TS Eliot prize for poetry 2007
April 2011
Why Sophie Hannah's Pessimism for Beginners should win the TS Eliot prize
For the second year running, the TS Eliot prize has been shadowed by A-level students, with students taking part in a student poll and an essay competition. Edwin Morgan was the poet chosen by the most students. Holly Stevenson, an AS student at Dame Alice Harpur School in Bedford, has won the writing competition with this essay, proposing Sophie Hannah's Pessimism for Beginners
October 2007
Blizzard by Sean O'Brien
The snow will bring the world indoors, the fall
That saves the Gulf Stream and the Greenland Shelf.
White abolitionist of maps and calendars,
Its Lenten rigour pillowed like a sin, it means
To be the only season, falling always on itself.
To put an end to all analogy, pure cold
That proves what it need never say,
It calls us home again, beneath a drift
In which the figure and the ground collapse -
No more redundancy, no more perhaps.