Jorie Graham and Gillian Clarke on T.S. Eliot Shortlist!

Left: Jorie Graham Right: Gillian Clarke

Carcanet is delighted that two new collections, Ice by National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, and PLACE by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham, have been shortlisted for the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. PLACE was also awarded the 2012 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Graham was the first American to receive this honour.

Both titles are available now in paperback; Gillian Clarke's Ice is available as an ebook for Kindle and other devices.

Congratulations to Graham and to Clarke! The winner of the 2012 Prize will be announced at the Award Ceremony on Monday 14 January 2013, when the winner will be presented with a cheque for £15,000, donated by Mrs Valerie Eliot, who has generously given the prize money since the inception of the Prize. The shortlisted poets will each receive £1,000.

PLACE

PLACE begins with a poem dated 5 June 2009, located at St Laurent Sur Mer, better known by its code name Omaha Beach, one of the sites of the American landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944. It is the starting point for a book of poems written in the uneasy lull of a world moving towards an unknowable future. Jorie Graham explores the ways in which imagination, intuition and experience help us to navigate a life we will have no choice but to live. How does one think ethically as well as emotionally in such a world? How does one think of one's child - of having brought a child into this world? How does love continue?

As we look back, and are compelled to try to see ahead, PLACE calls us, in poems of great force and beauty, to inhabit and rejoice in a more responsive and responsible place in the world.

Ice

In Ice Gillian Clarke turns to the real winters of 2009 and 2010. In their extremity they redefined all the seasons for her. Nature asserted itself and renewed the environment for the imagination. The poem ‘Polar’ is the poet’s point de repère, evoking a polar-bear rug she had as a child and here resurrects in a spirit of personal and ecological longing that becomes a creative act. She lives with the planet, its seasons and creatures, in a joyful, anxious communion.

The book also includes the ‘asked for’ and commissioned poems, and the Guardian spreads Clarke has written during her time as National Poet of Wales (2008-2013). She follows in the rich millennium-old Welsh tradition of occasional writing going back to the first-known named British poets Aneirin and Taliesin in the sixth century.