The first prize in our 2025 Folio Competition for Kent & Sussex Poetry Society members was awarded to What Kind of Soup? by Paul Robert.
What Kind of Soup?
I ask our host
“A very good soup. A perfectly good, green soup”
(He doesn’t know. His wife probably made it.)
It’s very green
Greener than greenness in a green forest
in late summer
A dark, velvety green
The colour of curtains.
Curls of steam rise from the tureen
filling the room with a comforting aroma
of home
of winter afternoons
when snow sent us back early from school
and The Archers theme tune muffled through
the fabric mesh of mother’s old valve radio.
The soupy thickness needs encouragement
to leave the ladle
It gathers momentum
as it plops into our bowls
spotting the stiff white tablecloth
with plant-based polka dots.
This could be an incomparable soup,
a soup to save in a sleeve of your psyche,
for later.
Judge Ella Frears commented: I would never have predicted that I would select as first prize a poem about soup. This is why competitions are great – they surprise you. I think this poem is wonderful – sweet, funny, strange, and well… soupy. I found myself thinking about the line ‘a soup to save in a sleeve of your psyche’ and smiling long after I’d read it. I won’t look at a green soup now without thinking ‘Greener than greenness in a green forest/in late summer’ – also I love that line break. The shape of it has a subtle awkwardness which I found really refreshing. ‘The soupy thickness needs encouragement/to leave the ladle’ – is simple and yet precise and vivid and visceral. It’s a poem that does what it sets out to do (what it says on the tin) – and I really enjoyed it. Compliments to the chef.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 