Very happy to see Kevin Graham’s debut collection The Lookout Post on the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2024 shortlist.Announcing the Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2024 shortlist, chair of the judging panel, Professor Eoin McNamee, Director of the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre said:
“Each year the task of choosing a shortlist becomes more difficult as the work of first-time poets submitted to us grows in assurance, authority and beauty. It is as always a privilege for myself and fellow judges, Vona Groarke, Alice Lyons and Tom Walker to read and debate this work.”
The shortlisted publications are:
Kevin Graham: The Lookout Post (The Gallery Press)
Amy Acre: Mothersong (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc)
Declan Ryan: Crisis Actor (Faber & Faber Ltd)
Susannah Dickey: ISDAL (Pan Macmillan imprint Picador Poetry)
Patrick James Errington: the swailing (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Eli Payne Mandel: The Grid (Carcanet Press)
Dawn Watson: We Play Here (Granta)
Alisha Dietzman: Sweet Movie (Beacon Press)
About The Lookout Post:
The Lookout Post, Kevin Graham’s first collection, is a book of uncommon poise and range. It includes harrowing accounts of illness, a suicide, and joyous celebrations of fatherhood and family life. Surprising revelations — ‘And it strikes me there is only / the moment’ (‘The Knack’) and ‘It’s both enough and never enough’ (‘Weathering’) — match original detail — ‘the worried frown // knitted on his brow didn’t drop a stitch’ (‘The Lesson’). Whether it’s in the extended sequence, ‘Sketches’, which draws on the letters of Van Gogh, or shorter poems which pay homage to Wendell Berry, Zinedine Zidane and Derek Mahon or ruminate on Elizabeth Bishop’s sojourn in Ireland, The Lookout Post seamlessly melds the ordinary and the literary. As the book’s title might suggest this is a collection of acutely observed reflection by an outstanding new and assured voice.
