Poetry prize shortlist Seamus Heaney's poem Cutaways, originally published in the journal Irish Pages, is on the shortlist for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, which was announced yesterday.
A total of 106 poems were submitted for this award - to be eligible, poems had to have either won a poetry prize or have been published in a newspaper or magazine. The winner will be announced on October 8th.
Also on the shortlist for the £1,000 (€1,270) prize are Wantonby Christopher Buehlman (the Bridport Prize); Campaign Desk, December 1812 by Catherine Ormell (the Bridport Prize); Love Poemfor Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze by Don Paterson (Poetry Review); Wells-next-the-Seaby Kate Rhodes (the Bridport Prize) and Ode on a Grayson Perry Urnby Tim Turnbull (Magma).
The six poets on the shortlist for the £10,000 Forward Prize for Best Collection are Sujata Bhatt, Jane Griffiths, Mick Imlah, Jamie McKendrick, Jen Hadfield and Catherine Smith.
The Force strikes back
Force 10,the vibrant periodical from the northwest, is back after a nine-year absence, once again edited by writer Dermot Healy. Given the wealth of writers and artists - the visual has always mixed with the written word in Force 10 - it's hard to believe the region survived nearly a decade without it.
Issue 13 - out now, 160 pages long at a cost of €16 - features a contribution from novelist Niall Williams, who sums up the literary provenance of the place in his piece about being writer-in-residence in Sligo over the past two years. When only three weeks in Sligo, he had already met so many writers that it seemed to him that every single person in the place had a book in them - one that was in most cases already at least halfway out.
"I had sat with one nurse-poet in a riverside cafe, and taken nods from a shopkeeper-novelist, a short-storying florist, all unknown to each other, all silently in the dream-wrestle of language."
He sensed the thousand poems and stories in the faces of passers-by every time he walked up O'Connell Street. "Every single soul was in the state of composition: there were mystic visionaries walking out from the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, there were thriller writers coming down Teeling Street from the Courthouse, and in Keohane's Bookshop, if you listened carefully, every customer's murmur was in metre."
Now a fraction of this, at least, has an outlet again in the new issue. So many contributions have been received for it that some have been earmarked already for the autumn issue. Included in the current issue are poems by prisoners from Castlerea prison and the next issue will contain work by prisoners from throughout the country.
Content in this issue is largely drawn from the northwest, but it's by no means exclusively local, and there are pieces by Aidan Higgins, Hisham Matar, Colm Tóibín and Roddy Doyle. Doyle writes about his summer in 1979 sweeping the London streets for Westminster City Council.
His beat included the street outside a house in Mayfair where The Who's drummer Keith Moon had died the previous summer. With two other sweepers, he went to Quadrophenia, the film based on The Who's rock opera. Because they'd all swept outside the Keith Moon house "We already felt slightly involved . . . A few weeks later, I went home to Dublin and became a teacher."
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