Joelle Taylor won the TS Eliot Poetry Prize for her look at Butch’s lesbian counterculture in the 1990s, C + nto & Othered Poems, which the jury recognized as “a flaming book of anger and light”.
Taylor’s fourth collection, a mixture of memoirs and guesswork, reveals the underground communities women forged where they could reclaim their bodies as their own. On Monday evening in London it was announced that C + nto has beaten collections from big names like Raymond Antrobus, Selima Hill and Michael Symmons Roberts for the price of 25,000 pounds. The TS Eliot Award is one of the most prestigious prizes in British poetry and has been won in the past by Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy and last year Bhanu Kapil.
C + nto & Othered Poems by Joelle Taylor. Photo: The Westbourne Press
“Every book on the shortlist had a strong claim to the award. It was extremely difficult for us to choose between 10 outstanding collections, ”said the chairman of the jury, Glyn Maxwell, who, together with Caroline Bird and Zaffar Kunial, selected the winner.
“The arguments towards the end were passionate and thoughtful, but the jury’s choice fell on Joelle Taylor’s C + nto and Othered Poems, a flaming book of anger and light, a great opera of liberation from the shadows of indifference and oppression.”
Maxwell said the winning collection was “quite autobiographical, about her life as a butch lesbian and the hostility she suffered as a child in a conventional family”.
“But then there are also fanciful depictions of nightlife – of lesbian clubs, some of which are hellish and some of which are heavenly,” he said. “It’s kind of angry, but it’s that kind of anger that creates light, and it’s really vivid read – it’s very special.”
The award, administered by the TS Eliot Foundation, is the highest endowed award in British poetry and the only one judged solely by established poets. Taylor is a former British slam champion who founded the 2001 SLAMbassadors British Youth Slam Championships.
“Joelle has its origins in performance,” said Maxwell. “This collection proves that at the highest level there are very few differences from what is on the page.”
The collection, Taylor writes in her foreword, is an immersion in her own personal history by viewing her “exile as a consequence of my sexuality” and an excavation of the past of others through interviews and archives.
“It is important that we keep our history,” she writes. “I interviewed other butch lesbians from that time, and together we started to construct a simple story: exile, friendship, grief, love, courage and threat.”
The collection opens when Taylor imagines Soho and its bars as a museum behind glass: “Everything, showcase. / Glass showcases line the old streets // materialize next to / cruising areas & cottages // squats & roughs / goldfish bowl cenotaphs. “
In O, Maryville, the narrative follows a night in a lesbian bar and revolves around four butch lesbians who watch and protect the room and hold their own even if the bar is torn down. In “The Body as a Battlefield” she writes, like “You fall, miss your body, end up somewhere / in hostile territory behind the lines where your body is a / a foreign country for which you cannot get a visa”.
“There is no part of a butch lesbian that is welcome in this world. It was bad as a teenager. It’s just as bad today, “Taylor wrote in her foreword, revealing that as a young teen who” carefully stepped out of the closet in the early 1980s “she was” subjected to constant government-sponsored abuse. “
Today, she says, war is “rage[ing] on social media ”and“ we spend more time monitoring each other than protecting ”. C + nto, she says, should “both acknowledge the crimes against the LGBT community and look back on a time when we had a greater sense of unity and self.”
C + nto is published by Westbourne Press and has been described by Hollie McNish as “visionary and powerful” and by Bernardine Evaristo in the New Statesman as “one of the most amazing and original collections of poetry in recent years”. Taylor has also published three plays and a collection of short stories, The Night Alphabet.