Lester Smith
Suffield native Alison Moncrief Bromage is pictured during her recent poetry reading at Suffield Academy. She is the 2016 winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.
Alison Moncrief and Andy Bromage didn’t move far from Suffield when they married: they live in Branford and both work in New Haven. And both work with words. Alison, now doubly a mother, is a part-time tutor in English at Yale, and Andy is director of communications for a respected K-through-9 private day school in New Haven.
Alison also writes poetry. In fact, she’s been writing for quite a while, as the Observer’s May 2003 issue printed a delightful poem she conceived after contemplating an antique embroidery sampler. The insightful imagery pervading that little piece enriches a recently published book of her poems, now perhaps a bit more esoteric, but still sensitively insightful.
The new book, Daughter, Daedalus, won Alison the 2016 T. S. Elliot Prize for Poetry, with a cash award and sponsorship of her publication. The contest’s judge commented, “Daughter, Daedalus is both original and masterful. From the very first poem, the reader is taken in by language and inventiveness. There is also an elevated ‘High Church’ intention – a scent of incense and bells chiming – that T. S. Eliot would have recognized.”
Alison visits Suffield often, as her mother-in-law (an Observer volunteer) still lives here, and her brother Kip has occupied her childhood home since her parents emigrated to Westport, Mass. (on Buzzard’s Bay). So the Kent Memorial Library and Suffield Academy (where Alison graduated in ’97) invited the prize-winning poet to come and read. About 80 friends, students, and poetrophiles crowded the main reading room of the Academy’s library on December 1, and Alison read about 20 short poems from Daughter, Daedalus, with enthusiastic response from her listeners. That contest judge was right.
Congratulations, Alison; we hope there’ll be more to come.