Seamus Heaney argued that poetry might not change the world, but it could change our perception of the world. Now, a new prize set up in his name seeks to honour exciting new work with a political edge. Poet Paula Meehan, one of the judges of the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize, talks us through their shortlist of six poetry books and pamphlets we should be reading in 2024.
Thanks for speaking to us about the inaugural Heaney Prize shortlist. Can you talk us through what the prize seeks to recognise?
The inaugural PEN Heaney Prize, which is generously supported by the Hawthornden Foundation and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, recognises a single volume of poetry by one author, published in the UK or Ireland, a book of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships.
The call went out for publishers to submit poetry collections in English. Translations into English were welcomed. The submission of poetry pamphlets were also encouraged, in recognition of the long tradition of pamphleteering in Ireland and the United Kingdom—sometimes new voices in poetry are first heard in pamphlets, where new ideas and claims of constituency are first mooted.
We were guided by Seamus Heaney himself who said, “I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.”
And we looked, simply, for brilliant, transformative work. It is a reflection of the groundswell of energy in contemporary poetry that we found brilliant, transformative work in abundance.
Would you say it’s more difficult to judge a prize for poetry compared to other literary genres?
There are many traditions in poetry, some ancient and indigenous to our two islands, in divers tongues, some newcoming with the movement of peoples and ideas in our troubled world. All judges bring the lens of their particular circumstances to the task — our visions and our blind spots. Our schooled inclinations. There are three of us involved as judges, myself, Nick Laird and Shazea Quraishi, all of us practicing poets, so we bring experience to the table and a desire to be surprised. To read a year’s harvest, is a pleasure and a privilege. Who would not love to give loot and praise to poets?
Quite right. The first book on the shortlist is Susannah Dickey’s Isdal. What should readers expect? What did the judges admire?
As we said on announcing the shortlist, Susannah Dickey’s Isdal is an astonishingly inventive look at a cold case, that of an unidentified woman found in 1970 near Bergen in Norway. Armed with a wide variety of formal approaches and a formidable vocabulary, Dickey explores and satirises the true crime genre, and specifically our culture’s obsession with female victims.
Next, we have The Coming Thing, a single, long narrative poem, by Martina Evans. It was also shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry earlier this year. Can you talk us through it?
In The Coming Thing, Martina Evans offers a powerfully realised world—Cork city in the 1980s—and an unforgettable narrator, Imelda, on a journey to England for an abortion. From the strictures of a Republic which denied Irish women bodily autonomy until constitutional change in 2018, Evans creates an Everywoman on the brink of the digital age.
Fran Lock’s Hyena! is concerned with therianthropy – that is to say, the magical transformation of people into animals. It was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize last year. Tell us more.
Fran Lock’s Hyena! comes at the reader with all the feral energy of its totem animal; it’s a devouring and hallucinatory work that channels the embodied grief of the queerminded into a mirror for our age. At its deep heart’s core is a righteous and riotous engagement with working class culture’s magnificent anarchic spirit.
Would you introduce our readers to Patrick McGuinness and his collection Blood Feather?
Patrick McGuinness’s Blood Feather is a profound work of elegy, principally for the author’s mother, but also for the objects and places overtaken by time, for dynamited cooling towers and villages replaced by shopping centres, for the way one language replaces another. McGuinness is a brilliant ‘connoisseur of the noises things make when they leave.’
Yes, McGuinness wrote the collection after the death of his mother. Would you say the book is ‘about grief’— and can you ever really say that poetry is ‘about’ something in this way?
Being facetious I might respond as once Bob Dylan did when asked what a particular song was about: About three minutes. It is the energetic charge in a poem, the ritualising of language to powerful effect, that holds us in thrall. In Patrick McGuinness’s grief-laden poems it is the lyric pulse itself that compels our attention and we open in compassion to his loss.
Dawn Watson’s We Play Here is described by its publisher Granta as “a collection of four poem-stories, taking place in an underdeveloped area of Protestant North Belfast in the summer of 1988.” Perhaps you’d tell us why you liked it
?
It is an extraordinary long poem spoken by four twelve-year-old girls in working class Belfast. Watson has a remarkable ability to recover both the sensations of childhood and the febrile atmosphere of the Troubles, where terror was normalized and violence endemic. Through their eyes we get a map of their community, of their nigh-adolescent longings, their hopes and oppressions. We loved its filmic vividness and its creation of four compelling, believable, characters.
The final book on the shortlist is a little different. We have Yang Lian’s A Tower Built Downwards, as translated from Chinese by Brian Holton. Why did you think it important to highlight poetry in translation via the Heaney Prize?
Yang Lian’s A Tower Built Downwards, impeccably transported from the Chinese by his long time translator Brian Holten, offers us a clear lens on the lived reality of a haunted world of exile and displacement. Yang Lian is a political exile since 1989; these are recent poems. Displacement is a central concern of contemporary poetry everywhere, so many of our poets are exiled, or migrants, or far from their homeland. The PEN Heaney Prize recognises the important conversations that take place across languages, it celebrates the radical understandings that poets can bring from one mother tongue into another, it acknowledges that English is an imperial language with deep roots in other languages and we are curious about other ways and means of saying.
Would you tell us something about the text itself?
Steeped in classical Chinese poetry, with a spirited understanding of historical forces, Yang offers us elegy as a sublime art in a fallen world. An experimentalist, his adventures in his mother tongue are reflected in Brian Holten’s exciting use of English syntax and pronunciation to create a similar impact.
Finally: do you notice any trends in poetry?
Well if the books of poetry of last year are anything to go by we have entered a time of hybridity in poetry. Genre mash ups, novels in poem-clothing, texts for performance, multi-voiced poems, entertainments in typography, talking in tongues, riddling and rhyming, chanting and ranting, glossolalia and logorrhoea, all the inarticulate speech of the heart—the strategies are complex and varied. And through the whirligig the lyric power of one human voice breaking silence.
One book you’re weeping, the next you’re laughing your head off. As always poetry, even at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, is singing our strange, complex, lives into language, with great verve and style.
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Paula Meehan
Paula Meehan has received the Butler Literary Award for Poetry, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award, and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry. She was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2013 to 2016; her public lectures from these years, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, was published by UCD Press in 2016. The Solace of Artemis was published in 2023 by Dedalus Press.
Paula Meehan has received the Butler Literary Award for Poetry, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award, and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry. She was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2013 to 2016; her public lectures from these years, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, was published by UCD Press in 2016. The Solace of Artemis was published in 2023 by Dedalus Press.
