Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024
The poems of Nadine El-Enany’s debut collection Pelican Daughter are imbued with tenderness and fuelled by a hunger for justice, connection and a more empathic world. With stunning lyricism she fiercely probes the pain of being powerless in the face of global catastrophes – genocide, climate crisis – without tilting into despair. These poems do not divide the personal and political – indeed, boundaries are met with love and defiance, even when they appear immutable.
The voice that permeates is as inviting as it is brave, through the book’s expansive terrain, from the “hopscotch puddles” of childhood to peace marches that do ‘something/to time and space, like we’re here together / but we’re also there’, to a militarised border where people pass ‘prickly pears / over razor wire, sacks of apples and bread’. El-Enany ushers our attention to the vulnerable and the small, the ‘wail of forgotten things’, waking us to what we cannot hear, the ‘woodlice walking / and spiders making silk’. Hers is a poetry of clarity, compassion and a ‘readying kind of love for the world’.
‘The poems of Nadine El-Enany gorgeously anticipate her readers who wait at the ends of her utterances, desirous of consolation, we “who look hard for ourselves in each other”. A bracing social consciousness melds with a lyric transparency that make these poems supple enough to startle readers to that place where “only new things happen”.’ – Major Jackson
'Pelican Daughter traces the intimate geographies of motherhood and loss, witnessing them with remarkable and tender precision and attention to detail. The poems navigate landscapes of personal grief and collective trauma – the joy, love and loneliness of early motherhood and truths of the continuing atrocities of a world in turmoil. Nadine El-Enany writes with great care and remarkable honesty. A tremendous debut.' – Vanessa Lampert
'Pelican Daughter offers up a poetics of personal and political survival: intimate without being self-indulgent, urgent without sacrificing subtlety. Nadine El-Enany moves between the local and the geopolitical, the queer body and the besieged city, trauma and hope, refusing to rank one grief above another. This is a voice that tests the space between what language can carry and what it can only gesture towards. Alive to the fragility of bodies and what it means to mother, these poems sharpen our sense of what is at risk and what is worth protecting.' – Jacob Sam-La Rose
'These moving and beautifully-poised poems have a clarity of voice that is intimate and lyrical and well-served by meticulous diction and lineation. They have clarity of the eye too, in their crisply-delineated images, their lacrimae rerum. For Pelican Daughter is an almost unbearably tender reliquary for the tears of things, where loss and fear – and love and hope, too – are found in the everyday, against the background of murderous, global violence.' – Meryl Pugh
'Pelican Daughter announces an exciting and vital new voice in poetry. The writing shows what can happen when subject matter of the greatest significance is held by a poet with the resources of talent and feeling to fully express it. Original and wide-ranging, intimate and enormous, innovative at the level of language, these are poems of the most tremendous power, of resonant and unforgettable endings. Their fierce beauty is a wonderful guide to grasping all that matters, through all the threat of the world that swirls around us. Read them!' – Jonathan Edwards
'The poetry of Nadine El-Enany has something of the primal power of the Mariner: you are grasped by the arm on a familiar street: you hadn’t seen anyone coming, you were getting through the day – now you’re alone with a clarity fierce and far-seeing, an austere compassion, a consoling light. Pelican Daughter carries the pulses of life, but sounds the charged spaces between them too. A brief poem about heartbreak seems to turn to a poem of distant war, then suddenly bombs are falling in earshot, new love is just around the corner, and a new life – the only hope if there’s only one – rises through the book like the dawning sun. The poems feel both timeless and time-stamped. This is poetry of the conscience, Thomas Hardy’s ‘full look at the Worst’, but it neither preaches nor berates, it simply guides the reader – often in remarkably few lines – to a place down the street where love seems reparable and peace might come. El-Enany’s is as compelling a new voice as one could hope to hear.’ – Glyn Maxwell
Love in fear of losing you
is to watch the sky nightly
for some bright and sudden change.
('Lichtjahre')
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