Intruders and Thieves

MANDY PANNETT

(Pulborough)

 

A single bird is awake in a tree

there’s a rasp of crows

a hoot from an owl ...

 

Two stone owls at the back of the house

look sad in this half-light.

Their feathers are chipped.

 

Remember that day?  That country fair?

We came home with chutneys and jams

and a pair of owls, one each.

 

At first they stood by the step at the front.

You said they were guardians keeping us safe

from all intruders and thieves.

 

Now they are under the cherry tree

veiled in every tumbling blossom which drifts

at the end of spring.

 

Well I don’t care, they can stay there forever –

weathering, grubbier by the day –

since you’re not here

 

to wash the pigeon droppings off

or tease the grit from their grey-green plumes

with an old toothbrush.  

 

Anyway

they failed  to keep intruders out

since you decided to let one in...

 

Was it in darkness when you did,

silently, like the wing-beats of an owl

and as stealthily?

 

Beautiful, the hooting owl:

sand and salt in a glow of beige, wings like canopies

of velvet, a long and pausing call  –

 

but vicious, born to kill.

That’s its nature, I suppose, to ravage

and eat hearts.

 

 

‘Intruders and Thieves’ was highly commended in the TRYangle Project Poetry Competition 2012

 

JUDGE’S REPORT AND RESULTS, THE TRYANGLE PROJECT POETRY COMPETITION 2012

JUDGE’S REPORT BY GABRIEL GRIFFIN

The beginning was easy – a handful of poems had the poet’s name below and I had to disqualify them –please remember competition entries must not bear any name or other mark of identification! Then I turned to the bulk of the poems and the selection process proved far more difficult. It is clear that the standard of poems entered into competitions has improved enormously in recent years, due, I guess, to wider reading, to workshops and creative writing courses – or to all three.  I read all the poems with interest and at least twice before coming up with a long list.

(One point I wish to make regarding layout – a font that is too large (16 point) is almost as tiring to read as one too small, and double spacing in a poem is usually unnecessary. Ideally use Times font size 12, with 1.15 line spacing and reasonably wide margins.)

Overview

An open theme ensured a wide variety of subject matter, including quite a shocking number of distressing poems relating episodes of domestic abuse. (Very often in these latter poems the strong emotions obviously felt overwhelmed the poetry – it’s understandable.) There were poems about personalities: Edith Piaf, Mozart’s sister, Keats, Mrs Darwin and one referring to Jimmy Saville, as well as lighter ones about dancing, amber, rivers, trees, and the more serious subjects of birth and death. Once upon a washday is a poem likely to be quickly eliminated from most competitions since it is in rhyme and metre and the subject sounds rather old-fashioned, but it was a pleasure to read. I also liked Day Trip, Gap, Building Blocks, Moth, The Honey Times (a comforting poem about old age) and The Seafarer, a poem well-constructed. And others. All made for fascinating reading – but also for difficulty in deciding which to list and which to reject.

Long list (in random order)

By the 0ld Lock-Gate; Not Now, Not Yet; On the Cards; Origami; Recital on the Perfumer’s Organ; Book Louse Lace; On meeting Jean Paul Sartre; At the Barber’s; For love of a burning bush; Swan on the A46; The World Begins at the Kitchen Table;

All these were well-written. By the Old Lock Gate and Not Now, Not Yet, describe episodes of violence, the first in essential language the drowning of a puppy by boys, watched in silent horror by much younger boys afraid to intervene. The persona in the second is a suicide bomber, a monologue reminiscent of Carol Ann Duffy’s  Education for Leisure. Another monologue, On the Cards, well-written, with only two long sentences for the 29 lines, begins and ends neatly with the identical phrase.  I liked Origami, the folding of paper to produce birds, rabbits, frogs, is beautifully described. A plethora of delicious scents flows from the Recital on the Perfumer’s Organ; Book Louse Lace is a small gem of a poem. On Meeting Jean Paul Sartre describes that meeting in a concise, rather amusing way – loved “Simone de Beauvoir was in the background so we couldn’t say much”.  The subject matter of At the Barber’s is just that, a good description of the barbers and of the hair-cutting. More mysterious is  For love of a burning bush that reads rather like an admonition to someone seeking a mystical experience. Both Swan on the A46 and The World Begins at the Kitchen Table are descriptions of past happenings remembered. In the first poem the person’s mind shifts the simile she originally employed for the fallen swan (that of an angel) to “a ghost, or soul/that of a child who has left home”. The second is written from the point of view of children witnessing in silence their father’s violence towards their mother and ends with the line “God was Dad’s friend and we knew it”.

Short list (in random order)

To Whom Crime is a Theory; Half-Gone; Squat; The Teacher’s Lot; Meeting Point; The Ghost of Banquo Speaks; Mr Micawber writes to Mrs Micawber, from King’s Bench Debtors’ Prison; What historians, vicars, geographers and mapmakers can’t help being dumb about, but the locals know.

To Whom Crime is a Theory is a political poem, a deeply-felt admonition to those in power to face up to reality and do something about effectively resolving crime, ending “The day approaches when you will ring 999/Only to find yourselves in a dialling queue/Your wait enlivened by mood music”.

Half-Gone is a very well-sustained metaphor for old ideas; a short poem – only 9 lines – but extremely vivid: “The old ideas…held together/dangerously with board and barbed wire”.

Squat is a poem about fear. A woman is alone with her baby in a squat. She has come from another country, doesn’t know the language of the country she is in, daren’t go out and is terrified: “in the night/ the animals and peering faces peeled themselves/from the despairing plaster and/ danced into the air, scurrying dimly around the squat”. This poem makes one wonder how many women are in a similar terrible situation.  A note: the poet has capitalized the initial letter of most lines but not all; please be consistent, either all lines are capitalized or only those following a full stop.

The Teacher’s Lot is in rhyme and ‘reports’ children’s speech as the teacher hears it, “I’ve got a calculator like what adds/so I won’t have to do it in me ‘ead”. Notwithstanding the incorrect grammar, the teacher predicts in each case a future profession for the student. An amusing, original, most enjoyable and optimistic poem.

Meeting Point is a fine sonnet, employing the image of a tiger to illustrate the options available to all of us, “One way the grazing herd, one way the gun – “; choices, however, whose desired outcomes may well be annulled by fate.

The Ghost of Banquo Speaks has Banquo ranting in chain-rhymed quatrains against Macbeth, Lady M and the witches, an extremely well-written formal poem.

Mr Micawber writes to Mrs Micawber, from King’s Bench Debtors’ Prison is very enjoyable. Micawber, fearing a pauper’s grave, in his letter to his wife, composes his epitaph: “Here lies Micawber, dead and cold as flint/lived well, loved much, spent more, so perished – skint.” But ends optimistically, just like the figure of Micawber.

What historians, vicars, geographers and mapmakers can’t help being dumb about, but the locals know is about those mentioned in the title not knowing where in that area – a “a coccyx on the Pennine spine” and a “god-forsaken place” – rises the river Trent, and ends, in contrast with the prosaic body of the poem, with the lyrical lines ( employing lots of gurgling ‘l’ sounds) “where the daughter of the water-god/ girds up her loins, lifts her head/and trills till her heart spills out”.

Prize-winners and Highly Commended

Choosing from the final poems – my short-short list - was extremely difficult, they were all deserving to be winners.

The contenders – seven for five prizes:   Intruders and Thieves; Kite-surfer; Darwinius masillae; My Private Collection. The Lost Library of Jesi; To Iken and back; Stoughton Church.

Intruders and Thieves has some lovely images: two stone owls  “under the cherry tree/veiled in every tumbling blossom which drifts/at the end of spring” act as guardians to keep out intruders. But they failed, the ‘you’ in the poem – the husband? – lets one in. The poet doesn’t explain if the intruder is a betrayal or, perhaps, death.

Kite-surfer is an intriguing poem and every line is delightful, each word chosen with extreme care. It is written from the point of view of observers who see a surfer “lift over waves/your kite above you like a segment of moon” A  poem about endeavor and failure, of longings and loss, and ends “A long while/ you lie prostrate upon the water till the moon/loops and climbs, lifts you up in its shadow.”

Darwinius masillae recounts of fossils found in a quarry that the poet sees as “a time-line”, the fossils “entries in a journal of millennia” and one, that of the poem’s title, “ a creature with opposable thumbs/etched on the ancient rock/reaches out, takes our hand.”

My Private Collection is about a museum – or is this really a dream or, perhaps, the poet’s mind  –  in which the poet searches for something he can’t name through  “an aisle of whale-ribs” and rooms with cases “where dogfish hang suspended  like lifeboats”.  A  grim Darwinian-museum ambience with some extremely vivid images; a very disturbing poem, ending “Once outside I might hear on the wind/the voices of rain which are also the voices of children. I might remember/what I left to wait like clagged boots at the door.” (N.B. ‘clagged’: while I understood this word to mean clotted with mud or similar, it is, according to the Urban Dictionary, also used to describe someone who is ‘suffering from symptoms of memory loss or disconnection from society”. Here the latter definition fits nicely!)

The Lost Library of Jesi consists of seven couplets describing men carefully dismantling a library of antique books and papers and finding behind the shelves a sealed room., with “columns fallen under a hemispheric dome/shadows curled asleep in empty niches along the walls.” The poem ends with “the men crawled inside that chamber’s deepest quiet/where one or two still could hear the beating of a heart.” As far as I can ascertain (Google), although Jesi is the name of an actual Italian town, the lost library of the title never existed, so it is a delightful conceit on the part of the poet.

In To Iken and Back the poet returns after thirty years to the cove where she (I’m guessing the poet is a she) went boating as a child. It is told masterfully (in 45 lines with no stanza breaks), the present and recollections of the past flowing easily in and out of the poem like the tides in the cove that is “…full now, washed with grey/to a perfect scallop”. It ends “…you have/ forgotten nothing and it is not sad/ the river narrows and widens again/ but everyone you loved is still with you.”

Stoughton Church, is about going to a church where there had been a function a couple of weeks earlier – a wedding, a funeral? – but now the flowers are faded, the celebration long over. The poet attempts to take a photograph but “cannot find the angle/ to take a picture”. This poem has rather sinister overtones, “clouds chase each other”, “weeds hem the base/ of the tower” and then “a rusty stain/trails down as if it had been weeping blood.” A poem to make one wonder what lies beneath the lines – and to shiver.

These are very different poems, each one worthy of a prize. The final choice must, inevitably be subjective. I chose Kite-surfer for its sense of rapture, a perfect description using the minimum of words, and for the way the poem catches the reader up into the poem itself and incites personal reflection; My Private Collection for its sad, grim undertones, the dream-like atmosphere, the vivid description of the windy winter scene outside the windows and the mystery of what is waiting outside that the poet has forgotten; To Iken and back because the poet takes us with her to Iken, we can almost hear the water birds’ cry, the voices rising from the pub and the child from the past laughing; The Lost Library of Jesi  because of the sealed room, shadowed and quiet, in which the beating of a long-dead heart may still be heard; Intruders and Thieves because it is beautifully described and for its terrible, mysterious ending.

So, of these seven, the two Highly Commended poems are:

MANDY PANNETT - Intruders and Thieves

CAROLINE MALDONADO - The Lost Library of Jesi

Third Prize

CAROLINE PRICE - To Iken and back

Second Prize

A.C. CLARKE - My Private Collection

First prize

CAROLINE MALDONADO - Kite-surfer

Gabriel Griffin.   February 2013

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See all current Excel for Charity competitions

Titania’s Wood

MANDY PANNETT

 

Her snakes are enamel in moonlight, hot

and heavy as chains. They stir uneasily; hiss.

In her rosebud bower she twines love-knots

with ribbons as gifts for the child. Unnoticed

her husband faces the forest, plots how best

he can hurt his wife, take over and gain

control of the boy. They are both obsessed.

This is a poisonous wood – wolfsbane,

hemlock, a low-hanging moon in a pool

of frogs, pale-green and belly-up; dead.

The child sleeps on: as yet no unscrupulous

moonbeams disorder the curls on his head.

In sweet-briar dreams his world is kind –

later he’ll learn not only worms are blind.

 

 

Highly Commended poem, Build Africa Poetry Competition 2012

Artichokes and an Olive Grove

MANDY PANNETT

 

Your spirit slumps in the saddle.

Easier, you say, to look down not up

when your weary head like an over-blown poppy

droops on its stem.

 

But down is where all shadows meet,

where even the rays of a posthumous sun

fail in their glitter and reach.

 

What can I offer to make you look up?

A far-away island seeded with hope?

No, you reply, island is another word

for homesick, for small torn edges of sands

where wale pods beach.

 

A small farm then in the backhills?

Old Laertes lived there: cuttlebone flat

in his moods. You too could hoe around the vine

think back to the naming of trees.

 

You are starting to un-slump.

In those hills is an olive grove

and a plot of land to grow artichokes on

where we shall put that donkey out to graze

 

Second Prize winner, Build Africa Poetry Competition 2012 

Build Africa Poetry Competition, 2012, Results and Judge’s Report

 

The winning poems for the 2012 Build Africa Poetry Competition are as follows:

 

First Prize: Understanding Dung Beetles by ROGER ELKIN

 

Second Prize: Artichokes and an Olive Grove by MANDY PANNETT

 

Third Prize: Stalkers by FAY MARSHALL

 

Two other entries have been selected as ‘Highly Commended’ from a strong list of poems also deserving of such honour. The two highly commended poems are:

 

1.    Titania’s Wood by MANDY PANNETT

2.    Finding Edna by BRUCE HARRIS

 

 Congratulations to the winners. The winning and commended poems will be published in the Excel for Charity News Blog on the 1^st of October 2012.

This competition has raised £69.48 for the Build Africa charity. Thanks to all the entrants.

 

Now here is the Judge’s report:

 

Report on the Build Africa Poetry Competition, 2012

  

Judgement in literary competitions is burdened with the expectation of precision in the determination of value. It is of course also burdened with the challenge of perspective. Added to this is the paucity of material a judge or any critic has to work with in determining the relative strength of poems. A novel or short story presents the critic or judge with more material, many pages of information, by which it can be evaluated against another novel or short story. Prose-fiction does have its own challenges, but it comes with significantly less unresolved ‘tribal’ conflict than poetry. The poetry universe is seriously sectarian, with factious practice camps, which sometimes refuse to publish, honour or even acknowledge each other. This does inform judgement in a poetry competition.  

 

Perhaps, I exaggerate, or hope I do, hope indeed there is greater agreement on value between differently persuaded poetry practices and traditions. It may be that the greater quarrel is about form rather than value, though the two issues tend to be conflated. So, if we like a certain kind of poetry we happily attach value to it, but if we are not happy with that way of writing poetry we do not even care that it may be of significant value to others. We just don’t touch that kind of poetry, won’t buy or read it unless we have professional interest in it – as would media reviewers, academics, archivists and other collectors.

 

The good news for those who support and enter poetry competitions is that the qualities by which the best poems succeed and excite interest remain unchanged and roughly same across the tribes. To an extent the bickering of our poetry tribes has complicated perceptions of value and capacity for fairness in judgement, but excellence is ultimately its own way maker, and poems which emerge winners will usually be among the best of any kind in practice. A poem is only fairly judged according to its form – the extent to which it excels in the appropriation or exposition of those qualities germane to its form. If we understand what a poet is doing in a poem we can determine how well he or she has done it, and also accurately compare the quality of what has been done to what other poets have been able to do working with the same material in a similar manner.  If we are informed enough through training or practice, or just as experienced readers, we can also judge correctly that a given poet has done more or less excellent work with a chosen set of poetry material than another poet working on a different set of material. In judgement, it helps to be informed by the history of practice and the movement of innovation. No poetry competition is judged in an ahistorical vacuum.

 

I was thus mindful of our poetry moment, its centred practices and attendant politics of placement, coming to the 2012 Build Africa Poetry Competition. I decided to begin as I intended to conclude, by examining and moderating my own preferences and perspectives. In the end I was able to find clear winners from my shortlisted entries, but I think it is useful to generally remind those who win a poetry competition and others whose poems only made the shortlist that the values of the governing poetics in a competition can in some cases determine the outcome. The triumph of the winners will in such cases represent excellence but also good fortune, especially where there has been performance parity or something close to that among the best entries. For the winners there ought to be joy in the public acknowledgement of excellence by peers, delight with progress in craft, but scant room for triumphalism as in sports competitions.

 

What kind of poems was I hoping to find and honour in the 2012 Build Africa Poetry Competition; that is, what baggage did I come to this judgement with? I find value in all poetry forms and traditions. I like to go beyond the centred poetics of dominant perspectives in recent poetry publishing and creative writing education, and find value in whatever form it is being offered. Every kind of poetry is capable of excellence but not every poem is excellent. I do not insist on showcase poems, the kind that scream ‘Look at us! We are poems!’ at every reader, but I have retained that healthy foundational interest in ambition, eloquence and the personal voice in practice. Poetic difficulty is not for me just a period modernist obsession because there is even more complexity in the cosmopolitan contemporary, more of everything tied together and still unresolved, to complicate the art and unconscious of practising poets. I recognise that what I consider ambition in practice – elaborate or exceptional exploration of craft or subject – some now see as pretentious. However, I still believe in the thinking poet’s poem and consider elaborate thought, histories and mythologies valuable material for practice even in our time, just as valuable as the preferred autobiographical realism of the snap shot here and now, recorded ad nauseam in recent narrative poetry. I worry about poets being the inescapable protagonists of all or most of their poems, but recognise and respect the fact that this is essential fare for much recent poetry. It happens with poets for whom practice is not only art but also confession and therapy.

 

I hoped to find in these competition poems a settled ownership of language, confidence in the application of meaning, because in most cases poetry practice still involves the creative processing of meaning, demanding or demonstrating above average dexterity in the verbal arts. You have to own or know enough of language before you can successfully ‘disown’ it, or attempt to deny it meaning or even presence in your work as some poets have done and some still do. I wanted to encounter the competition poems first as a lay or ‘common’ reader, and so expected to be provoked, informed, entertained, inspired and humoured, becoming so moved by whatever I read that I would want to read it again… possibly pick up a poetry reading habit if I wasn’t already one of the converted.  I was looking for variety and strong individual voices. I hoped the competition would provide in its variety the lyrical and narrative, even commentaries of compelling descriptive and expository power. Poetry is all of these things. It embraces all subjects, nothing off limit or taboo.

 

Thankfully, I did find the variety and robust poetics I was hoping for in this competition. The winning poem, ‘Understanding Dung Beetles’ is not for the squeamish, but the poem’s conversational tone and humour draws its readers to share an interest in what will be for many an unusual and possibly unsuitable subject. For both poet and readers, there is hard work in this informative poem, involving the processing of specialist information, but this is neither obvious nor obtrusive because the poet has masked it with an informal tone, that near conspiratorial voice by which the subject is exposed. In the third stanza there is the kind of heady information on dung beetles by which the poem is mostly constructed:

         

They work arse-over-heels, literally:

though have spade-shaped heads

            use their hind legs to shift a dung ball

            fifty times their body weight: backwards.  

 

There is more rib-tickling erudition in the poem from where that came. But there is also a serious purpose to all that laughter. We get to know the dung beetle, get to know the importance of its life to our lives, and are moved to serious thought, as the poet in conclusion:

 

          Dung is all they own.

            Get high on piles of ordure.

 

            And dedicating their lives to dung

question the testament

that bread is the staff of life.

 

We are on a journey in ‘Artichokes and an Olive Grove’, second prize winner in the competition. It does not matter so much that this journey may be more imagined than real. What engaged me as a reader was how the poem enacts movement as metaphor, imagining progress from brokenness and despair towards hope. There is a Mediterranean theme in the references to Laertes, a name from Greek mythology, and the two land products, artichokes and olives, from which the poem takes its title. The allusion to Greek mythology, in particular Homer’s Odyssey, informs the poem’s interest in place or land as a cathartic as well as therapeutic site for the processing of personal journeys, connecting the past with its present and possible future –physical and emotional  journeys of acceptance and closure, recovery and renewal.  The quiet, persuasive voice of the poem is speaking life or healing or hope to one slumped “like an over-blown poppy” on a donkey of despondency. Instead of staying saddled to that ‘donkey’, or removing to an ‘island’ location, an Odysseyan quest land, only to relive the pain of loss and separation, hope was on offer at a land of new beginning, a restful upland location, with familiar or reassuring olive surrounds, from which to look beyond the moment:

 

          In those hills is an olive grove

            and a plot of land to grow artichokes on

where we shall put that donkey out to graze.  

 

This rich poem has a simple lineal structure, moving from the observation which identifies its conflict early in the first line, ‘’Your spirit slumps in the saddle’’, to the two questions which engage and then resolve the conflict: ‘’What can I offer to make you look up’’ and “A small farm then, in the backhills?’’ A concluding observation completes the frame, identifying resolution of the conflict with the line, “You are starting to un-slump”.

 

I liked the ambition of these first two winning poems and the risks successfully taken in the choice of subject, the referencing of mythology, and use of detail, including scientific data. Mood is a significant contributor to enrichment of reader experience in both poems. ‘Stalkers’, winner of the third prize, as well as ‘Finding Edna’ and ‘Titania’s Wood’, which I highly commend, all demonstrate this impressive use of material, as do a number of other poems. ‘Stalkers’ wins the early interest of its reader by suggesting itself as a detective story. We immediately want to know who the stalkers are, a question the poem only responds to tangentially but never quite answers. Instead it provides descriptive identikits to guide its readers towards own interpretations and conclusions on who the culprits might be – as in police artist drawings of unknown villains:

 

          The first

            is a handsome brute;

            ……………………….

 

                        it swoops from tree-top to tree-top,

            hurdles roads, blazes across horizons,

                        ravager, turning

forest to ash, cropland to desert  

 

Looking at this portrait, we may begin to sense that rogue weather types and ecological disasters are the enemies we seek here rather than human or animal agents, but this is inconclusive. So we seek further information by turning to more of the pictures:

 

          The other stalker

is more insidious.

 

It sleeks beneath sills in serpentine coils,

undermines drip by slow drop,

fragile foundations;

inches up imperceptibly,

sinks islands,

swamps cities;

swallows shores

 

Aha! We think we are now sure about these stalkers, and even if we still don’t know who or what they are we are happier for taking part in the adventure the poem has provided.  

 

It has been a pleasure reading these poems – all the competition entries. I found in them much comfort, and the support to continue celebrating poetry in all its subjects, forms and traditions. I hoped to find excellence in its various poetry signatures and did. I hoped to find boldness in the use of language, adventure in the application of form, and I did too. I would say it has been a successful outing for the Build Africa Poetry Competition and its organisers.

 

Afam Akeh

Oxford, UK.

Swale Life Poetry Competition, April 2012 An adjudication report

by Mandy Pannett

 

An interesting and competent batch of poems although not many, apart from the ones mentioned below, that experimented or attempted to ‘stretch’ language a great deal. However, they made enjoyable reading and frequently there was the joy of a phrase or image that would spark itself off the page with originality and vividness.

 

Many poems were on the themes of birth and death, childhood, parents, illness and loss in the broadest sense. Several used the natural world as a setting and there were a few with political or religious content. Quite a few poems related to art or to language and there were many strong relationship/love poems. I was interested to see how many wrote pen-portraits of people, real or imaginary. Usually these worked well.

 

There were some poems that I had, regretfully, to leave out of my selection because of lack of space. Among them were Orders, Autumn Leaves, A New Light, Broken Water, Death in the Afternoon.

 

The poems I have chosen as winners or commended all have a certain quality that caught my attention from the start. They almost shouted ‘Look at me, I’m a bit different.’ Although they all demanded to be included, I found the actual placing difficult and changed my mind several times over different days. I feel (hope) I have made the right choices out of many that were outstanding.

 

1^st FOUR INTERLACINGS by Maude Larke (France)

 

This is one of the most original and moving poems on the themes of love and loss that I’ve ever read. This poet has complete mastery of his/her craft. Impossible to isolate any individual lines as deserving special mention (although the last 6 lines are incredible). I am haunted by the poignancy and the beauty of the poem.

 

2^nd SHIPS IN THE DISTANCE by Jane Maker (UK)

 

On first reading I was captured by the vigour and immediacy of this poem and it held its place as a potential prize winner in spite of several strong contenders. I love the vivid colloquialism of the writing but what really hooked me was the sad, repeated verse: ‘And there she goes/raised high on filial shoulders/over the frozen fields and up the salted track/ a bitter wind blowing’

 

3^rd SALTERGATE DIANA by Rachel Green (UK)

 

If anyone wants to know how to write a poetic pen-portrait I’d recommend they read ‘Saltergate Diana’ with its vivid, perfectly crafted details and images. A paraphrase would spoil this highly original, clever piece. This was another poem that caught me from the start.

 

 

HIGHLY COMMENDED:

 

TAKE MY SHOES  by Alex Hales (UK)

 

This is a perfect example of a ‘leaping’ poem that is attractive, accomplished and works perfectly. With the poet we move through images of poetry as an animal or a marsh bird to the startling lines ‘We are/the intestines of love’, continue on through gruesome  elaborations of this image to end with the lyrical lines ‘Take my shoes, wrap them/ in roses. Walk in them a mile,/or two.’ A stunning poem.

 

STILL LIFE by Miguel Saporta (Uganda)

 

I really needed there to be five main prizes. ‘Still Life’ moved in and out of my top three until the last minute and I’m still not sure that it shouldn’t have stayed there. I must confess I always enjoy well written poems that use dialogue and different ‘voices’ and this poem masters that skill to perfection. Hard to select any particular lines – but I do like the image of the woman chewing ‘a handful of sunbeams to snooze the noon away.’

 

 

COMMENDED:

 

EARTHMOVERS by Ally

 

A carefully crafted sonnet that is vigorous and lyrical. Not a word is wasted or out of place here.  A great use of strong verbs, especially.

 

A FISH OUT OF WATER by Moira Ashley

 

This begins ‘He’s swept along’ and I was too, by this poem. The author has a superb command of language. Brilliant.

 

COMPANION PLANTING by Abegail Morley

 

A short poem but just about perfect in my opinion. One of my favourite entries.

 

BODY MAPPING by Abegail Morley

 

I enjoy the originality of this poem and the directness of voice in lines such as ‘This is me in my skin./I can pinpoint/each bit on a drawing,/a diagram, an autopsy slab.’

 

PUB LUNCH AT HIGH TIDE by Claire Pankhurst

 

Another poem that I think is faultless. I am full of admiration for the way the author has handled and conveyed the emotion in this.

 

THE ALLEY by David King

 

A fabulous rhyming poem written in dialect. A joy to read. I wish I could hear the author reciting it.

 

 

THE NEW LOVER by Gabriel Griffin

 

A fine control of language here, with its blend of lyrical and colloquial phrases. An evocative poem.

 

TREASURE by Susan Skinner

 

A beautiful sonnet that flows with apparent lack of effort – always the sign of craft. Great images too, such as this : ‘A green power/that grants the fallen leaf a bud, a moon/in shining ermine to this cold December/night,’

 

WOMAN AT THE WATERFALL by Rose Bray

 

A mysterious, atmospheric poem with undertones of myth. I particularly like ‘the frosted light’ with its ‘first chittering breath’ and the woman’s eyes with ‘pupils dark as the deepest fjord’.

 

MORE THAN ORANGE by Roger Elkin

 

A strong, original poem. I chose it because it experiments and takes risks with language and layout.

  

Mandy Pannett.  May 2012