The Shortlist for The Crashaw Prize 2012
This year The Crashaw Prize — England’s only international prize for full-length collections of poetry — received over ninety entries from four continents.
The prize, now in its fifth year, attracts attention from around the English-speaking world and the winning writers, along with many of those shortlisted, have gone on to become significant voices on an international basis. The aim of the prize — to support debut writers by providing them with a platform to draw attention to their unique talents — is reaching more people than ever. In a change to previous years, there will be only one winner in 2012, who will receive a £1,000 cash prize along with a publishing contract.
The shortlist for 2012 contains a revised version of Micah Bateman’s Bastard Star, which was shortlisted in 2011 and, in an extraordinary outcome, Lauren Levin has been shortlisted with two separate works, both of which are exceptional books. The winner will be announced in April.
The shortlist (in alphabetical order)
Graham Allen The One That Got Away (Ireland)
Micah Bateman Bastard Star (USA)
Adam Davis Index of Haunted Houses (USA)
Lauren Levin Not Time (USA)
Lauren Levin Nightwork (USA)
Lydia Macpherson Love Me Do (England)
Catherine Ormell The Ish Feeling (England)
Notes for editors
- The Crashaw Prize is the only international poetry prize for full length collections of poetry written in English.
- The prize is administered by Salt and judged by Publisher, Chris Hamilton-Emery.
- The prize began in 2008. Winners are published the following year of entry.
- Since the prize began it has successfully published thirteen first collections.
- Previous winners include:
2011 Winners
Kaddy Benyon Milk Fever (UK)
Luke Heeley Dust Sheet (UK)
2010 Winners
Vesna Goldsworthy The Angel of Salonika (UK/Serbia)
Rebecca Lehmann Between the Crackups (USA)
Catherine Theis The Fraud of Good Sleep (USA)
2009 Winners
Nathan Hoks, Reveilles (USA)
Andrew Pidoux, Year of the Lion (UK)
Nick Potamitis, The Book of Night Terrors (UK)
Jonty Tiplady, Zam Bonk Dip (UK)
Ryan van Winkle, Tomorrow, We Will Live Here (UK)
Anna Woodford, Birdhouse (UK)
2008 Winners
Tom Chivers, How to Build a City (UK)
Abi Curtis, Unexpected Weather (UK)
Jamey Dunham, The Bible of Lost Pets (USA)
Jared Stanley, Book Made of Forest (USA)
I’m sorry my Submission OF POETS AND THEIR PRINCES did not make the Crashaw Short-List. For what it’s worth the Collection derives in part from a Novel I have written called OF PRINCES AND THEIR POETS, the Poets and the Princes of both Pieces being interchangeable and the implication that there is something of the Poet or the Poetess and the Prince or the Princess in all of us. For the British Reader the Novel also has a Political Dimension. Poets being the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World, an’ all.
Good to see Graham Allen on the List, however. She’s La Marianne des Îles, the Poet behind the Proposal upon which is sought the Judgement of the Princes and the Princesses of the Isles of Wonder.
She’s the completely representative British Sensibility, the Poet of the Piece. She is someone who is English born, of mixed Irish and Welsh descent and married as the Novel opens to someone of Scottish descent. Not that the Reader of the Novel sees any of the Poems of the Piece. The Poems she writes are the Sonnets I submitted to the Prize. The Reader of the Novel is asked simply to accept that they are pretty good. They form the context in which the British Reader of the Novel is invited to give his or her Judgement on the Proposal it makes. The British Readers of the Novel are the Princes and the Princesses of the Piece. They are the People of the Isles of Wonder.
A Mrs Rita Henderson, the Poet of the Piece. Used to dance and sing a bit, in a Peppery kind of Way, when the Sixties were at their Height. She also wrote parking tickets but now she’s writing other stuff, and whilst the Reader of the Novel may not see the Poems she writes other Characters in the Novel do. Of these Rita’s nephew Jonathan is the most important. He wants to be her Agent and put the Poems to Music, but she’s not having it. In the Poet’s Scheme of Things the finest of Words do not need Music. The finest of Words make their Own. They are a silent Symphony of Delight playing ceaselessly upon and along the constantly changing colours and contours of the Poet’s almost infinite capacity to dream, and to imagine.
They are the Music of Time and Place to which in the opening Sonnet of the Collection the Poet dreams, and delights.
It is an Attitude or a State of Mind that the Collection suggests.
In Sonnet 94 it is a condition of heightened awareness that suggests, and of the matters that most beguile. In Sonnet 13 it is something in the air. It is an energy and an electricity, and in the certainty and the sanctity of their days no less than in the certainty and the sanctity of their dreams and their desires it dances, and beguiles. For some there are (in Sonnet 37) who dance to remember, and others to forget.