An evening with T.S Elliot Prize Winner Peter Gizzi

We are thrilled to welcome Peter Gizzi, winner of the TS Eliot Prize 2024, to Bath this year for the winning collection.

This is the powerful new collection from legendary American poet Peter Gizzi, reckoning with the transformative power of elegy through poems of lament and love.

In Fierce Elegy, Gizzi contends with a decade of grief, and learns to transform a broken heart into new strength. These are poems of loss; of love; of the strangeness of being a self amid the fury of the world; and of our ongoing closeness with the dead. They are soaring yet grounded, vulnerable and brave. Ears attuned, grip assured. Mind free.

'I am awestruck, dumbfounded ... a masterwork' Ocean Vuong
'Transcendent ... He identifies the thing we're all searching for' The New Yorker

'A breathtaking book-length sequence in which each line or sentence, often paratactic, non-hierarchical, could be a poem in its own right. As if wordings had been gifted to him out of the ether, one-liners, two-liners coalesce into love lyrics, or a thought enters his head which, step by step, he unravels until a nucleus is reached and pierced' -- Hannah Sullivan, T. S. Eliot Prize judging panel

Peter Gizzi is the author of many collections of poetry including Now It's Dark (2020), Archeophonics, a finalist for the National Book Award (2016), Threshold Songs (2011), and In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987-2011 (2014). He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. Marjorie Perloff has called him 'a master of the mot juste'; Robert Creeley, 'one of the most exceptional poets of his generation'. Adrienne Rich has said 'his disturbing lyricism is like no other'; and John Ashbery thought him 'the most exciting new poet to come along in quite a while'.