We asked the judge of our 2024 Open Poetry Competition, Kathryn Gray, to award the fourth prize to four poems equally. One of these was “In the Manner of Your Ghost” by Neal Hoskins.
Kathryn commented on Neal’s poem that:
“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.”
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 