East Riding Open Poetry Competition 2009

BEVERLEY FESTIVAL POETRY COMPETITION: JUDGE'S REPORT

read 1^st prize poem | read 2^nd prize poem | read 3^rd prize poem | read all poems

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There were just short of 1,600 entries.

The first reading was the easy part, yielding 200 or so items that had caught and held my attention for different reasons: emotional gravity, ingenious construction, some special quality of voice, surprise angle of attack, a single arresting line or phrase - anything that might cry out for at least a second reading.

One curious feature was the larger than expected number of poems in demanding forms: sonnets, villanelles (especially), sestinas, even a pantoum used bravely to address a subject of unmistakable emotional importance to the writer. Their relative absence from my final list suggests, however, that formal ambition was more often a constraint than a key to expressive freedom.

Next stage, and more difficult, was the establishment of a short list. After some reluctant hardening of the heart, I was glad to arrive at one as short as 45 items. By this time, I was in a mood to tell those 45 to go and sort out the winners among themselves, quietly and democratically.

So it was some days before I could return to the task, and then at least a week of daily shuffling, as I placed poems in new, obstinately unsatisfactory orders of merit. Contenders were dropped only when repeated reading had begun to show their weak points unignorably. The final thirteen - three main prize-winners and ten commended - were the result of a dance, in and out, of a slowly decreasing number, something like musical chairs. There are still poems I regret not having been able to include; some indeed that I wish I could have written myself; but I am happy that the following list is as strong as it is.

Third Prize goes to 'Wild Half-Can' by Ed Reiss, which establishes its starting-point in an allusion to Shakespeare, before taking off, with appropriately punchy low-life vigour, in a wholly modern direction.

Second Prize to 'Final Report' by Duncan Brewer, which not only avoids all the traps - clichéd sentiment, rhetorical excess - as it deals with a subject largely (and oddly) neglected by entrants to this particular competition, but also generates real tension through its superimposed metaphor before culminating in a truly bizarre vision of 'dwarf headmasters / danc[ing] their fury'.

And First Prize to 'Thessalonians' by Christopher North, which transfers the apocalypse to a suburban setting and thereby, with quietly achieved but genuinely unsettling effect, connects St Paul's imaginings to real and recent pictures that none of us will be able to put out of our minds.

The ten commended poems are:

• 'String Figures' by Mike Barlow, for the gradual development of the metaphor at its heart, and the true light it throws on the dynamics of family behaviour;
• 'Express Delivery' by Maxine Barreit, for its identification of poignancy in a situation of banality and bathos, and in spite of its numerous typos and spelling mistakes;
• 'Lance -Corporal Ellis' by Michael Swan, for the sudden and overwhelming emotional ambush sprung in its final stanza;
• 'The Breakers' by Peter Knaggs, because it is not only very funny, but expands its comedy beyond all expectation through inspired metaphorical extravagance;
• 'Fatalities', by Anthony Watts for its startling observations, and for its writing which disguises tender feeling as almost callous dispassion;
• 'Reflections in a Samovar' by Susan Reynolds, as a piece both of finely modulated versification and Chekhovianly understated story-telling;
• 'When the wren sings' by Pamela Coren, because it is exactly as compact and vivid as the bird it describes;
• 'National Trust' by David Underdown, because it encompasses as much as a far longer, prose short story, and contains the phrases 'Bubbles born from nowhere' and 'like vultures patient that their meal is safe';
• 'Making Space for Water' by Jean Watkins, because it takes the carefully handled sonnet form and puts it to convincing new use;
• 'Pause' by Mandy Coe, for the measured, delicate and trustworthy way it explores its precise emotional territory.