10 poetry collections to read in 2021

Named after poet TS Eliot, the TS Eliot prize is an annual award given "for the best new poetry collection published in the UK or Ireland". A shortlist of 10 poetry collections selected from 177 entries was announced for TS Eliot Prize 2021 recently. “We are delighted with our shortlist, while lamenting all the fine work we had to set aside. Poetry styles are as disparate as we’ve ever known them, and the wider world as threatened and bewildered as any of us can remember. Out of this we have chosen ten books that sound clear and compelling voices of the moment. Older and younger, wiser and wilder, well-known and lesser-known, these are the ten voices we think should enter the stage and be heard in the spotlight, changing the story,” Glyn Maxwell, poet and Chair of Judges- TS Eliot prize, said in a statement on their official website.

Checkout the TS Eliot Prize 2021 shortlist here:

Photo: Canva

Hannah Lowe was a teacher at an inner-city London school for almost a decade. In this poetry collection, she focusses on ‘The Kids’-- her students and the teenagers whom she nurtured. Meanwhile, the poems also go further wherein she meets her own inner child as she comes of age in the turbulent times of the 80s and 90s, and later how she notices her own son navigate contemporary London. Lowe's poems also highlight the issues of social class, gender and race.

Photo: Bloodaxe Books Ltd

'Single Window' is Daniel Sluman’s third poetry collection, which is part memoir of poetry and photographs. The year 2016 was quite difficult one for Sluman and his wife Emily. More so, since he is an amputee dealing with chronic pain while his wife suffers from Fibromyalgia and Crohn's Disease. 'Unable to safely navigate the stairs to bed, they spent 24 hours a day together on their sofa, isolated from society except for a single window, where they watched the world moving around them,' according to the book's blurb. This lead to a series of poems in a journal form, which documented their life (of a disabled person) in Tory Britainn. These poems explore the themes of intimacy, unconditional love, and isolation.

Photo: Nine Arches Press

In his new poetry collection 'Ransonm', Michael Symmons Roberts explores what it means to have liberty and limits, the true meaning of being alive, and the possibility of having hope in a broken world. 'At the heart of this new book are three powerful sequences - one set in occupied Paris, one an elegy for his father, and one a meditation on gratitude - that work at the edges of belief and doubt, both mystical and philosophical,' reads the book's blurb.

Photo: Jonathan Cape

Selima Hill's 'Men Who Feed Pigeons' is a collection of seven contrasting yet complementary poems about men, and the various kinds of women’s relationships with different men.

Photo: Bloodaxe Books

'Eat or We Both Starve' is Victoria Kennefick's debut book of poetry. In this collection, Kennefick writes on the themes of 'the family home, the shared meal, the rituals of historical occasions, desire' according to the books blurb.

Photo: Carcanet Press Ltd

Raymond Antrobus’s debut poetry collection titled 'The Perseverance' won the Rathbone Folio Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, among others. And now his second collection 'All the Names Given' is shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2021. In this new collection, Antrobus explores the themes of his own ancestry, racial and cultural identity, love and it's fragility, etc.

Photo: Picador

''C+nto' enters the private lives of women from the butch counterculture, telling the inside story of the protests they led in the ‘90s to reclaim their bodies as their own – their difficult balance between survival and self-expression,' reads the book's blurb. A mix of memoir and conjecture, in this collection Taylor explores the themes of sexuality and gender.

Photo: The Westbourne Press

'This new book of poems finds fresh, spirited ways of navigating a time of continual surprise and uncertainty,' reads a statement on the publisher's website.

Photo: Faber & Faber

In this poetry collection Kayo Chingonyi tells a story about inheritance, people, memories, places and cultures-- all of which make us the person that we are. 'From London, Leeds, and The North East to the banks of the Zambezi river, these poems consider change and permanence, grief and joy, the painful ongoing process of letting go, with remarkable music and clarity,' reads the book's blurb.

Photo: Chatto & Windus

Kevin Young's 'Stones' is an ode to his 'home places and his dear departed, and to what of them—of us—poetry can save,' as per the book's blurb.

Photo: Knopf

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