Winners List
All comments below are from our judge, George Szirtes.
General Notes
There are ten good sophisticated and ambitious poems here and it has been very difficult to choose between them. My final choices may be wrong, but I looked for originality of approach, for the ability to shift subtly and lightly between perceptions, for the emotion to rise out of the poem, discovering itself, rather than being pumped into it, and for a sense of consequence, the sense that something difficult was being attempted, something approaching comprehensiveness.
1st prize: ‘The tank who fell in love with a village’ by Mark Fiddes
The light but bitter ironies of the poem treat of a complex experience with a biting imperial joke at the end. I like the distance, the way the poem doesn’t cram me with preloaded emotion. The cultural context is conveyed through the senses – the sense of taste, the playing of Chick Corea in Montreux – and the historical reference arrives at the right time through Damascus and Sednaya military prison. The enigmatic title presumably refers to a tank attack on the beautiful village and the heraldic device adds a strong specific historical-political edge. The last verse completes it.
The poem does a lot in a small space. It doesn’t need more information. It conveys what seems to me a genuine, interesting troubled state of mind brought about by both personal and national history.
2nd prize: ‘The Pearlfishers’ by Raymond Solytsek
The unusual equating of discovering pearls with the discovery of sex in the form of a torn up pornographic magazine (or that is what I think it is) is startling but oddly effective for early teenage sexuality, which is neither approved not condemned but is understood, particularly in its image of ‘the chill of a coming thunderstorm’ and those bursting ‘raindrops like tadpoles’. It seems like a comprehensive feat of the imagination.
3rd prize: ‘A Pirate Ship of Today’ by Wes Lee
The poem refers to a rape trial in Ireland in 2018. The image of the pirate ship as the agent of violent assault is troubling in its us eof J M Barrie’s Peter Pan, with Captain Hook and the crocodile, but the sinking of the galleon lends it a kind of beauty. I wasn’t sure about the use of. It seemed to associate the rape case with a children’s play and film. But there was no questioning the poem’s passion and feeling for language.
Highly Commended: ‘The Krakow Notebooks’ by Elizabeth Whyatt
A difficult subject area because it has been so often covered in literature and we know the events before the poem has presented them – in other words we are aware of the feelings expected of us – but I like its staccato spareness. Its humaneness, its notational observations, and the way its juxtaposition of ‘you’ ‘we’ and ‘I’ places us in the experience. The long lines, mostly in couplets, allow the poem some space while retaining a sense of rhythm.
Other shortlisted poems (listed in no particular order):
‘Gustavo whispers, It’s Las Vegas, but not the one in Nevada’… by Jonathon Greenhause
It is a rather cinematic account of events as remembered relating to Argentina’s Dirty Wars, though the date 1998 suggests the poem is set after that, though still dangerous enough to inspire fear. Everything is vivid and confident. We could be in Graham Greene or John Le Carré land. I am not sure whether Gustavo is being criticised or mocked by the narrative voice. I am not sure what the narrative voice is doing there. I want to see the whole movie.
‘A Hologram of the Sun’ by Wes Lee
I didn’t fully grasp this. There is a host of detail but I am not sure what the central event is except that it is probably traumatic and that an emergency room is involved. There is plague, war, stadiums, fridges, wilds, living rooms, seals, bones in the desert and much else. Maybe just a little too much.
‘Porfirio Rubirosa learns to love’ by Jose Buera
This is fun, a rapid succession of glamorous women who had affairs with the handsome, amply endowed playboy Porfirio who cadges off all of them. I presume the woman he has learned to love is his last wife, Odile, but I have no idea how he has learned to love her. That would be a fascinating novel or essay but I feel his life is whirling past me in a spectacular but insubstantial fashion.
‘I Drink Sriracha in the Dark’ by Sofia Lobo
Sriracha is hot spicy stuff and it seems to be there to distract from a terrible but undefined pain. Even, slightly incongruously, Germolene fails to help. As the poem says ‘You can’t put a wound in a wedding dress’. That’s a very memorable image. The pain at the core is serious but the specificities of Sriracha, Germolene and the Hoover somehow lighten the tone.
‘The Japanese Garden at Giverny’ by Isi Unikowski
I liked the narrative and conversational spaciousness of this. It has a kind of knowing humour though the subject is the meeting of Japanese and European temperaments and cultures which is serious in itself. There is delight in it but maybe its anecdotal ease makes it seem more trivial than it is.
‘Gathering Sea Glass at Beadnell Beach’ by Gail Lander
This has some lovely elements like the sky forgetting to be blue and the grey sighs are nice and ‘what returns is gentler than what went in’. Maybe the last verse is telling us more than it’s showing and is slightly overloaded with mentions of grief, grace, full hearts, kindness, loved. A little less might go a longer way.
Longlist (with names)
Top 20
‘Quickening’ by Peter Surkov
‘I am a nothing-doer’ by Kate Griffiths
‘The Art of Not Drowning’ by Esther Lay
‘Even the Cyclists’ by Ursula Kelly
‘In Search of Canine Nirvana’ by Kelly Louisa Balliu
‘By the 4th Cockcrow’ by Adam Brannigan
‘Le Jardin Domestique’ by Roland Perrin
‘Resolutions at 77’ by Martin Reed
‘Winter Accounting’ by Sarah Leavesley
‘Peacocks Can’t Swim’ by Matt Abbott
Congrats to our winners. Here is the shortlist and longlist, with names. Well done to all of you!
