SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2006 TS ELIOT PRIZE

Poetry Book Society Recommendation Summer 2006

Since 1987 when Ken Smith published his landmark prison study, Wormwood, there have been only too many poems arising out of prison residencies that have failed to meet the challenge, and understandably so. How does one exit one's own skin and enter another's; how does one become the other? Tim Liardet shows us how, but mysteriously, impalpably, as in a nightmare. He is a poet whose apprehensions have always veered towards the amorphic, the reverberative, the after-shock and tremor. He relishes gnat-storms, vapours, perfumes: not the thing that's there, but what's left after its disappearance, 'a sort of flowing yoke', 'a sort of spirit replica'. And in taking on teaching at a prison with 600 inmates, Liardet meets his subject. The instability of self and language meets a sensibility already primed for voicing the echo. The title-poem of  The Blood Choir is an extraordinary Goya-esque sequence that traces a sort of backward evolution in which the inmates, dressed in standard-issue green, lose their identifying marks of boot blisters, wrist scars, fingerprints - only to meld into a single phantasmagoric creature, an organism in chains that 'drums the rubber of its many feet.' Although we subsequently meet some of the inmates by name, in poems that show a gruesome tenderness, this many-in-one creature in the underworld, the prison's underground chamber with its eight locked gates, consumes everything. And the speaker is not exempt. He too is swallowed. He too faces a charge: what is the use of learning, of language? Like Dunwoody who smashes the stained glass window, he too prefers the thought of 'bright smithereens.' Set in a landscape of burning pyres and ancient heaths, The Blood Choir faces the charge with courage.

Mimi Khalvati, Poetry Book Society Bulletin Summer 2006

One starts by grasping at clues and sees them evolve into something near liturgy. He seems to say that the world and its morality move along signal fires of individual prodigies, and these may be monstrous as naturally as they are prodigious. The poems are as intimately limned as a Dürer drawing. This is a real book of poetry, conceived out of an original mind and written with a responsible virtuosity.                         

 Peter Porter

The respect and astonishment of seeing those white-as-sea-foam trainers is worth a hundred sermons on man’s inhumanity to man or on the nature of innocence. It is a discovery that arrives at the window of the imagination much as the sea suddenly does. It is these sudden openings out… that are most remarkable. This is certainly Liardet’s best book to date. It is what poetry is for: to register life, to turn it back into life through language.

George Szirtes, Poetry Review

It is at the points where Liardet’s language begins to tug against the reality he portrays that his poems come alive on the page. His delicate, highly metaphorical descriptions transcend the prison’s desolation and bestow the inmates’ lives with a sort of grace. The central achievement of this rare and powerful volume is to show us that even in the heart of prison there is the scope for freedom.

Sarah Crown, The Guardian

The Blood Choir is a work of extraordinary perception and honesty, unsparing with the harsh detail…Judges, lawyers and guards, whose shadows figure only faintly in this world, could learn much from Liardet’s powerful account. And nobody who believes that poetry could occasionally address brutal realities should miss it.

Alan Brownjohn, The Sunday Times

One of the year's most impressive collections, an extended and carefully crafted reflection by a poet who spent a year teaching in a jail on the way prison dehumanises, but also releases strange kinds of ingenuity.

The Financial Times

Repetition,  constraint, relentlessness, in Liardet's hands, have a sort of negative formal beauty, an almost abstract, classical  perfection of the kind dreamed of and aspired to by Beckett's characters. At another level, these poems meditate on ideas of form and enclosure, structure and symmetry, harmony and regimentation, all of which bear in fitting ways on questions of poetry itself.

Patrick McGuiness, PN Review

The Blood Choir is a book to stop readers in their tracks, and for teachers, no matter how experienced, it is the stuff of nightmares. It illustrates repeatedly that what is registered on the retina and transmuted by the imagination has a powerful effect, but the way in which the sounds of prison life are conveyed is every bit as striking and memorable. The cumulative effect of reading the book straight through is like a blow to the solar plexus.

Sam Adams, Planet

Liardet's great strength, in this very interesting book, is that he does not patronise his subjects, nor does he indulge in a false empathy. The situation is not moralised over, not deplored, there is no programme for Howard League reform, and I think he does achieve the focus he admires in Ken Smith's work.

John Hartley Williams, Poetry Wales

It is undoubtedly poetry at full throttle, with Liardet applying his trademark elegance and exacting ear to a brutal, poignant consideration of liberty and its limitations. Though the depersonalisation of prison life is depicted unsparingly...there is grace too. It is the absence of the didactic which makes his work so humane.

Kathryn Gray, New Welsh Review

Shoe Gazing
 

McStein has a facial scar and mannerly sense,
Sol, so loud, in a perpetual lather;
Hodgkins's sly, intelligent, furtive way
the counterpoint to Bradley's manic brain;
Aziz, his inoffensive glissando of laugh;
Randals, infallibly drawn to the weak -

One by one, I dream them, whose crimes
rattle and bump behind them like a cortège of tin cans.
Their faces - I don't know how to say this -
are turning into mine. That smile.
It started and now it cannot stop.
A potential is mirrored like a shadow. It falls, like rain,

in the spaces between assumptions
and threads the body's interstices, goes into your bones.
Look. They have found my new shoes
and squabble, trying to read the label.
Into their white-as-sea-foam trainers,
earned for good behaviour, I slip an overcautious foot.

The Physics of Chinese-Wrestling
 

When the gulf widens between them
these two young men reach out across it, hand to hand:
the skin of the pulse protests,

the pulse draws back its little egg-head to protest
as if it wants none of this slap
of male upon male. The force of the collision puts

such a strain on each wrist it turns into something else:
a question mark in convulsion,
say, unravelling backwards, a sparrow’s stopwatch

ticking in its ribs, an apprentice reaching back over his head
rather than shift the platform— 
it is a cradle of ligaments, hoist, the scaffolding that

secures the longing to build, stage by stage.
They bid to the master
builders, and all I know is when another back-of-a-hand 

strains towards the table-top or ceiling these two young men
are forming between them
a flying buttress, stone for stone, each one of which

presses against the next to hold the whole building up.
Or else they are forcing
skyward, stone by stone, the walls around them to justify

so wide a roof. Or else, now they are so nearly horizontal,
the building in an act
of upward and equal downward pressure,

of verticals meeting on a level plane, as if impartial,
holds its upright perspective, just.
Before falling down all over again.