2021 Winner
Arrow
by Sumita Chakraborty
Arrow is a debut volume extraordinary in ambition, range and achievement. At its centre is 'Dear, beloved', a more-than-elegy for her younger sister who died suddenly: in the two years she took to write the poem, much else came into play: 'it was my hope to write the mood of elegy rather than an elegy proper,' following the example of the great elegists including Milton, to whose Paradise Lost she listened during the period of composition, also hearing the strains of Brigit Pegeen Kelly's Song, of Alice Oswald and Marie Howe. The poem becomes a kind of kingdom, 'one that is at once evil, or blighted, and beautiful, not to mention everything in between'.
Read more Read less"‘I grew out of all this / like a weeping willow / inclined to / the appetites of gravity’: as soon as I first read these lines from Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Kinship’ as an undergraduate, they became for me a meditation about surviving violence and paying attention to the new hungers and desires to which I had begun to lean, which is what Arrow is about." Sumita Chakraborty
Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize Winner 2021
"This award holds a doubly special place in my heart because my first published piece of academic scholarship was also about Heaney; his presence in both of these ‘firsts’ speaks to how very much his work has meant to me for a long time, and I thank the judges for this honor.”
Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar. She is Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan, where she teaches literary studies and creative writing. In 2017, she received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and in 2018, her poem ‘And death demands a labor’ was shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem by the Forward Arts Foundation. Formerly, she was poetry editor of AGNI Magazine and art editor of At Length.
"Arrow by Sumita Chakraborty is a marvelous collection for both the maximalist and minimalist. Here are brief lyrics, prose essays, parables, lengthy lineated epics – and all of them given life with language stretched and pummelled into shape. Dealing in myth, astronomy, autobiography, philosophy, physics and metaphysics, Chakraborty possesses a singular outlook and the tone of a prophet."
- Nick Laird, chair of the judges panel
Arrow, by Sumita Chakraborty
by Padraig Regan
Near the centre of Sumita Chakraborty’s debut collection Arrow, the reader encounters a set of prose poems whose titles declare them to be ‘essays’: on the order of time, on devotion, on thunder and on joy. While I wouldn’t say these are the best poems in the book (if only because such a distinction would make very little sense in a book of such consistent quality, and whose constituent poems work together to form a totality of such richness and ambition) I would suggest the reader pay them particular attention. They are, in a sense, representative of Chakraborty’s unique voice: a voice distinguished by its remarkable ability to combine the intellectual with the emotional, the abstract with the somatic, the essayistic with the lyrical. Chakraborty’s range of reference is impressive enough (Stendhal, Barthes, Spinoza, Foucault, Stevens and Dürer all receive at least a passing glance in these pages) but what makes these poems the miniature masterpieces that they are is not their display of knowledge, it is their display of thought: Chakraborty does not use her intertexts for their own sake but as stepping stones or footholds in her own dazzling logical trajectories. In her essay on devotion, she writes ‘in the business of poetry, you are Death’s Fool’; a thought like this, gem-like in its clarity, may have been arrived at through Dürer and Stevens, but it is pure Chakraborty.
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