Jamie McKendrick on Tom Paulin – T.S. Eliot Writers’ Notes

Welcome to our Writers’ Notes for the 2025 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 Jamie McKendrick on Tom Paulin‘s collection Namanlagh.

A Sparer Idiom

In the days when poetry workshops were rare and when no university poetry writing courses had yet been established in the UK, writers relied on fellow practitioners, if they knew any, for advice. I had the luck to be taught as an English Literature undergraduate at Nottingham University by Tom Paulin. Having read his Honest Ulsterman pamphlet Theoretical Locations, I was well aware how original a poet he was, and I tentatively asked if he’d have a look at some poems of mine. Tom responded more encouragingly than they deserved to these early efforts, florid with the borrowed rhetoric of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. His final comment was: ‘a sparer idiom, I reckon’.

This was advice it took me quite a while to follow but still, more than fifty years later, it hovers usefully in my vicinity. By coincidence, I recently came across a Hopkins letter, which was sympathetically critical of Keats, but foresaw – had he lived – that the young poet would likely have adopted ‘an austerer utterance’ (rich coming from Hopkins). The two phrases are uncannily close.

No writers’ tips should be taken as gospel: they are often site-specific or serve as prompts for further thought. Of course, there’s nothing wrong per se with an exuberant idiom in poetry and, as a contrary counsel, we might remember that Keats, piqued by Shelley’s mild criticism, suggested the older poet should ‘load every rift with ore’.

At any rate this was one among many of Tom’s insights that has proved illuminating for me, and the phrase has considerable bearing on the spare and austere style of Namanlagh.

A Moment’s Thought: the Composition of Namanlagh:

I have no idea how Tom writes his poems, but having seen quite of few of his typescripts my sense is that he is one of those rare poets who tends to get it right more or less straight off, so further adjustments would be unnecessary. Montale was another such poet, who remarked: ‘Scrivo con pochi rintocchi’ – I write with few retouchings (rintocco= strike of a bell). Impulse and performance are synchronous. For most of us the opposite is true – ‘laborious days’, and nights, are required.

   From his fourth book, Fivemiletown, onwards, Tom’s style has been characterised by the spoken, the spontaneous and the improvisatory, so this rapid mode of composition – unpunctuated except for dashes – is perfectly in keeping. Without his exact ear for speech rhythm and vernacular, the result would likely come across as slapdash and unconvincing.

Whatever the mode of composition, speedy or painfully slow, it’s worth remembering Yeats’s lines in ‘Adam’s Curse’:

I said ‘A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught…

To highlight just one feature of this vividly spoken style which Namanlagh shares with his previous books, he deploys a rhetorical trope for which, I’ve just learnt, the ancient Greeks coined the term: epanorthosis. It is where something said is immediately corrected, usually with an intensified adjustment. Examples can be found in the book’s first poem ‘Namanlagh’:

        – that human weather

that sticks like salt stains or burrs in your hair

– no I realise all these are not

in fact the case – it’s a stonechat

I can hear –

An allied device, which looks the same but isn’t, can be found in the opening lines of ‘Spare Room’: ‘I slept all night in the spare room. / No, we hadn’t argued –’This, if we’re scouting for rhetorical terms, could be called contradictio – wittily employed here to avert a supposed assumption. But this kind of analysis slows down what anyone quickly apprehends in hearing the poem.

Adjustments of this kind – on the wing or the hoof – bring you into the immediate presence of the speaker, and this immediacy and presence are a persistent element in Tom’s poetry and one that he has also valued and brilliantly stressed in his critical work, especially in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, and highlighted in his ground-breaking anthology The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse.

Stitching and Unstitching: Namanlagh as a book

As Tom was ill, his wife Giti asked me to look over a bag filled with his  manuscripts – some typed, some handwritten, and mostly unpublished – that had accumulated over perhaps some dozen or more years – to see what should be preserved for an archive. Giti had already undertaken a significant selection and a preliminary grouping of the poems which would make the subsequent work easier.

In a week or so of reading through them, I became elatedly sure that not only were they of value but there was a strong book to be made from them. Excluding a number of poems which had merit but which I thought not quite up to Tom’s best standards, I arranged the poems according to what I perceived to be the four principle themes – depression, the Northern Irish Peace Process, the 2nd World War, and some translations, notably those of the Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar. These last two groupings extend his explorations in two previous collections, respectively The Invasion Handbook and The Road to Inver. Indeed, Namanlagh as a whole has very much the air of a summa, of a vital revisiting of his entire oeuvre.

At this point, I asked the poet Bernard O’Donoghue to check over the choices and help arrange the book before sending it to Faber, whose Editor-at-Large, Jane Feaver, had already expressed a keen interest. I can’t recollect in much detail the conversations that followed, but one example might suffice to show the process. With a certain plodding logic, I had grouped together the ‘Peace Process’ poems en bloc. Instead, Bernard wisely suggested that we insert the crucial 2^nd World War poems between two of the Northern Irish poems, ‘Decommissioning 1’ and ‘2’ so war and peace were not just adjacent but actually interleaved. Small shifts of this kind have large effects and it made the book immediately more fluid and organic, and brought out the way all these themes were braided together in the collection as it was emerging.

In making a book of one’s own poems, these decisions of exclusion and inclusion, and of ordering and shaping, are difficult and require considerable attention. It becomes even more delicate and problematic when you are working on someone else’s poems. Any decisions were made in full collaboration with Tom himself and were later subject to the expert ear and eye of Lavinia Greenlaw, Editor at Faber. I’m proud of the result of this combined labour and am honoured to have played a part in bringing to light a work of such resilience, originality, and power.

Tom Paulin grew up in Belfast and now lives in Oxford, where he is Emeritus Fellow of Hertford College, University of Oxford. Namanlagh (Faber & Faber), his first collection in a decade, is his tenth book of poetry and was recently awarded the PEN Heaney Prize 2025, as well as being shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2025. Of his previous collections Walking a Line (1994), The Wind Dog (1999) and The Road to Inver (2004) were all also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. His New Selected Poems appeared in 2014. He has published six books of critical prose on topics including Thomas Hardy and William Hazlitt, several plays and two anthologies.

Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955 and has published eight books of poetry, most recently Drypoint, as well as two Selected Poems from Faber. His poems have won the Forward Poetry Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and the Cholmondeley Award. His self-illustrated pamphlet of poems, The Years, won the Michael Marks Poetry Illustration Award. He edited The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems, and his translation of the six books of Giorgio Bassani’s The Novel of Ferrara was published by Norton in 2019, and individually by Penguin Classics. Among his other translations are selections of Valerio Magrelli’s poems, The Embrace, which won the Oxford-Weidenfeld prize and the John Florio award, and of Antonella Anedda’s poems, Archipelago, also won the John Florio award. His book of essays on art, poetry and translation, The Foreign Connection, was published in 2020.