LIFE STRETCHED to its limits of endurance and courage has again emerged as the defining theme in the outcome of the Costa Book of the Year Award. For the second consecutive year the overall prize has gone to a poetry collection.
At the ceremony in London last night British poet Jo Shapcott was announced as the winner for her fourth collection, Of Mutability,a series of poems plotting the contrasting moods of despair and elation experienced by her during her battle with breast cancer.
Shapcott (57), whose previous collections include Electroplating the Baby(1988) , The Phrase Book (199 2)and My Life Asleep(1998) ,winner of the Forward Prize, was a surprise choice if only because Edmund De Waal had been expected to win with his beautifully atmospheric investigative memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes, an astonishing odyssey following the historic journey of a collection of miniature Japanese carvings that has captivated readers.
In common with last year's overall winner, poet Christopher Reid, whose collection A Scatteringhad drawn on the death of his wife, Shapcott's powerful, wry, at times witty, poems had looked to the personal with disarming candour. It is the seventh time a poetry collection has taken the overall prize.
Previous winners include Séamus Heaney for his verse translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf(1999) and The Spirit Level(1996) while Ted Hughes won twice, in consecutive years for his translations of Ovid and for the deeply personal Birthday Letters, addressed to his wife, the poet Sylvia Plath.
While the win is a major recognition of the London-born Shapcott, a former winner of the Commonwealth Prize for a debut collection and twice winner of the National Poetry Award, it is also a triumph for poetry that it can compete on level terms with fiction and biography and more than hold its own against these more commercial categories.
The echoes of Spenser's themes of change in The Mutabilitie Cantos(1609), Book Vll of The Faerie Queen,in Shapcott's title may reflect the time she spent as a student at Trinity College Dublin.
She also studied at Harvard and Cambridge. The personal themes of the new collection do contrast with the strongly cerebral quality of much of her work with its word play and scientific as well as literary and historical references. Phrase Bookbecame famous for its Mad Cowsequence as well as for the title poem which looked at the Gulf War. In 2002 she published Tender Taxes,French translations of Rilke. Often praised for her daring, Of Mutabilityhas impressed through not only its artistry but its humanity.
Its multidisciplinary form gives the Costa Book Awards – prior to 2006, the Whitbread Prize – a unique status among literary awards. There is invariably a fascinating subplot. This year the award was, in fairness to all contenders, dominated by de Waal and his Ephrussi ancestors and family associations with Renoir, Proust, Imperial Vienna in the dying days of the Hapsburg Empire and flight from the Nazis.
Yet de Waal had been joined in his category by Sarah Bakewell's singular book, How to Live a Life of Montaigne.Elsewhere, in one of the two fiction categories, Dublin writer Paul Murray had been shortlisted with Skippy Diesfor the Novel Award, which was won by Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand That First Held Mine.
