Yes, there will be sadness.
There will be metaphors and music.
There will be music and the lovely names.
This is the beginning of Bill Manhire’s poem ‘Poetry Updates’ which, on the point of writing my report, I have serendipitously just read, to which I reply, ‘Yes, there was, there were.’ And much else besides. A surprising number of gods and goddesses, for example; animal personifications including some nice mouse poems; insect poems, both nice and nasty; poems about going to the gym and the coming of spring. But I am less interested in what poems are about than in how they are written. And here again I was surprised by the number of formal entries including pantoums, palindromes, terza rima, golden shovels of course and the inevitable ghazals.
It’s not only delightful to encounter such a variety of styles and themes, but genuinely humbling to share in so many moving life experiences. And it is hard to reject writing that is so heartfelt, even if rejection would in no way invalidate the experience. However, I was looking above all for the achieved poem, one I couldn’t quibble with, one that made me feel I was in the presence of a poet, not just a good writer. (To which end, multiple submissions can sometimes help.) Moreover, good poems have a magical ability to leap off the page and abridge the distance between eye and text, entering the reader’s heart and mind with deceptive ease.
My warmest thanks go to the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society for inviting to be this year’s judge, my commiserations to the poets who submitted 1,627
hopeful poems and huge congratulations to the seven prizewinners. It is fitting that two of their entries end with the word “applause”!
First Prize: ‘My Father Sits His Driving Test’ by Jonathan Edwards
It’s impossible to read this father poem without a smile spreading across one’s face: a joyful poem, one that makes it look easy because it says it like it is. But this belies the skill, the narrative control, the judicious lineation; the use of the present tense, numerical time markers and a syntactical pivot to tell the story. Whose? The father’s? The mother’s (the bride to be “waiting at the bus stop on the village corner” like Hardy’s wife Emma as he views her “Standing as when I drew near to the town”)? Or, of course, both of theirs. A story that is almost an epithalamium, ending with a tiny echo of Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’: “like an arrow-shower … somewhere becoming rain.”
Second Prize: ‘My headband has eleven moth holes’ by Sharon Black
Here is a wonderful example of a poet getting out of the way of the poem (“way” appears suitably twice: “out the way” and “all the way”). In other words, getting authorial intention out of the way and then following the words – the associations, train of thought etc. – trustingly all the way till they reveal, in this case, the unwilled discovery of a metaphor for loss that gives this poem its magic. Like a magician whipping the cloth out from under the tea set. Or like rhyme disappearing “in increments” from full rhyme (grey/way) to half-rhyme (flagrant/bent) to alliteration to assonance miniaturising its subject in the short i vowels of “nibbling … things”. I love that a lyric with such a pleasing “aesthetic bent” has crept by stealth out of such humble beginnings.
Third Prize: Kyoto Egret by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana
Among all these many given forms, how pleasing to find this one haibun: a Japanese form, exemplified by Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, in prose (typically a travel journal, diary, essay etc.) interspersed with haiku. And this one feels very authentic. It is often difficult to write in forms originating in non-Anglophone cultures without being guilty of cultural appropriation or overly seduced by local (or even global) colour picked up on one’s travels. But this haibun, so warm and friendly, almost intimate, is utterly at home with itself and its environment; also, it seems, with time and the past – a little wry from experience perhaps but still youthful with wonder. A haibun collection from this writer would be very welcome.
Fourth Prize: Interior with a Table by Fokkina McDonnell
I happen to love Vanessa Bell’s work so this predisposed me – I hope not unfairly – to appreciate this sensitive example of ekphrastic poetry. It does describe the painting, evoking in fine detail the colours, architecture and inter-relationships of a Bell interior. But it also invites what is not there to enter the frame: the home-owners, visitors (civilians or possible combatants who lived through the First World War), sightings of Saint-Tropez where Vanessa painted this picture, and even the “speed of marbles,/the hard sound when they hit”. Most striking, of course, is McDonnell’s use of anaphora, the “For” which one instantly associates with Christopher Smart’s ‘For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry’ – a catalogue (sorry!) of prized attributes, a praise poem, as this is.
Fourth Prize: This morning by Paul Blake
What a long way this poem travels! From the rather notational beginning where a young couple smooches under the “jungle rains” – somewhat ironised by the imagery of “vines entwined, ready to fruit” – we are led in the second quatrain to a sudden intense engagement with them and that beautiful “so ill-assortedly lovely” phrase followed by parenthetical Arabic. How lovely is that! And then the sestet: the pivot in feeling and thought from a boy and girl kissing to a “hesitant” close-up of a gay embrace; the Petrarchan volta turning from an idealised portrayal of love to that of the destructive forces of nature and desire. This is a strong, bravely rhymed sonnet, written in a classical vein but contemporary in its thrust.
Fourth Prize: The teachers by Duncan Chambers
What appears at first to be a kind of collective potted biography of these hapless teachers turns out to be, in the guise of an ironic summation of their careers, a love poem to them, unacknowledged, unappreciated, underpaid as they are. Duncan Chambers has an exceptional selective eye, drawing with wit, candour, accuracy, the invisible arc of their lives – what they did, where they lived, how they worked, were abused or abusive, how they were perceived – with such imaginative empathy that he himself must surely be a teacher I think. The gradation of tone from cool to an affectionate warmth, from scepticism to gratitude, from a minor key to a major triumphal note, spreads not only its emotional but also its geographical reach.
Fourth Prize: The (Glorious) Wordlessness of Painting by Mary Gurr
Less an ekphrastic piece than a meditation on the painting process, written simultaneously, it feels, with the action of painting, this poem starts appropriately with the void into which will float images of their own accord. The “absence of people” or even of the poet herself allows us to sense, not the intentional energy of the artist, but the momentum with which, passively, the poetic discovery is revealed in the lyricism of that last line (unlike many single line endings, earning its isolation). Passivity is mirrored by syntax: two sentences, only one with a main verb (the contracted “is”). This poem is a perfect metaphor for the creative process itself and, paradoxically, that of lyric verse despite, or because of, its (glorious) wordlessness.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 