Annal:2003 Whitbread Book Award for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Landing Light: Poems
- 2003 Whitbread-Poetry winner
- Score: 10.53
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver…
—from “Waking with Russell”
Hailed for its “enormous skill and verve” (The Guardian) and its “seriousness and moral urgency” (The Independent), Landing Light is one of the most important and resonant poetry collections to come out of Britain in recent years. Ceaselessly inquiring, Don Paterson discovers the love…
Minsk: Poems
- 2003 Whitbread-Poetry shortlist
- Score: 6.53
Minsk is Lavinia Greenlaw’s third collection, and the first since the title poem of A World Where News Travelled Slowly won the Forward Prize for the year’s finest poem of 1997. From London Zoo to an Essex village and the Arctic Circle, Greenlaw explores questions of place—the childhood landscapes we leave behind, those we travel towards, and those like “Minsk” which we believe to be missing from our lives. Greenlaw’s restless, inquisitive tone builds to make Minsk a hypnotic collection from one of the leading poets of her…
- 2003 Whitbread-Poetry shortlist
- Score: 6.53
The best ink stones are slates from Chinese riverbeds, but in the long history of their use these have all been found. as one expert writes, “the better the stone, the smaller and more consistent the particles will be and the denser the ink”.
These poems by Jamie McKendrick have a remarkable density of ink. They explore the grain, or “tooth” of the natural world with unusual and discomforting detail at the same time as they chart the medium they work in—not only what the eye sees, but the eye itself: its structure and structurings. These poems open onto…
- 2003 Whitbread-Poetry shortlist
- Score: 6.53
Though firmly rooted in the domestic, natural world, Jean Sprackland’s poems are thrilling excursions into the lives that we live alongside our everyday ones: the lives we are aware of in dreams, in grief, in love. She shows us the vertigo and vulnerability of human experience with great clarity and precision, tenderness and care. These are vivid poems full of light and weather and water—awash with water: a flooded forest, acid rain, an inland tidal wave, an ocean of broken glass; jellyfish washed up on the beach that “lay like saints/unharvested,…
