Hannah Copley – T.S. Eliot Writers’ Notes

Welcome to our Writers’ Notes for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist. These are educational resources for poets looking to develop their practice and learn from some of contemporary poetry’s most exciting and accomplished voices. Here’s Hannah Copley on her collection Lapwing.

I wrote the poems that would become Lapwing over a period of about six years, with a gap in the middle for my first collection, Speculum. The first half (I didn’t know it was just a piece of a bigger whole at that point) arrived altogether as twenty numerical poems in 2019 (I-XX in the published collection).

Close Encounters

The spark was a memorable encounter with a lapwing while I was out walking with my infant daughter. After this meeting, I’d gone home and had done a bit of research on the bouncing bird that I’d spotted in the fields near my house. Reading about their behaviour, and about their many regional names – ‘they are otherwise known as…’. Something clicked.


Up to that point all the poems I’d written had been carefully drafted and had taken quite a long time to edit. I’d also been trying, on and off, and in different forms, to write about my dad, our difficult relationship and his struggles and eventual death from alcoholism for years with no success. They were too close to their subject matter perhaps…weighed down with the burden of ‘what happened’. Whereas these poems seemed to just fly in.

Sparkler

Once I had the refrain ‘Otherwise known as’, I did a lot of free writing. I would also go out walking and use it as a riff to keep time to and then I’d transcribe me improvising into my phone notes. I must have looked strange to the dog walkers and birds. I’d play recordings of lapwing calls while I was on the train or the bus (I like to write on the go, or on the way to places); I’d apply it to random scraps and words and phrases from the radio when I was getting dressed. I’d listen to birding podcasts and read articles about migratory patterns, and I’d look at the various entries for lapwings in the OED and then go and read the passages in Shakespeare and Gower and Chaucer and Joyce (to name a few) where lapwings had been referenced. It all went into the stew. And if I got to the point when it all felt too claustrophobic, then I’d go and listen to an episode of ‘Free Thinking’ on an unrelated topic, or ‘Poetry Unbound’, or I’d go and read a dense article from a biology journal, and that would usually spark something up again. But this makes my process and approach sound quite controlled, whereas really it felt closer to Fran Lock’s description of her practice as ‘feral’. I had no routine, and it wasn’t a contemplative experience. It was urgent and done on the move and in between work and childcare – like holding a lit sparkler and trying to write your name. I still write like this, with varying success.

In the Face of Cosmic Chaos

This momentum also came from the sequence form itself. The poet Tony Harrison talks about rhyming forms being his ‘life-support system’ in the face of ‘sheer cosmic chaos’ (Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies I: Tony Harrison). For me the sequence offers something similar. When it came to writing grief and climate, my father, and the lapwing – creatures and ideas that took flight when I got too close –- it provided an energy that took the pressure off trying to get it just ‘right’. I could get it wrong over and over – the real measure of the lapwing would always be just beyond the page – and that failure could itself provide momentum to keep going. I’m still doing it now. In my video for the T.S Eliot Prize I used a word to describe my father that diminished him (and others in the same position). He was not simply an ‘addict’; he was someone who struggled with addiction. My choice of language failed him. And here I am owning up and trying again.

Love Sequences, Long Poems, & Returns

I also just love sequences and long poems and the way they can twist, evolve, and dance around their subject while still feeling entirely focussed. I think Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns was the first book-length sequence that I ever read, and Lapwing is very deliberately indebted to that early influence. But there are others I recommend again and again. Collections and poems by Alice Notley, Anne Carson, Rebecca Tamás, Jason Allen-Paisant, Luke Kennard, Bhanu Kapil, David Dabydeen (there are so many that I love that I’m missing out here) that do wonderful things.

Most of the numerical poems came out in January 2020 and I thought I was done, but then in late 2021, around the time my first collection came out, the desire to write Lapwing returned. I’d had multiple miscarriages that year and was then very ill with a difficult pregnancy. I think feeling out of control of my body brought me back again to my dad and his own struggles and loss of control. So, when I felt vaguely well enough to write, I went back to Lapwing. Only this time the voice and the perspective were different. The focus was no longer on the father, but on the daughter left behind.

