Loop of Jade
by Sarah Howe
Summary
Loop of Jade did something no book had done in the T.S. Eliot Prize's twenty two years: it won as a debut. Sarah Howe was born in Hong Kong to an English father and a Chinese mother and moved to England as a child, and her first collection is the record of a return journey, to the city, to the mother's history, and to the Chinese half of an inheritance that England had rendered distant and partly illegible. The title object is a loop of jade, the bracelet of the kind given to protect a child, and the mother's story anchors the book: a poem like Mother's Jewellery Box, which opens the collection, lifts the lids of a black lacquer box as if opening the past itself, and the long title poem listens to the mother's account of her own precarious childhood with a fidelity that lets silence stand where the record fails. Around that core Howe builds a formally restless book, travel poems moving through contemporary Hong Kong, meditations on the Western imagination of China from translators and missionaries onward, and playful, scholarly pieces that test taxonomies and translations, the instincts of a Renaissance scholar, which Howe is by profession, turned loose on her own divided archive. The judges' chair Pascale Petit hailed a thrillingly ambitious debut, and the 2015 Eliot judges' choice made news beyond poetry: a first book, by a young woman of Chinese and English heritage, taking the language's most coveted poetry prize. The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award had already come too, and the book now stands at the head of a British poetry newly fluent in migration and mixed inheritance.
Historical Context & Significance
Howe wrote Loop of Jade alongside an academic career in Renaissance literature, and its 2015 win, announced in January 2016, broke the prize's precedent against debuts a year before Ocean Vuong repeated the feat, the two wins together marking a generational and demographic turn in British poetry's honors. The book's subject had public timing too, appearing as Hong Kong's own future became a running question and as British writing began seriously auditing empire's family legacies. Howe helped found the journal Prac Crit in 2014 and has worked on both sides of the Atlantic, and Loop of Jade remains the debut against which British first collections are measured, the book that proved the prize's biggest door could open on a first knock.