Poetry Book Society

West-country-based poet, Carrie Etter, originally from Normal, Illinois, and now teaching at Bath Spa University, became the first recipient of the London New Poetry Award for her poetry collection The Tethers, at a joint Pizza Express/London Festival Fringe Poetry & Jazz Awards event at Pizza Express Jazz Club Soho on Monday (16th August), a celebration that also saw Norma Winstone and Cleveland Watkiss tie for best Jazz Vocalist 2010 and John Turville (piano) win outright the Jazz Instrumentalist of the Year Award.

London Festival Fringe director Greg Tallent opened the evening by explaining how his Festival Fringe organisation had first discussed with Cegin Productions the idea of funding an award to promote poetry alongside a range of other arts awards, and had looked to Anne-Marie Fyfe of Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour for the necessary organisational drive, and, more importantly, to establish how such a new award could be used to further artistic development.

Anne-Marie Fyfe, who has organised poetry readings and classes in London's famous Troubadour cellar-club since the mid-nineties was emphatic, Greg Tallent said, from the outset, that the award should include the myriad poetry presses in London and throughout the British Isles who are as important as the big publishing names in keeping poetry's lifeblood flowing in the capital, and that it should certainly do something for new poets, both financially and in terms of heightened profile, complementing the many existing awards which celebrate poets already in mid- or late-career with established presses.

Hence the criteria that the London New Poetry Award £2,500 prize to be presented at the cross-arts London Festival Fringe Awards Ceremony 2010 at the Waldorf Hilton at London's Aldwych next week should go to the best first collection of the year June 2009 to May 2010, criteria that had found a deserving winner in Carrie Etter's first book.

In a brief introduction Anne-Marie Fyfe commented on how for her, the Award's high points, had included finding out just how many people in the Troubadour newsletter community, and the wider poetry world, took the trouble to nominate favourite new poets; discovering exactly how many first collections were published in the past year (77!, all listed, for the first time ever, on Coffee-House Poetry and London Festival Fringe websites); and realising how many of the year's new poets had been published by small and medium-sized regional and specialist poetry presses: (and recognising, sadly, how few new poets are published by the mainstream poetry presses who traditionally dominate the Eliot and Forward prize lists).

Both Salt Publishing and Seren Books each had more than one poet in the final shortlist, Cape Poetry and Bloodaxe Books one each, the remainder of the shortlist including first collections published by presses as diverse as Mulfran, Flambard, Dedalus, Templar, Cinammon, Red Squirrel and Blackstaff, (with none at all, incidentally, appearing on either shortlist or longlist from some of the best-known publishers in Britain and Ireland!)

Anne-Marie Fyfe also paid tribute to the professionalism and commitment shown by the the three distinguished poets and poetry activists who formed the 2010 Awards Poetry Panel, Tamar Yoseloff, Daljit Nagra and Adam O'Riordan, and to the complexity of their task, a difficulty made more evident by the high praise they offered to each of the fifteen short-listed poets who attended the Pizza-Express sponsored celebration to hear the winner announced: Maureen Jivani, David Briggs, Eleanor Livingstone, Tom Chivers, Grace Wells, Howard Wright, Agnieszka Studzinska, Patrick Brandon, Abi Curtis, Hilary Menos, Ellen Phethean, Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Katrina Naomi and Sam Willetts.

Appropriately for a combined poetry-&-jazz audience, Carrie Etter celebrated her win by reading 'Siren', from The Tethers, a poem which reverses the classical concept of sailors fighting to resist the entrapment of women's voices and envisages instead a mythological scene in which the unwilling victim tied to the mast is a woman struggling to resist the lure of a male singing voice!

What the judges said about Carrie Etter's award-winning poetry collection:

"It's rare to find a poet having quite so much fun with language and life as Carrie Etter. The poems perform acrobatics with forms as they are driven by the possibilities of words so each piece seems to arrive at its own unexpected and surprised ending. What's most impressive is Etter's restless mind that fetches odd allusions or steers off into tangents in a way that always compels us to make the journey. It's also rare to find a poet who can persistently find joy through suffering with such an assured lightness of touch which defies its lucid surface. A persistently witty and beautifully moving book that is carefully themed and linguistically patterned so that it feels more like the collection of an experienced poet."

For full details on judges, shortlisted books, the longlist, etc see www.coffeehousepoetry.org

Source: Coffee House Poetry at the Troubadour

Categories: Poetry News, Poetry Prizes

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