TS Eliot prize
The Sunday Times review by Alan Brownjohn: a preview of the 10 shortlistees for the prestigious poetry prize

The annual 10-book shortlist for the £15,000 TS  Eliot prize can be re-lied on to provide an intriguing mix of obvious candidates and surprising outsiders. But the experienced poet judges for 2009 (Simon Armitage, Collette Bryce and Penelope ­Shuttle) have added some particularly wild cards to the four choices already delivered to them by the Poetry Book Society. (The PBS makes a quarterly choice for its members, and those four titles automatically go on the shortlist.)

Last year saw admirable new collections from Andrew Motion, Don Paterson (winner of the 2009 Forward prize) and Peter Porter. None is among the Eliot 10. ­Sharon Olds is; but her marvellous fellow-American John Ashbery remains oddly beyond the range of the judges. One of the PBS choices, Alice Oswald’s Weeds and Wild Flowers (Faber £14.99), presents a problem. The poet described it as 'two separate books', her poems not relating specifically to Jessica Greenman's prominent, beautifully exact etchings. The poetry has a weird charm (Snowdrop is 'A pale and pining girl, head bowed, heart gnawed'), but lacks the boldness and range that won Oswald this prize with Dart in 2002.

Jane Draycott's Over (Carcanet £9.95) has an emotionally charged yet cryptic style that is at its most approachable in poems concerning parenthood or marriage (the excellent Picnic), while the raw confessional mode of Sharon Olds's One Secret Thing (Cape £10) recalls ­Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton in the 1960s, with sequences about war, adolescent awakening, or (the best) her mother's second marriage and death.