I usually enjoy judging poetry competitions immensely – but not this one. The theme was domestic violence and the 150 odd poems entered were all, of course, on this distressing theme. It was hard to read them, I had to read in shifts. It was impossible not to empathize with all the writers, many of whom I guessed wrote from personal experience and were not accustomed to writing poems, yet desperately needed to express the horror of their experiences, to give voice at last. The great majority of poems entered were those that described (very vividly) the violence inflicted upon women by their husbands or male companions. Rare were the poems that spoke of women battering men. Several (not as many as I would have expected) related to incest and child abuse.
Through all these poems ran coloured threads: purple, violet, blue, red and black; the colours of the bruises and wounds inflicted physically on the victims – we can only guess at the immense psychological damage. There were a fair number of birds fluttering over some of these poems: birds trapped in cages, birds of paradise, a woodpecker and a handsome bird that pulps its prey. There was a tomcat, a rat, a fox and a wolf.
A handful of poems were from the point of view of an onlooker, a would-be helper relating the impossibility of assisting someone who dare make no move to help herself – in one the victim, a young woman, prefers to be “abused than unwanted, despised than alone”.
Occasionally the victim attempts to call for help, one dials “the three nines”. But when she is asked whether she needs fire, police, ambulance, or coastguard, she asks herself, uncertain, “was she burning or drowning?” and puts the phone down. Another victim asks her priest for help with a bipolar, violent husband but the priest just tells her “to offer up the pain”!
Most of the victims of male partner abuse have developed that devastating conviction that the violence is their own fault – in one the victim says “leave him? You must be joking, my fault, always provoking”. This is an attitude that the majority of battered women and children (according to these poems) assume and I find this extremely sad. A devastation that is both physical and psychological. It was a relief to read the words of one battered wife to her husband: “There is only one ceremony I wish for you/ and it has fuck all/ to do with forgiveness”. I wanted to cheer this woman.
But another woman who had the courage to denounce her violent husband and take him to court saw the abuser get off scot free because, according to the author, both he and the judge were freemasons. I find this example of ‘brotherhood’ very troubling.
Children in these poems are abused by neighbours, brothers, fathers. Babies are battered . A kid is forced to eat food he finds revolting. Onlookers hesitate to help. But some children can be extremely difficult and terrorize their parents , although I have a sneaking sympathy for the boy who carried on provoking his too-perfect, composed mother until she lost her temper with him at last, the boy finding her anger “the warmest thing/ to have passed between them” .
All the poems were extremely eloquent and stirred a strong emotional response in me. But at this point I had to put emotions aside and judge them not merely for their subject matter but as poetry. Almost all were written in free verse, sometimes rather too freely, perhaps the authors were overcome by the emotion and distress they were attempting to portray. There were two rather informal sonnets (I had expected more sonnets). A few entries were written in rhyming couplets or quatrains, the rhymes being often a little too obvious. There was a well written villanelle.
I put on the ‘No’ pile poems with clanging rhymes, those that used hackneyed phrases, those that slammed the message home, those that said what they had to say in a rather monotonous way with no image or turn of word to engage me. I looked for poems that intrigued me, that arrested my attention, that made me wonder, not just exclaim “Oh how terrible!” and turn to the next.
After much reading, re-reading and pauses for reflection, I had a final shortlist of ten poems. These poems were the ones that stayed in my mind and had me thinking of them while I was doing other things. They were very individual and different poems; there is the monologue of ‘Forgiveness’ in which the poet reassures her batterer over and over again that “it’s alright”, she accepts what’s happened and forgives him but ends “I’m not going to talk to you again./Nor anything else to you again”.
‘Crossword’s is rather unsettling: the mother trapping her adolescent son (I guess a son rather than a daughter) in the ritual of her crossword puzzle. The mother shows off her ability, cheats rather. As the boy grows older, he realizes “how many of the clues/were repeats from other weeks, /how the language used was simple and limited.” It ends with the boy catching up and overtaking the mother, all the time careful to keep between them “requisite blank spaces”.
‘Pomace’ has some memorable images, of Nona, the grandmother, in the kitchen sieving “the hush flour, dribbling the mummed oil”. In contrast with these peaceful domestic images is an undercurrent of contained violence, “the knives’ fangs” and “slicing the muscle of love”. The making of olive oil is used to express something we can guess happening to the young girl but that she won’t admit even to herself, nor will anyone else speak of it: the secrecy conveyed by the adjectives ‘hush’, ‘dumb’, ‘ mummed’.
