2011 poetry competition winners

Our thanks go to Anthony Thwaite and Mandy Ross for reading every poem and selecting the winners. Our thanks too, of course, to everyone who sent a poem in. Please don’t be disheartened if you didn't win this time and keep on writing.

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Adult section - First prize

The Elizabethans by C J Allen

 

Their high lace collars, calumnies

courtly and cantankerous,

their lute-songs, love songs, poetry

and celebrated oratory,

their science and philosophy,

their doubt and dancing, sailing ships,

their wit, their epigrams, their quips,

their wordplay and their swordplay, their

vanity and facial hair,

their falconry, their hunting dogs,

their peacock-feathers, jewels, wigs,

their castles and their hovels, mazes,

gardens, herbals, allegories,

miniatures by Hilliard,

life-size Holbein portraits, card-

games, rural poverty and churches,

royal parks and forests, creatures

mythological, symbolic,

caged, apocryphal, heraldic,

their wars against the Dutch and Spanish,

their politics, their need to vanish

at very little notice into

France, things said they never meant to

say, things that they wish they’d said

instead, their barges, bridges, bread,

their lawyers and their torturers,

their essayists and conjurers,

their nine-men’s morris, marriages

for land and money, carriages,

contracts, lies, low-haunts and Latin,

linen-lawn, dagged velvet, satin

slippers, shepherds passionate

and pure, their loves inviolate,

their mills, mill-races, waterwheels,

their feather-beds and fallow fields,

their sonnets and so-long-lives-this,

their flourishes of emphasis,

their treachery and faithlessness,

their gradually becoming us.

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Adult section - Second prize

The Academy of New Words by Beatrice Garland

 

The Academy of New Words

 

In the beginning the language worked well:

named the body, spoke of birth

and love and death, the vigorous need for moving on.

 

Look, not so different from the old country after all -

terraces gone wild, narrow fields,

the trickle of water that could become a river.

 

We can make bricks from mud and straw,

a roof of plaited vines, grow wheat, bake bread.

There was a name for everything.

 

But as the children grew taller,

dissatisfied, wanting more,

the old belief broke down - that language worked

 

like bird-song, linking them

the way a lullaby, a thunderstorm,

are understood without translation.

 

Something new was needed: how else could

a roof-tile be described, electric-light,

a railway-train? What is a can of Coca-Cola? 

 

Stumbling towards this brave new world,

the elders’ composites grew longer:

the round-eye-that-remembers-everything,

 

the box-of-moving-pictures-in-the-dark,

and still more difficult, messages-that

fly-through-air-quicker-than-thought.

 

So the Academy was born.

Ten new words were ratified each week,

chanted in unison in all the schools.

 

But no-one could keep up:

the unstoppable children ran on

rapping, texting, surfing, streaming.

 

Now Professors of Linguistics study

yellowing box-files of the obsolete

in basements of the Public Libraries

 

while dazzling inventions flash by week on week –

wi-fi, satnavs, the blogosphere – and the old

fall silent, staring out of windows.

 

 

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Adult section - Third prize

Benediction by Peter Gillott

My father dipped his finger like a pen

into invisible ink called holy water

and wrote a cross above unfocused eyes

and made me cry the tears of innocence.

 

Now nearer to the finish than the start,

I wonder if that ghost still lingers there,

whispering, 'You're a Christian, don't forget.'

What was that water's source? I ask myself.

 

The bathroom tap that gushed on Friday night

and stung my buttocks red as nettle rash?

I asked my mum, 'Is Hell as hot as this?'

 

Or water from the shrieking swimming-pool?

A tile-blue mix of piss and chemicals

that shocked my body when I charged and plunged.

 

Or was it from the stream that sneaked between

the village and teh Warren? There the tramps

made stone corrals to cradle brushwood fires

and boil up blackened kettles for their tea.

 

Or was it from the pewter-coloured trough

in Slater's pasture next and the garden wall?

It waited for the long lathargic file

of auburn cattle with sand-paper tongues

to sink the float-ball, made the nozzle hush.

 

Or was it from the bird-bath, where ripe plums

burst on the paving-stones, ejecting wasps,

and fruit-filled blackbirds ducked and tossed their heads

to spray hot backs with particles of cool?

 

My choice would be the rusty rain-tank, fixed

against the Monday morning wash-house wall,

inhabited by wriggling question marks.

And when in August I would thrust my arm

towards dark depths, fearing some monster there

might feed upon my finger-tips, I watched

fine pearls assemble on my sunburnt skin.

  

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Young persons' section - First prize

Footage of Nureyev Andrew Wyn Owen

The moment he died, Nureyev’s feet

turned into the clockwork carousels

the American papers really wanted them to be.

I can hear the shoes whistling in the coffin,

funeral procession getting creeped out –

saying, “This is eerie,” up the aisle.

When those calves clicked it was more silent,

dead silent, than the grave, more solemn

than the dance of death or the irate

undertaker’s breath.  The comrades wept, crept,

then stepped, then leapt, so slick – this

was the miracle, mechanical dance of life.

This was the Stradivarius Humanus in the flesh,

in a gilded wooden crate, clopping away

The ankles into action, then legs, then heart

pulsing forth like a jack-in-the-box, giving

Leningrad the fright of its life.  Life in

the pad of this mad, risen Messiah figure,

the living vivre, the synapse triggered yo-yo –

first snowdrop of the cultural thaw was go,

breaking the Two Worlds War.  He breathed,

the spinning sylph, on a vesper, divesting death

under the flowers thrown on the stage

for the Lord of the Dance.

