Last night at Somerset House the 2012 Forward Prize was awarded to the American poet Jorie Graham for her latest collection P L A C E (Carcanet). Graham, about whom the New York Times has written, “For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption – intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic – rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems,” is yet to receive much attention in the UK. Chicago’s Poetry Foundation refer to her as “perhaps the most celebrated poet of the American post-war generation.”
The coveted award for Best First Collection (£5,000) went to Sam Riviere for 81 Austerities, which began life as a blog applauded by Ruth Padel as “a vision of a world ruled by twin demons, Austerity and Information Overload.” Riviere is, alongside his many online, print and performance projects, currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. We published a poem from the collection, “When it came”, earlier this year, which you can read online by clicking here.
The prize for Best Single Poem went to Denise Riley, whose poem “A Part Song” was published by the London Review of Books in February. The poem deals with the poet’s grief following the death of her son, neatly arranged into stanzas which paradoxically imply the experience is all but monovocal: “She do the bereaved in different voices / For the point of this address is to prod / And shepherd you back within range / Of my strained ears”. Leonie Rushford, chair of the judges, said “A Part Song struck us all powerfully. It is a really searing poem”.
P L A C E, which defeated stiff competition from Oxford’s Professor of Poetry Geoffrey Hill and Australian poet Barry Hill, “explores the ways in which our imagination, intuition, and experience – increasingly devalued by a culture that regards them as ‘mere’ subjectivity – aid us in navigating a world moving blindly towards its own annihilation”. The collection opens on Omaha Beach in Normandy on 5th June, the day before the anniversary of the “historical” 6th, when the allied forces landed on the beach, also known as the D-Day landings. Graham is the first ever American woman to win the prize, and the first female recipient since 2004. Rushforth said of the collection: “It is a challenging collection of unusual force and originality, forging connections between inner experience and a world in crisis.”
The Forward Book of Poetry, a collection of winning and highly commended poems from this year’s prize, will be published on Thursday, National Poetry Day, by Faber and Faber.
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