British National Poetry Award: No Latter-day Yeats Need Apply

In the week in which we were reminded many times
of Yeats' great poem Easter 1916, without which
(and all the national revivalism of Yeats and Synge & co. which went before)
the Rising might not have acquired its legendary status,
the winner of the British National Poetry Award was announced:
O, Great Northern Mall, you dwindling oracle
of upstate New York...
                                      Jesus Christ! the grandiose bathos of it!