‘Gnome Princess’ consists of two stanzas with many phrases of the first repeated in the second while assuming an opposite meaning. A little girl stands in the garden (I loved the phrase “All nithered and withered”) observed by a kindly neighbor who has no idea of the true nature of the child’s father – the daddy the girl is trying without hope to avoid. This poem invites us to ask ourselves how often do we fail to notice when something is dreadfully wrong with those near us, children especially, who haven’t the comprehension of their situation or the language to ask for help.
‘Dressed to kill’, a short, neat, vivid poem, describes a many-hued bird “posed/as if waiting at a hotel bar” that batters its prey to pulp. A charming analogy! Since the name of the bird isn’t mentioned and I was intrigued, I spent some time on the RSPB and similar sites before finally deciding (there are clues in the poem) that it might be a bee-eater.
Highly Commended: ‘Secret’. The form is a villanelle, well-worked, very visual. A father persuades his little girl to stay with him all day and a night in their secret place in the bracken: “We may spot a lark, like a speck in the sky/ till it snaps out of sight and the song drifts away” adding “No need to tell Mummy, for Mummy might cry/then bad men would come and take Daddy away”… the subject is, alas, all too clear.
Highly Commended: ‘Their Door’ is a spare, sad poem, the poet wanting to go back to the past and see “two beaming faces with a look of me/arms outstretched” but the door will not open and the poet remains outside in “this cold, endless night”.
Now for the three prize-winning poems: each one is very different in form and subject from the other two, but all three are extremely assured, each poet is obviously in full control. And says exactly what he or she wants to say in the best language, whether this be dialect, everyday speech or very elegant writing.
3rd prize: ‘Punchbag’ A short poem (16 lines) telling of a battered husband and father. It is written in dialect and describes the father as “shan, weak, pathetic/an empty shirt blown in the wind”. The child would join the mother in hurting the father both physically and with words, but the poem ends “It’s only now I ken/that accepting the jags and burling shoves, just as the need tae inflict them/ shows a girning kind of love”. A wonderfully descriptive and moving conclusion.
2nd prize goes to the extremely well-written, elegant ‘Inside David’s Labyrinth’.I was enchanted by this poem because it is mysterious, it doesn’t tell but alludes. The protagonist says he needed “this evening of gin and single malts/just to get these words on the page…”. Thirty-six lines and nine stanzas to recall a past of fractured pictures, beginning with a Hakone puzzle box (I didn’t know what that might be, had to look it up on internet: a craftsman-made Japanese puzzle box requiring anything from 5 to 66 moves in order to open.) What was inside the puzzle box we are not told, and perhaps the poet doesn’t know either because, he tells us, the opening mechanism of the puzzle box is broken – possibly something to do with a photo of David “in pantaloons as a child, smudged lipstick and rouge”? The poem ends, “Then, he shook it, for a charm to fall out.” This is a haunting poem, beautifully written.
It was almost a toss-up between first and second places. Because the theme of the competition was the one it was, I finally decided on the winning poem because it expressed so very well what many other poems entered had also said, or attempted to say, in concrete images and with no word wasted.
Ist prize: ‘Apology’. The theme of this poem was one common to so many entered: the battered woman apologizing to her violent husband/lover because she is convinced that if he hits her – and he does and has – it is entirely her own fault. The form of the poem, unlike some of the other poems on this theme, is controlled to perfection, consisting of only one sentence with no intervening punctuation between the opening and the final full stop. Thirty-six lines of equal length compose a rectangular block on the page that invites reflection: her house/a cage/ a prison in which the woman is trapped? Inside this box violence is expressed in vivid images: a smashed china teapot, a yellow fruit bowl overturned, purple plums bursting out of their skins, her torn red and black dress. This woman is violently beaten and raped in her home by her husband – and yet she is convinced it is all her fault and apologizes to her assailant.
To conclude: I have really appreciated how all the entrants, placed or not, managed to express themselves so well and vividly and thank those relating their own experiences for allowing me to enter briefly into their world and share a little of their sadness. To all these poets my very sincere good wishes.
Gabriel Griffin
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