From former heroin addict Sam Willetts to the hit performance poet Kate Tempest, they are the up-and-coming new poets who have been named as the Carol Ann Duffys and Simon Armitages of the future. The Poetry Book Society has released its once-in-a-decade list of Next Generation poets, which has in the past tipped names from Duffy and Armitage to Alice Oswald and Don Paterson for future success.
The 20 new names, said the poetry organisation which was founded by TS Eliot in 1953, are expected to “dominate the poetry landscape of the coming decade”. More than half of them are women, from Tempest, the 27-year-old south London performance poet whose spoken-word theatre show Brand New Ancients won her the Ted Hughes award for innovation in poetry last year, to 66-year-old Annie Freud. Daughter of Lucian Freud, she writes in her second collection, The Mirabelles: “Do we need to know why the child is laughing? / Or indeed that she is the artist’s daughter? / Not in the least. // What matters is that we register her presence / with the greatest possible immediacy: / the inexplicable human gorgeousness.”
According to the Poetry Book Society, “women look set to lead the charge” when it comes to the next decade of poetry. Judge and poet Clare Pollard said she had been looking for poets “who were doing something new: tackling fresh subject matter, taking both emotional and literary risks”, and “female poets seem to be particularly fearless at the moment, with names such as Emily Berry and Melissa Lee-Houghton shaking up and reinvigorating the poetry scene”.
The announcement makes something of a red letter day for Kate Tempest, who the night before was also nominated for the Mercury prize – given to what its judges deem to be the best British album of the year – for her album Everybody Down, a hip-hop concept album about three people adrift in the city.
The selection of what the Poetry Book Society believes is the best of the emerging poets from the UK and Ireland who published their first collection of poetry within the last 10 years also includes Willetts, whose New Light for the Old Dark is the author’s poetic response to the years he was homeless and addicted to heroin. “I’m back in a basement, / heartsick, digging for a vein in February / as in a February gone and a February / still to come, spitting prayers through the tourniquet / in my teeth, licking up tears and pleading / for my blood to plume up in the barrel, please,” he writes.
Willetts is joined by Forward prize winner Daljit Nagra, the Granta best young novelist Adam Foulds, TS Eliot prize winner Jen Hadfield and 12 other poets whom chair of judges and poet Ian McMillan said were “the visible and vocal evidence that poetry is on the crest of the wave at the moment”.
“What a fantastic list”, said McMillan, who was joined on the judging panel by the poets Caroline Bird, Robert Crawford, Pollard and Paul Farley. “We are going through a really fantastic period for poetry and these writers show the confidence poetry has at the moment. It is everywhere – in festivals, open mic nights, on the internet.”
The Poetry Book Society has made two previous selections of New Generation poets: in 1994, its selection included Armitage, John Burnside, Michael Donaghy, Duffy, Lavinia Greenlaw, Kathleen Jamie, Paterson and Glyn Maxwell. In 2004, it highlighted names from Patience Agbabi to Sophie Hannah, Oswald, Pascale Petit, Robin Robertson and Owen Sheers.
The latest selection, according to McMillan, “will be leading our national cultural conversation for many years to come”.
“In this group of writers we find an exhilarating mix of style and subject, reflecting a truly diverse range of voices: poetry is in excellent hands,” he said. “The quality of these collections was hugely impressive but not surprising – most of these poets have been paying their dues for years now on the events circuit and cutting their teeth with short pamphlets. In this way the poetry scene differs from fiction where you often see debut novelists appearing seemingly out of the blue. Poets are made to prove themselves long before their first full collection is ever published.”
Pollard said she had been “struck by how many of the collections are in fact sequences, heralding a return to book-length narratives: long-poems”, adding: “There are some incredible storytellers in this list, with tales about family, loss, drugs, madness, colonialism, love or war every bit as gripping as any novel.”
The New Generation award is supported by the Arts Council and the T S Eliot Estate.
The 2014 Next Generation Poets list in full:
• Tara Bergin (This is Yarrow, Carcanet)
• Emily Berry (Dear Boy, Faber & Faber)
• Sean Borodale (Bee Journal, Jonathan Cape)
• Adam Foulds (The Broken Word, Jonathan Cape)
• Annie Freud (The Mirabelles, Picador)
• Alan Gillis (Here Comes the Night, Gallery)
• Rebecca Goss (Her Birth, Carcanet)
• Jen Hadfield (Nigh-No-Place, Bloodaxe)
• Emma Jones (The Striped World, Faber & Faber)
• Luke Kennard (The Harbour Beyond the Movie, Salt)
• Melissa Lee-Houghton (Beautiful Girls, Penned in the Margins)
• Hannah Lowe (Chick, Bloodaxe)
• Kei Miller (A Light Song of Light, Carcanet)
• Helen Mort (Division Street, Chatto & Windus)
• Daljit Nagra (Look We Have Coming to Dover!, Faber & Faber)
• Heather Phillipson (Instant-flex 718, Bloodaxe)
• Kate Tempest (Brand New Ancients, Picador)
• Mark Waldron (The Brand New Dark, Salt)
• Sam Willetts (New Light for the Old Dark, Jonathan Cape)
• Jane Yeh (The Ninjas, Carcanet)
