Peter Gizzi’s ‘Fierce Elegy’ wins TS Eliot Poetry Prize

Peter Gizzi has been awarded the 2024 TS Eliot Prize for his collection Fierce Elegy, a work born from profound personal loss and acclaimed for its “transcendental beauty,” per theguardian.com. The £25,000 award recognises the year’s finest new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland.

Gizzi’s winning collection, which explores themes of grief and mortality following the deaths of his two brothers, emerged victorious from a competitive shortlist of 10 distinguished works. The judges, led by British poet Mimi Khalvati, praised the collection for being “infinitely sad, yet resolute, and so alive in body and spirit.”

The Massachusetts-based poet, who was diagnosed with a rare blood disease in 2021, crafted “Fierce Elegy” in the wake of losing both his brothers – fellow poet Michael Gizzi in 2010 and Tom Gizzi in 2018. The collection, which previously secured the Massachusetts Book Award, demonstrates what the judging panel described as a masterful ability to “revel in minutiae while braving large questions.”

“The elegy allows me to explore the significant awareness of periodicity as a measure of the world,” Gizzi told the White Review in 2020, reflecting on his longstanding engagement with elegiac poetry. His approach transforms “a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world.”

Guardian reviewer Oluwaseun Olayiwola highlighted the collection’s innovative treatment of silence as “conversations with the dead,” praising Gizzi’s reimagining of the elegiac form as “the undying practice of the living.”

The victory positions Gizzi, whose previous works include Now It’s Dark and the National Book Award finalist Archeophonics, among contemporary poetry’s most compelling voices. His win was selected over notable shortlisted works including Raymond Antrobus’s Signs, Music and Helen Farish’s The Penny Dropping.

All shortlisted poets receive £1,500, with a portion of the prize money for the late Gboyega Odubanjo, who passed away in August 2023, being directed to a foundation supporting low-income Black writers established in his memory.

The TS Eliot Prize continues its tradition of recognising transformative poetic voices, with Gizzi following in the footsteps of last year’s winner, Jason Allen-Paisant, who won for Self-Portrait As Othello.

  • Featured image: Peter Gizzi reading from his collection Fierce Elegy at the Southbank Centre, London/The Guardian
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