Tim Liardet
This was a very exciting year for MA Poetry at Bath Spa University, full of artistic endeavour and the 'moment of self-begetting' that so fascinated Harold Bloom. It was a year which saw the production of a long, disturbing and exceptionally moving sequence of poems on The War in Iraq. It was a year that saw poems which drew their ars poetica from Somerset folklore and the preeminent importance of locale, probing both with loving care. There were poems whose ambition reached into the ekphrastic roots of European art and came up with a new synthesis. There were poems set in Manhattan alongside poems set in China, beautifully balanced in one submission. This was the year which saw a series of poems evoke the altogether riskier, stranger terrains of recovering from alcoholism with an unflinching gravitas. It was the year which saw a series of ambitious poems first tryst Charles Darwin, then the gruesome truths of the Holocaust, reminding us in one submission that post-Bunting cerebrality remains prosperous. There were also brilliant poems that, in emotional and psychological terms, bestrode the spaces of the Atlantic in ambivalent longing; there were poems that explored the arcane possibilties of Anglo-American diction with the kind of elan of which Bukowski would have been proud. All in all, a year of extraordinary fruitfulness, during which the drunkenness of things being various was felt without so much as a tangerine being peeled.There's the smell of publication in the air.
As if this were not enough, Poet's Eye - the context module designed to touch the interface between prose and poetry - enjoyed its first all-woman group and shifted artistic remits into all sort of different shapes until they were no longer recognisable. Until they were no longer remits. Nabokov was warily loved almost as much as he was plauibly hated, as was Virginia Wolff. Marquez was adored, half adored or not adored at all; Golding held at a certain distance and shown respect. Poems, written by people who had never before written poetry, discovered new forms of articulation.
Thanks to everyone who contributed energy, commitment and the steady gestation of their poetics. It was memorable.