Judge’s Report & Results, African Prisons Project Poetry Competition 2013

We are pleased to announce the results of the first African Prisons Project Poetry competition judged by Bob Beagrie.

 

Judge’s Report 

 

It was both a pleasure and as always a challenge to act as a judge for the competition. The entries varied dramatically in subject matter, style, form and tone and upon first reading them all I felt somewhat overwhelmed at the task of narrowing them down to a handful of the best entries. However, after several careful rereads  I had shortlisted twenty of the poems that particularly stood out to me, showing originality, flair, a control of form, a clarity of language, which seemed to work on a number of different levels, which played with ambiguity while having something to say, and which also represented a distinctive and compelling voice.

 

The five poems I finally settled on as the winning three and the two highly commended all continued to surprise and intrigue me, even after multiple readings, all show an awareness of the dynamics and tensions between form and content and play with contrasting discourses, each held something of the common-place experience but transformed it through lyrical compression, striking language, suggestion and implication so that it resonates, gains weight and seems to blossom in the mind into unexpected significances and feelings you recognise but had never before quite manage to name.

 

To me good poetry opens your eyes, reveals something new, but it is not just the eyes that look out upon the world it opens but the eye that is trained inwards at the ways in which we respond to the world and its circumstances. The five poems all in some way succeeded in this, but I’d like to make a few observations about the three winning pieces:

 

‘Another Story’s precise ordinary detail of objects and actions is deftly turned by startling touches of abstraction into fairy tale tropes that give it an archetypal bearing, without losing its footing in an identifiable world while we are, before we know it, swept away into the uncanny.

 

The mix of abrupt conversational, even accusational, address, sharp imagistic detail and the shifts to a more intimate, confessional tone in ‘A letter to the outside’ gives this poem an unsettling and powerful dynamic. The gentleman in the long white coat, the mulberry bruises, the sudden introduction of the image of dirty eggs, their association to eyes, the slack mouth all conjure an uneasy atmosphere we must enter tentatively with suspended faith in the reliability of the language given.

 

The fine control of form while employing a clear voice in non-standard English in ‘Mumbue Sonnet ‘ creates an exciting defamiliarising effect that brings the reader up sharp and tells us to take note, this is not what we might first assume it to be, and few things ever are.  It is full of striking phrases ‘I’m walking in my feet to Mumbue’ ‘ I’m crackling like a chicken’  and the emotions of happiness and sorrow  mentioned are all part of the trek.

 

Bob Beagrie

 

Results

 

Ist Prize – Another Story – Julie Mellor (UK)

2^nd Price – A letter to the outside – Katelin Farnsworth (Australia)

3^rd Prize - Mumbue Sonnet – John Gallas (UK)

Highly Commended

Not a third world country – Katelin Farnsworth

Where The Chicken Pecked – Mary Oliver (UK)

 

The winning and highly commended poems will be published in the Excel for Charity News Blog on Friday 7^th of June, 2013.

 

Congratulations to the prizewinners.