Religious poetry, and a review of a prize winning poem

About Religious poetry, from Horace & friends (Victoria Moul) -

• Why is it that so many of the best contemporary poets in English are (broadly speaking) religious? In the US (but not in the UK), there’s a recognised tendency for “formalist” poets to be religious, especially Roman Catholic.
• the average highly-fêted poetry collection is now much more shallowly rooted in the literary culture than used to be the case, and that high-profile UK poets, in particular, now quite often sound like imitation-US poets, without the roots in the distinctive American tradition to be heard in the best American writers.
• Scripture and liturgy are, in literary terms, a shared canon.
• religious practice may also offer at least some sort of encounter with another linguistic world. ... The pronounced monolingualism of much Anglophone culture is also extremely unusual, historically and geographically, and it’s hard to imagine that it’s doing its poetry much good.

Victoria Moul and Hilary Menos discuss 'The Gathering' by Partridge Boswell, winner of the 2025 National Poetry Competition (from The friday poem) -

• Victoria: I’ll be blunt and say I think it’s a terrible poem. It seems to me to have almost all the vices of the typical ‘poetry magazine’ poem and no real redeeming features
• Hilary: feels like borrowed ballast ... it’s virtue signalling ... Lots of big league references, but so little feeling.
• Victoria: I have lost confidence at this point that the poet has really thought about his references.