Back from a fortnight with my in-laws in Ubeda, I've seen the Forward Shortlist has come out. Others have already written excellently about it and very much along the lines of my own thoughts - Rob Mackenzie and Matt Merritt among them - but I'd like to ask just one more question.
How many print runs have there been of each of the shortlisted first collections?
Most of them probably haven't got beyond their first printing, unlike Andrew Philip's sadly ignored "The Ambulance Box", which is currently on its third run and still counting. This prize seems more and more disconnected from the pulse of U.K. poetry, just like the big publishers whose miniscule lists it tends to champion.
The recent row about a plagiarist being awarded a prize in a poetry
competition has troubled me for a week or two. Obviously, the basic
principle is that n...
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