Highly Commended:
‘Illusion’ – Elin Lewis
‘Gold’ – Tim Lenton
Third Prize:
'The Poltergeist' – Max Hawker
Second Prize:
'Massacre in Houla' – Lynn Roberts
First Prize
‘Fish’ – M V Williams
Judge’s report.
It was enjoyable reading so many interesting poems, but it was hard work judging the competition, there were a lot of very good poems entered, and getting it down to a shortlist of 20 was hard, let alone the last 5.
I read the short listed 20 over and over again, they were all good poems, technically proficient and with their own merits. It was difficult to choose the winners but in the end the same poems kept catching my eye, there was something in each of these poems that touched me; so here they are with an idea of what it was that drew me to the winning poems.
First Prize: Fish
The extended metaphor is a dangerous card to play, it can be all too easy to trip yourself up, but this poet handles it perfectly. From the image of the ‘stargazy mouths’ this poem had me hook, line and sinker! The poet carefully builds the picture of these ‘half dead fish’ then hits us with ‘thin, white, what-were-hands, / are useless fins now’ and leads on a downward slope towards the terrible scene, where de-humanised bodies in hospital beds await death.
Old people who ‘had names, / mouths filled with love and wonder’. This poem has a good rhythm built on alliteration, internal rhymes and assonance.
The poet broaches a difficult subject in this both shocking and touching, but very memorable poem.
Second prize: Massacre in Houla
From its arresting first line to its heart-renderingly simple final sentence, this poem tackles its emotive subject, the massacre in Houla, full on by avoiding it.
Instead of showing us the modern day horror, it takes us back in time to the Massacre of the Innocents where Herod the Great ordered the execution of all young male children in the village of Bethlehem. But the poet doesn’t even show us the horror of this incident, instead we get Herod the loving father watching ‘his sleeping son’, we are shown the beauty of the child and the night. We have comparisons to flowers: peony, stamen, honeysuckle, that suddenly become dark omens ‘dark red rose relaxes, weeping/ arterial petals’. We realise he is watching over his son as the boys of Bethlehem are killed. The poet asks ‘What can the king be thinking’, and we can’t know what he is thinking, or indeed what President al-Assad thinks when he looks at his children.
Third prize: The Poltergeist
This poem is full of clever images, ‘curtain-tracing breaths… foggy photo frames’. The poltergeist of the title comes in the night with ‘hot growls’ and banging doors, painting her face with menopausal ‘reds and pinks.’ In the morning light she sees reflected in ‘mirrors/ and wine glasses’ an unwanted ghost, whose former life has departed, she feels herself a stranger in her own home.
Highly commended:
Illusion is a poem in which the highs and lows of drug dependency are explored. The poet uses some wonderfully fresh images: ‘Shivering like a star-string’, a raindrop ‘bloated with royalty’. The illusion of the title broken with the come down of morning ‘screaming like a maniac.’
Gold. Great use of its title to draw you in to the first stanza & also to the ‘sun-soaked evening’ of the last stanza and the treasure you ‘already hold…
in your … hands’ I loved the description of the river that ‘bends, tightens,
then hurtles’ and the imaginary bears ‘juggling and swallowing,
blending’. A perfectly paced little treasure of a poem.
Derek Adams, July 2012
Gold / Illusion / The Poltergeist / Massacre in Houla / Fish
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