Stafford Poetry Competition 2010Judges Report This second Stafford poetry competition has again been a success, like the first competition last year, if success means that it attracted a lively, accomplished bag of entries from poets with many and various skills at their disposal, and produced stunning winners. The number of entries was somewhat down on last year, perhaps reflecting the pressures upon the hardworking Muse in times of recession, but the quality wasn’t. As I read my way through the near-eight hundred entries, I felt a growing satisfaction that any worries the Library and Council might have had about the sustainability of an international poetry competition run from Stafford were being so convincingly dispelled. The winning poem in the open, international section, ‘Briar Rose’, is an imaginative tour de force that revisits the story of the Sleeping Beauty. Vividly it presents the state of suspended animation into which the princess and the whole of the court have fallen, that time in the fairy tale between the pricking of her finger on the spindle and the awakening with a kiss. Every animate creature in the castle is frozen — or rather, in the modernized, fresh language of winner Pat Winslow, on stand by. Surrounded by the briars that have grown up to enclose it, this uncanny terrain is like a First World War emplacement defended by barbed wire. And, in Pat Winslow’s mind, the thought of Ypres and of no man’s land leads on associatively to the contemporary image of Halabja. Or, alternatively, she thinks of the total arrest at Pompeii. It’s as if there need be no end to the images that scattergun through the first half of the poem ... but then, as she begins to dwell on the damaged state of the princess, the poet introduces a darker note, and comes to suggest that the kinder option might be not to wake the Beauty at all, or indeed to smother her with a pillow and put her out of her misery. The dark options at the end suddenly feel horrifyingly close to the temptations that might rise to the mind of the despairing nearest or dearest at the bedside of a woman in a coma, say. In this analogy, buried just below the surface, there is the same contemporaneity as there was in the mention of Halabja. Pat Winslow, already a poet with several small press collections to her credit, impresses at every turn of this thoroughly energetic rethinking of a story we all thought we knew. Congratulations to her on taking the first prize of £1,000. The five runner-up poems are a bracing reminder of what very different forms excellence takes in poetry. In ‘Bus Rides with Faulkner’, Mike Bannister weaves with syntactic panache and lexical detail in and out of Faulkner’s world and Faulkner’s sense of language, as if to present to us in real time the many full dimensions of the experience of reading. Richard Goodson’s ‘Epithalamion’ is a rhapsodically gay celebration of sexual joy, unforced in its learning, unembarrassed in its desire, unstrained in the vigour and inevitability that meet in the closing threefold repetition of two all-important words. Jo Bell’s ‘Afterlife’ manages the near-impossible trick of turning-about continually within its very tight space, producing not only the startling image of the grandmother but also the seemingly timeless image in its last two beautifully simple lines. Dawn Wood’s ‘A Rat in the Kitchen’ is relentlessly funny and down-to-earth in its straight-faced account of an amiable domestic history, bringing something of Stevie Smith to the goings-on. And Bob Rogers, talking us in doggedly empirical fashion through ‘The Cure’, brings us in po-faced splendour to a tart restatement of Wittgenstein, “why bother to speak?” — deflating high philosophy to humble common sense. All five of these runners-up were particularly unlucky to be up against Pat Winslow on this occasion. Mike Bannister has a small press reputation, Dawn Wood’s first collection was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize last year, Jo Bell has been Cheshire Poet Laureate and organizes National Poetry Day, and Richard Goodson and Bob Rogers have both been published in nationally visible places. This was a close race. Congratulations to everyone. This year too I’ve chosen to commend ten further poems that stood out but didn’t quite make it into the prizewinning ranks. Two of them — Pat Winslow’s ‘The Juniper Tree’ and Jo Bell’s ‘Snow, like love’ — are additional fine performances by the first prize winner and a runner-up respectively. Simone Mansell Broome’s celebration of the primal act of barbecuing, Duncan Fraser’s meditation on Poles, work and identity, C J Allen’s delight in the life of libraries, Brian Burford’s lyrically assured ‘The Gift’, Wayne Price’s moving and finely cadenced attempt to dig back through memory to his father, Joan Michelson’s barbed report from the life of the newly unemployed, Gill Learner’s nicely judged unicorn poem (so much stronger for leaving that word to the last), and Mary Anne Perkins’ undeluded yet heroic ‘Street hermit’, are all persuasive, accomplished performances with real oxygen in their blood. Alongside the main prize of ₤1,000, another prize of ₤250 was once again offered this year to a poem with a Staffordshire connection. This prize goes to Liz Berry for ‘Homing’, a finely sensitive exploration of the Staffordshire vocabulary, those words and sounds that are closeted in its dialect and (as the poem eloquently reveals) have sometimes been hidden away even from close kin, for reasons that perhaps originated in the embarrassments of class and regional consciousness in the past but which led to a denial of a part of self, and of home. Liz Berry, a young writer who took an Eric Gregory Award (for poets under thirty) from the Society of Authors last year, comes from the Black Country but has studied and now teaches in London, so I re-read her poem, once the decision had been communicated to the Library and the seal of anonymity had been broken, with a strengthened sense of the homesickness and longing that are apparent in every line of the poem. It’s a fine, nuanced piece of writing, and ends impeccably. In this category I have chosen to commend five other poems: Lawrence Harris’s tender and probing ‘202983 Private Wakefield W G’, Peter Cash’s ‘The Disused Tennis Courts on the Wedgwood Estate at Barlaston in Staffordshire’ (an excellent example of finding a resilient subject for poetry in what might at first glance seem an unpromising everyday place), Clare Kirwan’s robust and devil-may-care ‘Armitage Shanks’, A F Jackson’s emphatically local sestina reporting talk with an old woman, and Ben Wilkinson’s virtual Baedeker of Stafford, packaged under the nostalgic title of ‘Home Again’. All of these poems had real strengths, and stood out by virtue of their clear individuality from Staffordshire poems that merely touted the county as the best (etcetera). This competition is for poems, not for tourist board slogans! The prizes will be officially awarded on 6 May, in an event that includes short readings by the judge and by 2009 winner Grevel Lindop as well as by those of this year’s winners who can attend. This year’s two principal winners Pat Winslow and Liz Berry, the runners-up, and the writers of the commended poems, all wrote superb work, but the standard overall was high, the subjects unpredictable, the formal and linguistic takes resourceful and varied, and I did my work with real pleasure and a sense that, with poets like these around, the art isn’t yet in any serious danger. Michael Hulse
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