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
‘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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