A sequence of sonnets written during the first 200 days of Donald Trump’s presidency is just one of the “intensely political” poetry collections shortlisted for the most valuable award in British poetry, the £25,000 TS Eliot prize.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, in which the award-winning US poet Terrance Hayes tackles the fast-moving news cycle of American politics, is one of 10 collections contending for the award. Alongside it, US poet laureate Tracy K Smith considers the country’s past in Wade in the Water, named after a spiritual sung on the Underground Railroad, former winner Sean O’Brien considers England’s relationship with its continental neighbours in Europa, and Nick Laird takes on topics from Grenfell Tower to the refugee crisis in Feel Free.
Judge and poet Clare Pollard said: “It’s an intensely political list, and right now it needs to be a political list. Poetry’s ability to engage with language when it is being so debased, when there are so many lies and so much fake news, its ability to look at the discourses around us, is so important.” She is joined on the judging panel by fellow poets Sinéad Morrissey and Daljit Nagra.
Hayes, who wrote a poem a day in the opening stretch of Trump’s presidency, said his sonnets were “a response to what it means to be a writer, an African American, a man, an American”.
He added: “It was the only way for me to process the quickness of the turnover of the media cycle that Trump has created – every day there is a new bone in the pot, so to speak. To cope with that I decided not to linger, so whatever happened on Monday I couldn’t be revising on Tuesday or Wednesday, because there would be another new shock to respond to. I don’t think of them as perfect sonnets by any measure, they’re almost a record of what was happening. I was putting in about 12 hours a day on them, working sunup to sunrise.”
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