| 1st Prize | Loaf by Miriam Patrick | Read Judges Report |
| 2nd Prize | Ghost writing by P A Erskine | Read Judges Report |
| Best unpublished poet | 15.02 to London Victoria by Meerabai Kings | Read Judges Report |
Highly commended poems
- Alan Bush
- Chris Hardy
- Camilla Lambert
Commended poems
- Jill Munro – 2 poems
- Camilla Lambert
- Audrey Lee
- Claire Pankhurst
Adjudicator’s Report – Ted Gooda
Judge’s report
Primarily, I was looking for poems that, once I’d ‘met’ them, I knew I wanted to spend a bit more time with, because of their connection with an emotional truth.
Richard Hugo, in The Triggering Town suggests that poets should abandon strict factual accuracy to focus on emotional truth, using a specific ‘triggering’ location or object to unlock personal, associative language. He argues for prioritizing the ‘generated subject’, or where the poem leads, over the initial inspiration. A number of the poems I read contained beautiful, carefully-crafted descriptions, but they didn’t necessarily take the reader much beyond that. The poems who achieved this movement between a triggering idea and wider theme most successfully often seemed to arrive there through the power of ambiguity; the kind of ambiguity that invites the reader to find something fresh each time they return to the poem.
Structure is an important part of what poetry is, for me; and what differentiates it most clearly from other forms of writing. I am fascinated by how poets make use of the intrinsic ‘poemy-ness’ of a poem. It might be an interesting choice of form or meter, or use of white space. And I’m always in the market for a killer line break. I was also interested in poems which demanded to be spoken out loud, where sound patterns and echoes shouted themselves off the page.
Finally, I wanted to be struck by images that were surprising, perhaps because they were unexpected, or because they captured the essence of something barely understood. I was searching for the moment when you are brought up short, that makes you catch your breath. Emily Dickinson’s idea that, ‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’
I am (and try as I might, I can’t help it), put off by errors and inaccurate or unhelpful punctuation. In a competition, it is worth that final readt`1hrough to double-check before hitting send.
Themes ranged widely. Many of the submissions, perhaps unsurprisingly, referenced local places. A number of poems entered a meta-dimension about poetry and the act of writing itself. The rise of AI and the impact of technology appeared as subject matter in a few poems. There were a good quantity of ekphrastic poems, inspired by or referencing other works of art. Others contained exploration of little moments of epiphany. Themes of grief and loss, relationships, and poems rooted in the natural world were prevalent.
I hope that readers will enjoy the winning poems as much as I did.
First Prize – Loaf by Miriam Patrick
This was a poem which felt like it could be read in multiple ways and on different levels: as one woman baking, as a journey of a humble food staple through time, as a balm in a world of war and pain, as a story of tradition, as a meditation on lockdown. The ‘she’ of each stanza seemed to be both one person and a representation of the divine feminine simultaneously. There was an emotional depth and nurturing power to the poem. I liked the rich sound of the unexpected, unfamiliar words: hilaf, quern, barbakan, challah, and the way the poem captured a simple, relatable moment of the pandemic across cultures, placing it within a rich skein of centuries of history. The final line brought me up short.
Second prize – Ghost wriing by P A Erskine for Anne
This was a poem evoking loss and the way it hits a mourner anew. The concreteness of the triggering image of the barn owl as a text or manuscript was powerful, and the metaphor carried through the whole poem from the bird ‘writing itself’ against a twilight sky with its ‘parchment feathers’ to the final ‘posting’ in the dark. The tell-tale conditional ‘you’d know’, with its colloquial tone and future tense captured the closeness of the speaker to the departed and foregrounded the loss that was encapsulated so devastatingly in the final line.
Best unpublished poet – Grinding the Lens by Pauline May
I was intrigued by this poem’s title – I usually think of lenses being cleaned, or polished, rather than ‘ground’ so I looked forward to learning more. I could see that this was a poem in 14 lines, with four tercets and a final couplet – but not a conventional sonnet, as the meter was not written in iambic pentameter. From the first line, I was so drawn into the immediacy of the physical experience – ‘What I remember is sliding my fingertips over the glass’ – so sensuous, but pared back, trusting the image to do its work. In the second stanza, the reader meets ‘him’ – we don’t, at this stage, know who he is, or his relationship to the narrator – and the tone is full of wonder – ‘…I’d witnessed the magicking of glass/to gather greater light than the human eye.’ The poem’s subject had worked ‘wet for a hundred hours’ and ‘…in a weeping of milkiness, the grit ground out the curve.’ Terrific interior rhyme, which can feel forced, but here, feels absolutely right. In 14 lines, the poem gifts the reader some stunning imagery – ‘figured it smooth as an eyeball.’ ‘He’ tells the narrator ‘Galileo made his own lenses from old eyeglasses’ (I loved learning this) and was ‘the first to see the nuances of Jupiter and Moon). So the poem’s subject matter includes quirks of scientific history, and encourages the reader to -look up’ – and imagine astral bodies. The final couplet really packs a punch: the reader learns that ‘he’ was ‘my father’ – with a ‘cancerous eye’ ground ‘deep into the night sky’ – and ‘gave me Saturn to hold in my hand.’ Which made me think – this is really a love poem; the subject matter is about ‘seeing through a lens’ – but what is ‘seen’ ultimately, in retrospect, is the ‘magical’ gift of knowledge, and how much the narrator was loved by a man who ‘rubbed back and forth, round and round.’
I thought this poem achieved so much in a compressed space: stunning imagery, musicality of tone and cadence, and a bold, emotionally celebratory ending.