                                                         This was 1960,

the opening night of Don Quixote.  Soon

the dancer without defect would defect,

dashing the door off the land of the living.

 

 

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Young persons' section - Second prize

The Chase by Jade Cuttle

Those rolling tongues, the hills;

there never were any cows.

 

The tastes buds, aligned as crops

create a fist. A single lump knot

 

that could knock you off balance,

with just one throw.

 

By day, a grassy tongue sits;

grounded by its roots but still

 

ready to pounce. To thrust itself out, at me.

To poke me in the eye.

 

By night, that tongue wakes.

Stretching like a branch, that field

 

uncurls itself like a curling flame-

trying to lick the sky.

 

But, when that lawn curls up,

as the sun rolls in,

 

and the tongue dries up,

as the dawn falls in

 

the cows are planted as seeds.

'One foot wrong, and you're a gonner-'

 

Bone branches skitter-skatter berries

across the path, like marbles,

 

to trip you up into the grasp of the fingertips;

point pricked and bleeding -

 

pointing at you, laughing;

gesturing for you to come closer, closer.

 

Like a foreign tongue in a feisty mouth,

there's no taming the beast.

 

Cut the chase - there's no escaping

the field that eats the cows.

 

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Young persons' section - Third prize

Missing ( a broken sestina) by Alexandra Cussons

He is my only son,

have you seen him? Our

child, a boy of two,

please tell me if you saw

him lately, playing in the sea

or on the shore.

 

I was sure

I saw him last, playing in the sun

before the sky clouded. The sea

was calm then and our

blanket warm. My back was sore

from carrying him, he's too

 

squirmy to hold for long. Best to

sleep a little, I was sure

I'd feel better after that. The last I saw

his little figure was playing in the sun.

One half hour,

and that ocean you see

 

was blue. The sea

that woke me was too

huge to be the one of half an hour

ago in which he waded, unsure

which sun

to trust, the one he saw

 

above or his reflection, that sore

red path of light which stretched across the sea.

My son

has left not two

prints of his small feet upon this shore.

Those feet of ours

 

whose piggies we would count for hours.

Every bird here seems to soar

the skies and answer to his name with sure

replies. I can barely see,

it is becoming too dark. The sea has swallowed the sun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Children's section - First prize

 

The Lace Maker

by Aimee Hughes

 

Thoughts were carved in the poor womans tarnished soul,

Mrs Jones is a white bead, pure,

Miss Millers, crystal for she had nothing to hide,

Mrs Simpkins, of a silver divinity,

Mrs Groven, of the wispy gossamer blue,

Miss Lovelace, the pink of a bud yet to bloom,

These thoughts tattooed in the sad ladys head,

For, when she died,

She feared,

They would find a black bead in her work box.

 

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Children's section - Second prize

The Seasons

by Trinity Coles

The raw glare of ice,

The invigoration of the strong blow that pushes you forward,

A furious thump from a tiny boot lifting the balls of water to the air,

A sheet of silver glitter spreads its way covering land,

The warmth of red flame awakens,

The white floating candyfloss turns to grey,

The flame is sleeping now,

The world is sleeping.

 

The white cushions of wool take their first steps into the world,

A dance from the gold velvet petals,

Nature’s satisfaction of her stalks of greenness,

A soft touch of wind knocking at Nature’s door,

The world opens its gate to summer,

Life arrives once more.

 

A touch of air feeling Nature’s comfort,

Sparks of sunlight diving to your eyes,

Glitter falling from the golden sphere of joy,

A gorgeous shimmer drifting through the rivers,

New life of exotic colour bursting to pleasure

Seeds blossom into large flowers,

God sprinkles his love to everyone.

 

Flat cushions of brown crunch scattered on Earth,

The children and the land is damp,

The sight of the sun becomes scarce,

The nights draw in.

Nature’s children unravel their colour,

The clear drops of ink dive to the ground,

Hear the naked tree whistle in its sleep.

 

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Children's section - Third prize

The Sun

by Harry Lipscomb

 

In the bakery of burning hell the workers of the

sun make the blades of light cut through the

clouds to furnace the universe with life

 

ooountilooo

 

the mighty army of the night comes to smother

the earth in darknessooo    ooowith hope the sun

fights back and soon the darkness is banished for another day!

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2011 winners

Category A (Adult section)
1st prize - C J Allen
2nd prize - Beatrice Garland
3rd Prize - Peter Gillott

Category Y (12-17)
1st Prize - Andrew Wynn Owen
2nd Prize - Jade Cuttle
3rd Prize - Alexandra Cussons

Category C (11 & under)
1st Prize - Aimee Hughes
2nd Prize - Trinity Coles
3rd Prize - Harry Lipscomb

Commended in Category A

Martin Figura x 2                         Beatrice Garland                    Deborah Alma                        Pippa Little                          George Horsman                    
Alan Francs
Keith Chandler

Commended in Category Y

Tali Hutson                                 Kathyn Cussons                      Ellie Myerson                            Lottie Pyer                           Helen Bowell

                              

Commended in Category C

Kasia Kapoor                   Catherine Fryer-Spedding              Lottie Buchannan              Maggie Jones                         Aimee Hughes