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.

 ...This surely deserves to be one of the best propositions for the prize, along with Sinead Morrissey's Through the Square Window (Carcanet £9.95), which offers scary and witty poems about pregnancy, birth and a child acquiring language. There is some risk of overload, but the assemblages of eerie detail in Electric Edwardians and (especially) Telegraph make those poems memorable.