The Water Table is a collection of poetry written by Philip Gross in 2009, published by Bloodaxe Books. It won the 2009 T.S Eliot poetry Prize. [1]
In her review in The Guardian, Polly Clark states that Gross did not compare water in traditional metaphors but instead the intrinsic physical properties of water itself. She noted that the poems were written not only with educated, technical terms and knowledge but with common everyday phrases. Mentioning the balance of these writing methods mirrors the poems' focus on the trans-formative nature of water which constantly changes states. [2] From his interview with Gross, Stephen Adams of The Telegraph writes : "At its heart is a simple theme - the ever changing nature of water. But Gross said that the whole world - both natural and man-made - could be reflected in that liquid mirror." [3]
Gross was given the T. S. Eliot Prize by Valerie Eliot, T. S. Eliot's widow, in London. [4] Gross expressed his astonishment at winning the T.S Eliot award over more celebrated poets including three former T.S. Eliot prizewinners. [3]
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist and playwright. He is considered to be one of the 20th century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His use of language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet laureate, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
Faber and Faber Limited, commonly known as Faber & Faber or simply Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Pascale Petit, is a French-born British poet of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. She was born in Paris and grew up in France and Wales. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. She has travelled widely, particularly in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon and India.
Philip Gross is a poet, novelist, playwright, children's writer and academic based in England and Wales. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Wales.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) for "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, known for her poetic explorations of migration, both animal and human, and her involvement with classical music, wildlife conservation and Greece, ancient and modern. She is Trustee for conservation charity New Networks for Nature, has served on the board of the Zoological Society of London and was a professor of poetry at King's College London from 2013 to 2022.
Birthday Letters is a 1998 poetry collection by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes' death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards, including the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection, and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 1999. This collection of eighty-eight poems is widely considered to be Hughes's most explicit response to the suicide of his estranged wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, and to their widely discussed, politicized, and "explosive" marriage. Prior to Birthday Letters, Hughes had only explicitly mentioned Plath once before, in a poem titled 'Heptonstall Cemetery' from his 1979 collection Remains of Elmet.
Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. From 1 October 2019 until 30 September 2023, she was the Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Hugo Williams is an English poet, journalist and travel writer. He received the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1999 and Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2004.
Julia Copus FRSL is a British poet, biographer and children's writer.
Fiona Ruth Sampson, Born 1963 is a British poet, writer, editor, translator and academic who was the first woman editor of Poetry Review since Muriel Spark. She received a MBE for services to literature in 2017.
Roger Robinson is a British writer, musician and performer who lives between England and Trinidad. He is best known for A Portable Paradise, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2019.
Polly Clark is a Canadian-born British writer and poet. She is the author of Larchfield (2017), which fictionalised a youthful period in the life of poet W. H. Auden, and Tiger (2019) about a last dynasty of wild Siberian tigers. She has published four critically acclaimed volumes of poetry. She lives in Helensburgh, Scotland.
Bee Journal is a 2012 poetry collection by Sean Borodale. It is written in the form of a journal and follows one colony for around one year, from the initial formation of the hive to the capture of a swarm.
Loop of Jade is the first book of poetry by Chinese-British poet Sarah Howe, and the first debut collection to ever win the T. S. Eliot Prize, in 2015. The collection contains poems that trace the author's journey into her own roots, including poems about growing up in Hong Kong and about her mother.
Rapture is a collection of poetry written by the Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy, the British poet laureate from 2009 to 2019. It marks her 37th work of poetry and has been described as "intensely personal, emotional and elegiac, and markedly different from Duffy’s other works" by the British Council. Rapture was first published in 2005 in the UK by Picador, and in 2013 in the US, by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Nigh-No-Place is the second collection of poems written by Jen Hadfield. It was published in 2008 by Bloodaxe Books and won the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry.
Parallax is the fifth poetry collection written by Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey. First published in 2013, by Carcanet Press, the collection of poems focus on the premise of the appearance and position of an object being changed by the change in the position of the observer. In 2015, after becoming the fourth shortlisted poem written by Morrissey, it received the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Falling Awake is a 2016 poetry collection by English poet Alice Oswald, published by Jonathan Cape. Her seventh book of poetry, it won the 2016 Costa Poetry Award and the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.