Many entries to this competition were very competently written and
clearly deeply felt. While it was relatively straightforward sifting
out an initial shortlist of about 50, when that shortlist was whittled
in two other stages to 12, the decisions I had to take became much
more difficult.

The top three poems stood out from the start for different reasons.
‘In a landscape’ is brave, beautifully constructed, paced and gentle.
It is a quiet lyrical poem, but in its presentation the poet is doing
something new – challenging a reader to think about how he or she
looks at the landscape and, in fact, reads a poem. So the stanzas are
read horizontally instead of vertically and that twist gave me
confidence in the poem. It’s a spare poem and in its sparseness,
philosophical and energising.

By contrast, ‘Wakes week’ is fast, dynamic and exciting. The writer of
this poem has control of the sounds, the pace and the reader’s
emotions. The language is vibrant and rooted in the world. It’s a poem
that offers an alternative view of contemporary history and celebrates
the workingwomen who inspired it. In this poem, too, the poet shows
his or her confidence with language by drawing on the vocabulary of
these women’s lives and making it musical.

I couldn’t shake ‘Toby’s Walks’ off, in much the same way as one of
the protagonists of the poem is unable to forget what happens. While
it appears to be a ghost story in poem form, the underlying narrative
touches on fragility and strength, a person slipping away from reality
into a personal prison of fear. This poem is so well paced that each
word earns its place and it is brave in its insistence on repeating
the alien phrase within it. This poet pursues the idea of this
hallucination until the reader also questions what has happened. This
really is a poem that combines physical, emotional and spiritual
journeys in the age-old tradition.

The highly commended poems are also excellent pieces of writing. All
of them stayed in my shortlist and were never in doubt – the hardest
decisions for me were in fact, to separate them from first, second and
third places. ‘Changing Destination’ is a sophisticated poem with a
beautiful sense of irony and the absurd, grounded in true and
convincing language, emotionally complex. ‘Bride of the Wind’ moves
the reader through mythological landscapes so skilfully that it is
unclear, in the end, how much of the ‘I’ of the poem is human. It’s
skilfully arranged and its half rhymes lend it a soothing, mythical
quality. ‘Small gold horse’ is one of those quirky poems that make you
smile. I love the physicality of this poem, the energy and its courage
in staying within the frame of this moment in time. This decision of
course ensures that the poem resonates far beyond that moment.

To separate the commended poems off from the top three slots was also
a wrench because my initial notes to myself show the impact they had
on me – each of them different, distinctive, strong and thought
provoking. ‘Tourist Trap 1967’ starts with a startling three lines
that echoes all that is happening in the world right now and the poem
is universal, even though it is grounded in a specific event. The
language, metaphors and depth of emotion in ‘Journey in old Castile’
are so stunning they reminded me of Lorca’s ‘deep song’ poems that
draw on the gypsy traditions of Spain. Spain was the landscape, too,
in ‘Travelling with Taurus’, a sequence of six interlinked poems with
the bull as a thread. This sequence expertly moves between the modern
and ancient, between the real and mythological.

My decisions were made in layers. I recorded first impressions of
poems that struck me, because these impressions can so easily be lost
in the repeated sifting and re-reading that you do as a competition
judge. I read the poems I’d shortlisted at different times of the day,
in different moods, in different places even. This exercise also
helped whittle the list down. The poems I held onto survived these
changes of environment and the increasing scrutiny I had to place them
under.

Some of the poems that I set aside I’d have liked to include, but they
weakened at some point for example: a spelling mistake in one, a line
or two that should have been edited out, a poem that would be more
effective if it was half the length…. Sometimes the poet lapsed into
summing the poem up, sometimes there was just too much noise from too
many images and the poem could have been pruned to allow the strongest
space to live. Sometimes the ending didn’t ring true – how hard it is
to get these last lines right, and sometimes the true was, I felt, a
few lines down.

Then there was the other level of scrutiny – what does a poem do as
you read it? Does it go beyond the everyday, does it take the reader
on a journey and make an emotional leap? Does it shift perception of
the world almost imperceptibly but enough to make the words work
differently?

The control a poet exercises over language, metaphor and the shape of
a poem on the page was a prerequisite of short listing. The insight a
poem communicated through a combination of all these techniques was
the element that led me to select these nine.

Jackie Wills.