” Given the reputations of these two poets, the other eight seemed like definite outsiders. But had anyone else won, it might have meant so much more.

For Walcott the prestige of the prize will do little to increase his already considerable reputation. By contrast, imagine if Sam Willet’s debut collection, New Light for the Old Dark, had won—the prize might have made a considerable difference to the poet’s development and future.

But I suppose that’s all just wishful underdog thinking. The point of the prize is not to turn one person into a sensation overnight, but to promote poetry generally. Annie Freud, another poet on the short list, told me excitedly that “These days there is an increasing ferment around poetry.” On the evidence of two thousand people turning up to Sunday night’s reading, I think she may be right. Let’s hope so.