Winner of the 2021 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize!
In mid-fourteenth century Yorkshire, the plague pandemic wipes out half the inhabitants of a remote village. Left behind is a twelve-year-old shepherd boy, who with the help of his dog survives near-starvation and a brutal winter and keeps his flock alive. In the months and years that follow, he struggles to reconnect with the life around him. He tells his story in a sequence of eighty-four sonnets.
From the judge:
When faced with the daunting task of choosing one winner out of more than 430 manuscripts submitted for the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, what does one look for? A first poem that hooks you and pulls you in—and then poem after poem that refuse to let you stop reading. A mastery of craft. Music. An undulating urgency of tone that leaves no doubt about the emotional impulse that drives the work. A voice that you trust, even when the syntax or the material is difficult. And that material needs to feel relevant, of substance, necessary.
Not a Soul But Us
is an achievement on every front. Set in rural England during and after the bubonic plague pandemic of 1348-49, this verse novel drives to the heart of what we humans are capable of when boiled down to our very core in the struggle to survive—and how, in more ways than one, it’s not our intelligence or our resiliency, but love and the non-human animals that save us. Timely, remarkable, and unforgettable, these eighty-four sonnets are so well crafted that we cease to notice the form, swept away as we are by the current of the story and its song.
—Meg Kearney, author of
All Morning the Crows
and
The Ice Storm
and judge of the 2021 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize