Take the fifteenth poem (they are numbered rather than titled) of the thirty in his first collection: The central long poem that gives the collection its title is perfect - an elegy for Laird's father, a meditation not just on death and grief, but on how we try to explain or capture death and grief and what's been lost; and how language always fails to do this, but it's all we have, so on we go. With each new segment of the poem Laird opens this up into more expansive, philosophical, spiritual spaces while keeping it completely individual, through details gathered about himself and his father. A masterpiece. The man who, during the thirties, was one of the five or six best poets in the world has gradually turned into a rhetoric mill grinding away at the bottom of Limbo, into an automaton that keeps making little jokes, little plays on words, little rhetorical engines, as compulsively and unendingly and uneasily as a neurotic washes his hands.

There is conflation and conflagration, rage and fire, neither of which are seen as necessarily destructive. The Murderess” contrasts lust (“I tell you men/were leering to themselves”) with the historical violence done to the female (“the sun/opens to consume the Virgin on the fifteenth day”). Any deities present are also complicit. After the virgin has been sacrificed (“It was like slitting fish”), the reader learns that “God presided at her body.” There is power in this work, though personally I find it too naked, too direct. The revelations are intimate, but of the speaker’s personality, and too often the poems don’t discover revelations for themselves, in their syntax or form, as before, but instead simply recount a clarity achieved in psychoanalysis:The second line’s unusual syntax replicates the cumbersome nature of the body, so the subject of the sentence, the soul, the “it,” finds itself in the middle of the clause swamped on either side by excess, the mild alliteration of “the body became for” on one side and on the other the assonance of “too large a garment.” There is a sense of menace in that buried phrase “came for it” as one might come for a condemned man.

We've lived in 13 places in 13 years. I love lots of things about America, but there's so much that is completely crazy: the health system; obviously the gun thing. To be away from your home as a writer can be good in some ways, but can also be a limitation, especially as a poet. To be away from your first language can be difficult, but at the same time Joyce – not that Joyce has anything to do with me – reconstructed Dublin from Zürich and Paris and I suppose I've just written a new book which sometimes seems as if it's entirely about Northern Ireland." Laird emerged as a bright young voice in the late 1990s, although he points out he was in fact 30 before he published his first book: "I was no Muldoon, publishing at 20." A sense of literary celebrity also attached to him from the beginning by virtue of his marriage to the novelist Zadie Smith. He publishes his third volume of poetry, Go Giants (Faber), this month and has also written two novels. "I have always written fiction and I think I'm not bad at it, and while there is no hierarchy between oranges and apples, poetry is my first love and remains special to me as a unique art form that can do things like nothing else." By 1937 the thirty-year-old Auden was regarded as the leading poet of his generation (and the voice of the socialist youth) in England, a reputation that had spread across the Atlantic. That year New Verse dedicated a double issue of the magazine solely to celebrating his work, and contained tributes from elder statesmen like Pound and up-and-comers like Dylan Thomas. Thomas’s real feelings were revealed in a letter to James Laughlin, not long after Laughlin’s founding of New Directions, in May 1938:

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Fatima Bhutto, chair of the judges, said: “To spend the better part of a year thinking about poetry has been an incredible gift. The collections we pored over reminded me of care and the power strangers exert over each other in so many delicate and fragile ways. We have assembled here a collection of debut writers, masters, believers and doubters, all of them innate observers of our intimate lives. Some of them you may already know, others will be a revelation.” Shortlisted alongside Sy-Quia were Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd, The English Summer by Holly Hopkins, Some Integrity by Padraig Regan, and Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire. Everywhere, the relationship of “male and female” is “thrust and ache” (“Palais des Art”). It is men who have agency, the option to leave. In “The Apple Trees” her son sleeps and “already on his hand the map appears…the dead fields, women rooted to the river.”

Mendelson has been studying, explicating, and collating Auden’s work for more than fifty years, since Auden asked him, around 1970, when Mendelson was a young teacher at Yale, to help organize his uncollected essays into what became Forewords and Afterwords (1973). Mendelson, recalling the selection process to another biographer of Auden’s, Richard Davenport-Hines, said the poet Adult readers may enjoy seeing a different side to some of our finest writers, but for children, this is irrelevant; they just want great stories, brilliantly told. With these three new books, that’s exactly what they’ve got.He says it wasn't until he left Ireland for Cambridge that he really appreciated that his upbringing had been unusual. "There were, taking into account the usual complexities, essentially two separate realities, a Catholic one and a Protestant one, that would meet every now and again in certain bloody ways." Being an inveterate schematizer, 3 Auden cannot resist a further categorization when it comes to Berlin, who takes his two classes of thinkers from Archilochus. Auden, in response, goes to Lewis Carroll: all men, he insists, may be divided into Alices and Mabels. (Mabel is one of Alice’s friends, who “knows such a very little.”) Auden’s elaboration is slightly nonsensical—he decides that a Mabel is an “intellectual with weak nerves and a timid heart, who is so appalled at discovering that life is not sweetly and softly pretty that he takes a grotesquely tough, grotesquely ‘realist’ attitude,” and he puts Donne, Schopenhauer, Joyce, and Wagner in the Mabel column—but it’s typical of Auden to steer the argument to childhood. At the book's heart lies the title sequence, a profound meditation on a father's dying, the reverberations of which echo throughout in poems that interrogate inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retrieved. Laird is a poet capable of heading off in any and every direction, where layers of association transport us from a clifftop in County Cork to the library steps in New York's Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo's Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a Kilburn garden. Through the reading and shortlisting process, the judges spoke often about their sense of responsibility toward the incredible selection of books submitted, and how they felt that the wealth of works in contention across all categories was a strong testament to the vitality of poetry in the UK today.”