Young Critics review the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist - part 1

The Poetry Society

Listen to the first five of this year's Young Critics reviews in podcast form. You can watch all ten reviews on our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/YoungCriticsReviews Priyanka Moorjani reviews Signs, Music by Raymond Antrobus, guiding the viewer through the speaker’s ‘avalanche’ of emotions upon becoming a parent. Joe Wright considers the formal and poetic influences mapped throughout Hannah Copley’s Lapwing, while Sylvie Jane Lewis pays close attention to the epigraphs of Helen Farish’s The Penny Dropping and how they haunt the rest of the text. Eira Murphy situates Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy within the poet’s wider corpus and influences, asking ‘in what ways might we come to a world increasingly pushed to the horizon of its own collapse?’, and Orla Davey interrogates Gustav Parker Hibbett’s use of mythology in High Jump as Icarus Story. Since 2022, the T. S. Eliot Prize (the most valuable prize for new poetry collections in the UK and Ireland) and Young Poets Network, The Poetry Society’s leading platform for poets aged up to 25, have run an exciting new collaboration to support the next generation of poetry reviewers: the Young Critics Scheme. This year’s scheme follows a hugely successful first two years, in which two cohorts of Young Critics’ video reviews were seen over 60,000 times and shared online by readers, publishers, poets and critics. Several of the Young Critics have since been invited to review for leading magazines including The Poetry Review, Poetry London and Magma. Find out more about The Poetry Society's programmes for young people: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/young-poets