Brian Turner, VPR Featured Poet, Named Finalist for T.S. Eliot Prize

I am pleased to report that Brian Turner’s Phantom Noise has been selected to be among the ten works named on the shortlist of Great Britain’s prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, begun in 1993 and organized under the administration of the Poetry Book Society, which was founded by T.S. Eliot in 1953. The prize is given annually to the best book of poetry published in the United Kingdom and Ireland in the past year. Other works among the finalists include the latest collections by Nobel Prize winners Seamus Heaney (Human Chain) and Derek Walcott (White Egrets).

Brian Turner recently appeared as the featured poet in the Spring/Summer 2010 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review, in which he was represented by the first appearance of three poems that are published in Phantom Noise. The issue also includes an interview with Turner and my review of Phantom Noise.

As I wrote in the review, “Walking Among Them: Brian Turner’s Phantom Noise”:

In an article, “To Bedlam and Back,” that appeared in the New York Times last October, Brian Turner wrote about the difficulties facing soldiers when they make the transition from war to home. Even as a veteran, an infantry sergeant who served both in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Iraq, Turner questioned his own perspective on this issue: “I guess what I’m wondering most is, as a country that is currently at war, how do our veterans rejoin the life waiting for them back home? How do they rejoin the tribe once they’ve been to Bedlam? How do we help them so that they don’t feel as if they’re encased in glass, pinned to the walls as specimens in some museum-house of culture? It’s a difficult question to answer. I have trouble answering it myself.”

One of the ways Brian Turner has responded to his history, as a soldier at the battlefront who returns home, has been to explore in his poems various experiences encountered in a war zone and to examine the enduring emotions evoked by them. Indeed, early in his new collection of poems, Phantom Noise, Turner reminds readers of how frequently soldiers encounter an inability to leave behind the traumatic images and dramatic experiences of war . . ..

Readers are encouraged to examine the rest of the review.

The complete shortlist for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry includes the following:

Seeing Stars by Simon Armitage
The Mirabelles by Annie Freud
You by John Haynes
Human Chain by Seamus Heaney
What the Water Gave Me by Pascale Petit
The Wrecking Light by Robin Robertson
Rough Music by Fiona Sampson
Phantom Noise by Brian Turner
White Egrets by Derek Walcott
New Light for the Old Dark by Sam Willetts

About the selection of finalists, jury chair Anne Stevenson states: “The judges have found this an exceptional year for poetry, with a record number of entries, and have agreed on a strong shortlist which is unusually eclectic in form and theme.”

The T.S. Eliot Prize is Great Britain’s richest award for poetry, and the winner will receive a check presented by Valerie Eliot, T.S. Eliot’s widow, at a ceremony on January 24, 2011. The jury of judges for this year’s prize is Anne Stevenson (Chair), Michael Symmons Roberts, and Bernardine Evaristo, also the featured poet in a previous issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review.