Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’’s judgement

We thought the quality of this year’s finalists was very impressive – a wide range of voices and subjects and forms. There were some new forays into familiar territory – childhood memories, nature’s epiphanies – and some bold attempts at more difficult terrain – violence, illness, guilt.

And we admired the way that – in some of these poems – the form seemed to be more than a shape imposed on an idea or story, more a co-maker, so the poet’s engagement with a form was changing and shaping the poem. At their best, these poems showed with poetic form what sculptors call ‘the resistance of the material’ with their stone, marble, wood.

Winners:

In Praise of Pylons… Beautifully judged, fine use of couplets, inventive imagery, and a genuine success in that hardest of forms – the praise poem. The absolutely ordinary is invested with meaning; the National Grid and the conveyance of power here becomes strange, volatile and affecting in the way the pylons simply abide.

Othello Gives….. A terrific title and idea, surprising, strange and disconcerting. Very arresting ending. This is the kind of poem that adds a little chaos and mystery to the wider franchise, and sticks in the mind long after reading, from the title on down.

Homunculus… A poem as extended ‘thought experiment’. Beguiling and unsettling, linguistically rich and tightly written. It manages to suggest great economy while it fashions life from the materials closest to hand, a quickening both in terms of subject and the way poems themselves can mobilise strange energies.

Commendeds:

Regret… Powerful central idea, a surreal image pushed to its fullest extent in pared back couplets.

Behind the Turnip… Witty and tender, a strange portrait with an excellent final image.

Thixendale… A precise and well controlled evocation of place.

A Selection of this year’s winning poems:

IN PRAISE OF PYLONS

by Victoria  Gatehouse

Sometimes I think of the pylons –

so ubiquitous we tune out

their dark glower over moor-land,

motorway and housing estate,

move unseeing beneath

massive steel shoulders

that never sag

from the weight of the Grid.

These are lonely Stoics;

their fate to hold

the power, yet never to feel

electrons leap

through the wires that hang

from wrist to twisted wrist.

To those who would brand them

as eyesores I say only this –

if you took the time,

you’d look up to them as more

than harbingers of light and tea

and your favourite soap;

the dying sun

worships the bones of them

and hurricanes can’t shake free

the diamonds that make up their core,

and if you take

the path beneath the power-lines

on a day when the rain offers up

beads on the wire

your hair might lift

as though at the swell of a choir.

Othello Gives an Interview about Tribal Scarification

Andrea Porter

I’m not talking now about adornment,

the showy cut as a thing of beauty,

the hacked out tracks laid down as

the signifier of adulthood or courage.

It’s not about the bite down on wood

as the skin is raised on fish hooks

then sliced through and fed on ashes

to keep away the spirits of the dead.

I’m talking about signs of belonging

to other ghosts, the secret mutilations.

The gouges, gashes, scores and slashes

hidden except from the ones we own.

These are our history written into deeper

flesh. We hide it in the ease with which

we come naked to lovers or in the skill

we demonstrate in giving all yet nothing.

The taut covering of skin, the thin spine

of a knitted ridge of flesh is just binding.

The book is shut to the uninitiated; scars

are studied only in the script of damage.

There are times we cannot read ourselves

but we can always sense a tightness,

this constant tug of something resisting,

a catch in the breath on certain words.

We can recognise our tribe in a man who

moves so his back is never to the door,

or in the flare of a woman’s pupils as

she walks the dark corners of a house.

Homunculus

A C Clarke

Every day I check him, the little man I’ve brewed

from root, semen, dung.

Hunched in his flask

he looks at me out of a minikin face

- heavy-lidded,  frog-mouth on the grin -

my image and likeness. I watch him grow

his budding limbs awaken, kick the glass,

his lips open, shut like a goldfish.

I can’t hear him.

But what a mandrake shriek rips from his throat

the day I crack the crystal shell.

Out he hops, no bigger than my thumb

perfect from pate to prick.

I coddle him in lambswool,

grub soil for worms, cull lavender for seeds,

fatten him tame. Daily

I stroke his rounding belly -

smooth as an egg – teach him to speak.

He calls to me now as he scuttles

among alembics, his squeal

drowned almost by the furnace roar.

I love to watch him. Though my schemes for gold

miscarry, he redeems all labours.

Forty days a-making

he never lay in woman’s menstrue

to have his blood turned milk,

my imp, my devil’s apple, my true son.

Regret

Sarah Stutt

The star catches her unawares

and flits into her mouth.

She tries to cough it out

but its barbed edges

hook inside her throat,

making it difficult to swallow.

A subdued, starry light

leaks from her eyes

like the half-hearted beam

of a broken torch.

Arms spread wide,

she keeps on rising,

looking downwards,

falling backwards.

Her skin, young and intact,

carries the scent of the sun

and her children,

whilst the star pulses

towards the indifferent

workings of her heart,

finally rests there,

emitting a punishing heat.

If only she had listened,

kept her mouth tightly shut.

Behind The Turnip Harvest

by Julia Deakin

One Saturday we went inside

the Pickerings’ – our semi neighbours.

Perched on their mustard settee

on our best behaviour, we sipped tea

in their front room, which was ours

inside-out, with the same criss-cross

wooden knick-knack rack but strange

ornaments and more furniture. And

they were croakier and even more

wrinkled here than outside. But kind.

Belle and Jack. Polyphotos of their son

Dennis who was working at Ferranti

in blue rompers. Embassy Regal

smoke climbed the Vymura trellis.

I took it all in, eating a lemon puff.

From then on, when their door slammed

you knew if you stepped through

our Rowland Hilder* where you’d stand.

After the last strains of our Doctor Who,

their telly’s alien kazoo made more sense.

*English marine and landscape artist, 1905-1993