A Flock, A Wonder

In the past, I often haven’t known that a piece of writing isn’t ready until I’ve sent it out. The moment it leaves me I can see it with different eyes and immediately want it back to start meddling again. So, I suppose I knew that Lapwing was ready (or at least ready to be talked about as a whole collection) when I pressed send on the email to my editor at Pavilion Poetry, Deryn Rees-Jones. She wasn’t my editor then. We’d met before in 2019 at the Newcastle Poetry Festival when she’d judged their first competition, but mainly I was just a huge fan of her writing (another master of the sequence and long poem), and of all the Pavilion Poetry collections. I suppose me effectively cold calling her meant that I really believed in the manuscript. It was ready because I was willing to be rejected by someone whose work I knew and loved, and I didn’t believe she’d think less of me for trying. I was committed to what I’d written.

It turns out that Lapwing wasn’t quite ready anyway. What Deryn saw, and what perhaps I was only just ready to see, was that the collection needed more vulnerability. I wasn’t just letting the poems speak on my behalf, I was hiding behind them. So some of the last poems I wrote – ‘Is that all?’, ‘Progress report’, ‘On waking’ – are the ones where the beak slips just a little and I put my human self into the book. They were so important to write, as they were also the moment when I really considered how much of my father’s life and story I was going to share. Deryn also helped a great deal with the ordering of the book. It needed to reflect its subject more – to feel like an airborne flock rather than a grounded examination, and that meant messing around with the sequencing and trying to find different ways of linking and ordering poems. A great editor is a wonder.

World Building, Obsessions

One thing I like to do when I’m working on a project is to create material around it. So, although they haven’t ended up in the finished collection, while I was writing and editing, I was also drawing maps, making collages and work-in-progress zines, cutting up old photographs, plotting graphs and making line charts of migratory patterns. I’m a keen artist, not a good one, but I find this kind of poetic ‘world building’ useful as a way to visualise work in progress and also find new prompts.

I believe that something being ready, and something being finished are two very different things. In fact, I’m not sure either of my collections are finished. I’m not ‘over’ them, or rather I’m still preoccupied with the topics, ideas and figures that formed them. The research, time, and work that went into them is still there. So is the obsession. I’m interested in the pursuit of newness and originality and how differently we approach those things in poetry than, say, in academia. If I was a historian, I might spend my career exploring a very specific set of events. Whereas I often feel like a fraud expert. A visitor. I’m going to flit in, say some poems and then flit off to find my next idea. If anything, the book has marked the beginning of a more public engagement with both environmental writing and writing about addiction – something I’m hugely grateful for.

I hope Lapwing, with its ‘Bloated appendix’ and its look towards the post-human at the very end of the collection, acts as a kind of refusal to get ‘over’ anything. Grief is messy. Life is messy. The way we live and consume and ruin and love is messy and unceasing. Why not try and embrace that in the work itself.

The Poetry School and T.S. Eliot Foundation have long collaborated on celebrating the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist, highlighting this major fixture in the poetry calendar as a fantastic way into the art form and an opportunity to learn from poets at the top of their craft. This year we have a series of Writers’ Notes from the shortlisted poets, alongside a special one-off course with the fabulous Rachel Long, specifically focused on reading and writing after the shortlisted book, Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo. Additionally, we also have an exciting generative workshop exploring the whole shortlist as inspiration for new writing with T.S. Eliot Prize-winner, Joelle Taylor!

Hannah Copley is the author of Speculum (Broken Sleep Books, 2021); and Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry, LUP,  2024). The latter, which was a Poetry Book Society Summer 2024 Recommendation, won second prize in the 2024 Laurel Prize and has been nominated for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize. Hannah is a poetry editor at the long-running literary magazine Stand. She also runs a regular poetry night at the Soho Poly. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster.