We are very pleased to announce the winners of our 2024 competition, as chosen from over 1700 poems by Kathryn Gray. With thanks for her excellent judging, here is Kathryn’s report.
We will publish the seven prize winning poems over the coming days. Congratulations to the poets, and thank you to all the other (nearly 800) poets who entered their work.
Kent and Sussex Poetry Competition 2024 – Judge’s Report
First things first: I am not the last word on what constitutes a fine poem – far from it. I’ve been attempting to make poetry for nearly 26 years. Starting out, my younger self had had the ambition – well, certainty – that one day I would become an ‘expert’ (for whatever that means). I think most people who have ever taken up baking can likely identify with the hubris. Now, at 51 years old, I’ve started to become comfortable with the sense of my being, instead, an ‘experienced learner’, whose CV of the imagination can list years’ and years’ worth of the inevitable and substantial outright failures, misfires, and disappointments I’ve accumulated along the way. Those losses have been formative and, I hope, reshaped me into a (somewhat) better human. This caveat is to assure all who entered this competition, run by the dedicated cohort of the Kent and Sussex Poetry Society, that I came at every one of the poems submitted without any particular claim to mastery but rather from the position of an enthusiastic, fairly well-travelled reader, open to surprise and wonder. Even then, of course, the rules of the game remain imperfect. We all bring our inclinations, and another judge of differing tastes might have selected otherwise. But, as Melanie Griffith memorably and sensibly quipped in Working Girl: ‘If you want a different answer, ask a different goirl!’ So, I can only – unapologetically and personally – present those poems whose proposal I accepted and which I kept returning to, with admiration and pleasure. And, I should add, I am very glad to have, in the first instance, accepted the proposal to judge this competition. Thank you, Kent and Sussex, for the invitation and for your great courtesy and professionalism throughout.
Nearly 1800 poems were entered this year. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered such an intimidating cardboard box as arrived at my door in February. I took to La Box, as I christened her, with scissors, clipped the masking tape, and began my work.
Reading through the poems, common themes emerged: time, grief, nature, and love. Of course, these are the staples of poetry. But living on this little blue planet in the grip of permacrisis, where assaults on humanity and the environment are broadcast on a 24-hour rolling news cycle, where our understanding of the long-accepted certainties has been radically recast by COVID-19, and with an all but complete diminishment of faith in the old systems, those themes seem, somehow, to be all the more poignant.
I was moved by the vulnerability with which so many entrants set down feeling and their own, important ‘momentary stay against the confusion of the world’, as the big boss Frost had it. Vulnerability is humbling to encounter; it is very far from passive; and it demands faith – which is, perhaps, the ultimate courage.
But, of course, poetry is more than feeling and vulnerability. It has to be. And, in the end, the poems that made the final cut were those which, for this reader, haunted and held. How did they do that? My dear, departed friend and teacher Michael Donaghy greatly enjoyed the relationship between magic and poetry. Magic, of course, isn’t real – but craft, anciently synonymous with the word, most definitely is. Michael also liked to draw a comparison between the best poets and prestidigitators: that sleight of hand that can make us believe anything, green and wide-eyed as children. The winning poems here all demonstrated, for me, craft and sleight of hand in ways singular to them: exemplary sonics (sometimes subtly beguiling and at other times powerfully insistent), wit (in all its interpretations), descriptive panache (conjuring place or person in ways that pulled me inside the poem), judicious tone (prompting my immediate and sustained readerly conviction), and an ability to walk the tightrope of the poetic line with elegance (making the intensely difficult look breezy).
I want to thank everyone for entering the competition and allowing me the opportunity to read your poems. It’s been a real pleasure and a privilege. And to the winners: I salute you and especially thank you for so delighting me.
First Prize
‘Grasshoppers’: John Saddler, London
This poem. A small work of such fragility and tenderness and yet so large and powerful that my heart ached – and ached again – to read it. As with many a terrific poem, it possesses multiple possible emotional/situational applications that a reader may use to suit the ends of their own wants or needs, but the epigraph from Ecclesiastes 12:5 indicates an intended, specific allusion to old age, and resulting decline and mortality. At the same time, the poem is a gentle call to arms about love and life and bringing meaning to both, even or especially in the face of the inevitable: ‘No time to sleep, you said.’ There is a quite particular genius at play in casting the poet-narrator and the addressee as literal grasshoppers. And speak the poem out loud – relish those delicate but decisive sonics! What sad beauty. For this reader, ‘Grasshoppers’ was the ultimate winning poem.
