another national poetry day dawns...

...under a blanket of snow from Sean O'Brien, who has just won the Forward Prize for the third time - and a third tome - an unprecedented hat trick which places him firmly, in the words of the judges, as "one of the leading poets of his generation."

I have to confess that the winning collection, The Drowned Book, arrived in the post two days before I went to the USA, and is sitting pristine in a pile of the 2,837 books I brought back with me. Drowned Book, indeed. Though that seems to have done it no harm.

The poem extract quoted in The Guardian has already settled in my mind like a snowfall, alongside August Kleinzahler's wonderful "Snow in North Jersey:"

Blizzard

From The Drowned Book (Picador), by Sean O'Brien (extract)

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 ...
It calls us home again, beneath a drift
In which the figure and the ground collapse -
No more redundancy, no more perhaps.

and Look!

The Forward Prize for best first collection, which also had a Salt poet on the shortlist, has gone to Daljit Nagra for his Faber collection, Look We have Coming to Dover! I have to say I did love this book and I think it is a well-deserved win, against stiff competition.

Daljit himself has said, in an interview in the Guardian, that he hopes he can be known as a British poet, not "just" an Asian one - this collection is all about Asianness, and when the poet performs the work he often "minstrelises" (it (his word), doing accents etc. I think his writing is strong enough that he should let his other influences (which include Browning, Hardy, even Shakespeare) come out in his second collection.

This is, above all, a happy book - very rare in poetry. It's fresh and fun and about, ultimately, the joy of life. Read some poems here.