Judge’s Report on the Swale Life Poetry Competition (April 2011)

By Claire Askew

- THE RESULTS -

Winners:

1^st Prize: “Blue-shirted” by Roanne O’Neil

2^nd Prize: “Triangulation” by Frances Donovan

3^rd Prize: “Rough Guide to the Lake District” by Christian Ward

Highly Commended:

“Eating Mackerel” by Wendy Pratt

“Garden of Remembrance” by Abegail Morley

…

JUDGE’S REPORT

Unlike previous contests I’ve judged – where I tend to try and whittle poems down by piling them in haphazard “yes,” “maybe” and “no” heaps – this time, I took a pencil to the hundred identically-typed poems I was sent, making notes in a bid to better crystalise my thoughts. The more I think about the last contest I judged, and the more I look at the poems, the more I wish I’d reversed the first and third prize winners’ places. I really didn’t want to end up making the same mistake again, so I needed a system that promised to be more thorough than my initial “yes please!” or “definitely not” reactions.

‘Blue-shirted’ was one of only a very few poems that escaped notes entirely. I managed to find fault in some way with almost every other piece – in some cases, these faults were as tiny as ill-chosen punctuation, and in others, I slashed big graphite crosses through whole stanzas (usually shortly before depositing the cross-marked poem in the “definitely no” pile). The printed copy of ‘Blue-shirted’ that now sits atop the ‘yes’ pile is still completely untouched, save for a small “Y” in the top right hand corner.

Because there really is nothing to find fault with about this poem. It is confidently arranged on the page, with the poet making good use of line breaks in order to create a sense of structure. The use of enjambment also goes some way to punctuating the poem – in eighteen lines, only two commas are used – and the effect, an assured, spot-on sense of pace, is excellent. For example, when the poet gives over an entire line to the command, “Listen”, they do indeed create the tiniest fraction of a silence, a pause, a tensing-up in the reader.

‘Tense’ is a good word to use to describe this poem. For the most part, it is a sparse, no-nonsense, almost prose-like description of a man getting dressed: “then he sits on the mattress / doubles over and pulls on his shoes.” However, there is both familiarity and a sense of unheimlich in this poem – it is clear that the speaker is not in the room with the subject, yet they are able to describe, even second-guess, his every move. With the command “Listen”, and in the lines that follow it (“He is not straightening out. / He is not standing to pocket his keys”), we come to understand that the speaker knows the subject (their father, we learn) very well indeed, but also that something about the familiar picture is wrong, possibly very wrong. The only adjectives used in the piece are colours – blue, twice, and white. Coupled with the “smell of dry-clean only things,” the poem takes on a subdued, washed-out kind of feeling. Running beneath this seemingly innocuous little poem is a strong thread of sadness, or perhaps threat. The fact that it is difficult to tell which only adds to the deft feel of the whole piece.

My copy of ‘Triangulation’ has “hell yes, this is great” scrawled across the bottom half of the page in excitable pencil. I was instantly drawn to this poem by its short, sparky lines and easy shape. It begins, “They say things come in threes”, and then lists various examples, chucking in “blind mice” alongside “disasters, deaths”, and – my favourite line in the whole thing – “Good poems, wisely struck.” The final image of the three-legged ginger cat as “An orange tripoc” spread such a broad smile across my face that I knew immediately that the poem would make my top three.

Why is it not number one? Because it is not as “wisely struck” as it all-too-easily could be. A general mis-use (and I suspect, misunderstanding on the part of the poet, all too easily done) of semi-colons bothered me – after “in threes”, a colon would have been far more appropriate to kick off the list, and in the final stanza, the semi-colon is screaming to be decaptiated into a comma. Finally, the “good poems, wisely struck” image is not left well enough alone – the line itself is great, but it is cheapened slightly by the fact that the poet dwelled far too long upon it, and ended up parroting themselves (“carefully placed”), utterly confusing me (“tri-lined”?!), and misusing yet another semi-colon into the bargain (if in doubt, folks, just go with a comma).

However, these are minor details. ‘Triangulation’ is a skinny nine lines long but bears reading after reading after reading. I have now looked at it so many times that I could probably recite it by heart, but it still makes me smile with its cheekiness and sparky originality.

‘Rough Guide to the Lake District’ appealed to me partly because I know exactly what it’s talking about – pick a particularly stinking wet day, and there’s no greater anticlimax anywhere in the English countryside than “rashers of rain… on the Windermere steamer”. I also liked it because it’s deliberately cheesy, and it refuses to apologise for the fact. The poet happily puns and rattles off a hyper-obvious wordplay at every possible opportunity, likening the weather’s “rashers” to “lunch at Little Chef” and taking things just to the very threshold of Too Far with the lines “The pencil museum / at Keswick made everyone sharp as pencil-tips / and we took turns sketching each other’s faults // on the way back to the hotel.” This is a confident, irritated voice having a good old British moan about “crap weather” and tourist destinations “closed for repairs”, but it manages to remain concise, entertaining and just poetic enough to justify its genre. It’s nicely paced – suitably ranty, but controlled – again, making only minimal use of punctuation and demonstrating a strong understanding of enjambment and its general usefulness. Unfortunately, the piece is let down by a mediocre ending – after all the effective half-jokey, half-pissed-off wordplay, I’d geared myself up to a darn good punchline. Instead I got the jarringly poetic-with-a-capital-p streaking of algae “like honey across the water” of Lake Windermere. The fact that it’s poisonous algae adds only a tiny bite of the disdain of the rest of the poem, which disappointed me somewhat, and perhaps made the difference between second and third place.

‘Eating Mackerel’ is highly commended because it held my attention throughout in spite of being fifteen (long) lines on a very mundane and everyday act. The phrasing, though long and intricate, felt deftly handled, and was well punctuated and skilfully paced. The piece contains lovely, unusual images such as “golden smoke” as a description of the fish’s skin, and spot-on yes-you’re-right ones, too – I particularly enjoyed “cellophane ribs”. This latter is also a good example of the poet’s fine ear for sonics, further illustrated by “salt-sweet-fish” and “the way Houdini caught / and broght back the key”. The poem didn’t make the top three primarily because it felt in need of a hard technical edit – some of the lines were a little laboured, some of the phrases a tad overdone. “Something / about the little bones makes me want to stop looking / with my eyes” had me scrawling what else would you look with? in the margin, and felt too obvious a please-edit-me line to overlook. But the poem is strong, unusual, and I savoured it as I read… much as the poet, I think, intended me to.

Finally, ‘Garden of Remembrance’ grabbed my attention with its sureness of voice. You can really hear the speaker addressing their dead loved one – in a manner that prevents the poem from ever sliding into anything remotely saccharine – and in their short, guarded statements you can hear not just grief but also uncertainly, self-consciousness, confusion and anger. The poem could be tighter – notably, the unintended (I think) rhyme at the first stanza break (“keep walking / round the square, one step behind the family // looking where we dare” draws far too much sing-songy attention to itself and breaks the voice ever so slightly. There’s also a disparity between the speaker “see[ing]” the loved one’s name and then noting that it doesn’t “sound” right. However, the poem builds to a beautiful, subtle end line – the inclusion of “kind of” here (“it kind of folds in my mouth and belongs to nothing”) reveals so much about the speaker, their feelings, their entire social context. It’s another short piece at only nine lines, but – in spite of its flaws – it does and says a huge amount in that tiny space.