Second Prize
‘Why do you want that expensive watch when all the sky’s a clock?’: Hilary McDaniel, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
I must confess a natural gravitation to this poem, having a predilection for popular culture. How wonderful to discover icon and famed watch enthusiast James Dean, the obsolescence of the analogue LeCoultre he was wearing at the time of his fatal car crash at only 24 years old, and the Dean Museum in this atmospheric, small but perfectly formed tour de force. Here’s a poem about time, and falling in and out of time, that conjures place so effortlessly that it inspired envy. From the very first reading, I felt as if I were standing next to the speaker, feeling the chill of the sky – ‘cold, clear crystal’ – and watching the ‘belts of shadow’ pass over the land. I have never been to Fairmount, Indiana – or driven down Highway 26 – until now. This is a poem that takes you there and somehow – through sheer skill and measure – won’t let you go.
Third Prize
‘Pantoum at Sixteen’: Mary Paulson, Naples, Florida, USA
Which comes first in the genesis of a poem? Form or subject matter? A chicken-or-the-egg conundrum. Whichever might be true in this instance, form and subject matter successfully fuse to reinforce mood and meaning: obsession and the persistence of memory. This is grand writing – which is not to suggest ‘mannered’. What I mean is the courage to embrace high register and the ability to pull it off: even the deployment of ‘transoceanic’ seems inevitable. Register contrasts brilliantly with youthful recollection, with the ‘cigarette’, ‘a hole in someone’s bed’; on second thought, perhaps it is entirely apt. There are moments of lovely phrase-making: ‘[b]reaks happen when the heart of a bud becomes a bloom’. Indeed. ‘Pantoum at Sixteen’ is also a poem of troubling, mixed feelings: the sexy and sinister, the appetite and advantage, the active and the passive. An excellent poem to experience and will continue to provoke interpretations with each re-reading.
Fourth Prize Runners-up (in alphabetical order)
‘Two members of Mary Wollstonecraft’s circle’: Jo Davis, London
Here’s a poem that beguiled me with its sensuality and sensuousness. Oh, and its rich humour, too. How I long for more playfulness in poetry. The wit of the commentary is superb: Thomas Paine ‘is bending over as if to climb into a bath, or think a revolutionary thought’ and his ‘ass-cheeks’ are ‘pert as common sense’. And what about William Blake’s ‘penis glinting like a compass’? Or the perfection of Newton ‘curled up like an ammonite’? This is absolutely stellar description. The magic of this poem, besides its apposite way of seeing and its delicious serious comedy, lies in the contrast between physicality and intellect, as well as its unashamedly borderline-lustful gaze and the seamless shifts in register – the latter a tremendously difficult feat, as any poet will know. This is how you do ekphrasis with insight and panache.
‘In the Manner of Your Ghost’: Neal Hoskins, Tunbridge Wells
At the height of lockdown, our sensory awareness – in the absence of that great distraction that is social activity – heightened and so, too, did our consciousness of time, which seemed inexorable but all the same perdu. While some took up – if only temporarily – Italian on Duolingo and learned to perfect their Downward Dog via YouTube videos, for most of us, I suspect, it was less a period of practical self-development than one of great interiority. This prose poem – perfect choice of form for the subject matter – evokes the period: its longueur and strange, sad gifts of attentiveness and discovery. The subject shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’ is positioned purposefully in this poem as the world opens up once more – and, in its final sentence, slips back to address the missing ‘you’. The poem concludes as elegy: both for personal loss and for the great cost to lives we will never know. It’s a fine and moving conclusion, and we return to the title: integritas! It is a beautiful haunting.
‘Blood and Men Shouting’: Vanessa Lampert, Oxfordshire
One of the great problems of poetry is that so often it must grapple with the big themes and hopefully provide some edification to the world – but if it deploys didacticism, then all is lost. ‘Blood and Men Shouting’ takes a familiar domestic scene and the HBO smash Game of Thrones to explore the seemingly relentless cost of toxic masculinity. It is a lightly worn (and charmingly weary) performance that all the same drives home its message with a rhetorical flourish: diminutio. Elegant touches abound in this clever and, despite it all, tender poem, from the portrait of a mother as benign tricoteuse (so benign, she falls asleep) to the absurdity of ‘an angry couple’ locking swords ‘over a dog’ to the vulnerability of the son both as baby and as man. I consider the state of geopolitics. If the measure of a quality poem is to be timely and for all time, then ‘Blood and Men Shouting’ triumphs – for the good.
‘Hats I will inherit from my grandmother’: Julia Usman, Richmond, Yorkshire
How I enjoyed this colourful portrait of an assertive, misbehaving, sexual woman and her unapologetic life, imparted through her signature mode of apparel: a series of hats, each of which denotes complementary personal qualities and, for the eventual beneficiary of them, may represent a credo of sorts (bohemianism, magnetism, predation, mystery, indefatigability). The poem is powered by an admirable economy – over five tercets – and the good judgement to reveal just enough leg to seduce the reader’s imagination into running wild to fill in the backstory. And what a great and ambiguous end to a poem that summons this unsinkable spirit – in stark contrast to, one can only suppose, the relatively ordinary, vanilla men (and women) in her life. A witty poem of genuine charm – but not one without a compelling sense of discomfort, either.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 