We're delighted that new books by two of our authors, Kei Miller and Louise Glück, have been shortlisted for this year's Forward Prize for Best Collection. Another Carcanet poet, Jeffrey Wainwright, is on the shortlist for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. The 2012 Forward Prize for Best Collection was awarded to P L A C E by Jorie Graham, a book which explores the ways in which imagination, intuition and experience help us to navigate a life we will have no choice but to live.
The winners of this year's Forward Prizes will be announced on 30 September.
The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion by Kei Miller
In his new collection, acclaimed Jamaican poet Kei Miller dramatises what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding place and territory, comes up against another. We watch as the cartographer, used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it (‘I never get involved / with the muddy affairs of land’), is gradually compelled to recognise – even to envy – a wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman’s eternal city of Zion. As the book unfolds the cartographer learns that, on this island of roads that ‘constrict like throats’, every place-name comes freighted with history, and not every place that can be named can be found.
by Louise Glück
‘At last the night surrounded me; / I floated on it, perhaps in it, / or it carried me as a river carries / a boat’. In Louise Glück’s new collection, night takes on the dimensions of myth, becomes the setting for a sequence of journeys and explorations through time and memory, as the speaker of the poems moves backwards into childhood and forwards into ‘the kingdom of death’. Glück draws equally on the worlds of fairy-tale, of dream and of waking life, each poem a door into a narrative both haunting and compellingly beautiful.
Available for pre-order now (published September 2014)
The full shortlists are as follows:
Shortlisted for the £10,000 Forward Prize for Best Collection:
Colette Bryce The Whole & Rain-Domed Universe
John Burnside All One Breath
Louise Glück Faithful and Virtuous Night
Kei Miller The Cartographer Tries to Map A Way to Zion
Hugo Williams I Knew the Bride
Shortlisted for the £5,000 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection:
Liz Berry Black Country
Fiona Benson Bright Travellers
Niall Campbell Moontide
Beatrice Garland The Invention of Fireworks
Kevin Powers Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting
Vidyan Ravinthiran Grun-tu-molani
Shortlisted for the £1000 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem:
Tim Nolan - 'Red Wing Correctional Facility' - Troubadour International Poetry Prize
Denise Riley - 'After La Rochefoucauld' - Eggbox/UEA Poetry Series
Stephen Santus - 'In a Restaurant' - The Bridport Prize
Jack Underwood - 'Thank you for your email' - The White Review
Jeffrey Wainwright - 'An Empty Street' - PN Review