Stafford Poetry Competition 2010

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 Stafford Poetry Competition. Thanks to the over 600 poets who entered over 700 poems and to Michael Hulse for judging the poems.

Judges report

Please look out for next year’s competition – and later this year our Under 18 Poetry Competition.

The £1000 prize winner –

BRIAR ROSE – Pat Winslow

It’s the pause button, or stand by, to be more accurate.
The deep sea of readiness, a yogi’s altered state,
the pulse that’s barely discernible, a heart beat
like the circuit of the earth round the sun, the span
of a slow winter, going under, the polar bear’s retreat.

If you could break through, get past just one soldier
tangled up in the briar defence, it would be like Ypres.
Like entering No Man’s Land. And after that, Halabja.
A black cat and a small boy by a wall, a young man
cradling a baby on a step, a pieta for the camera.

Or Pompeii. Lying where they fell. The escapes that failed.
The moment they knew the prophecy had been fulfilled.
The hand reaching out, the fallen horse still half-saddled.
You’d see the king collapsed in the arms of the queen.
But breathing. All breathing. And the spindle that stilled

in the fist of the daughter who tumbled down the staircase,
her neck at an impossible angle, her legs splayed, her dress
ripped where the heel of her shoe caught the hem, her wrist,
her arm, her knee, her thigh, her ribs probably, all broken.
You wouldn’t wish her awake, would not kiss her, would not kiss.

If you loved her, you’d turn back. You would leave her alone.
You’d cover your tracks, you’d wait until the briars had grown
over again and then, when there was no trace, you’d go home.
That, or you would look around, find a soft pillow or a cushion,
move her hair aside, cover her face and press till it was done.

£250 Prize – for a poem with a Staffordshire connection

HOMING – Liz Berry

For years you kept your accent
in a box underneath the bed,
the lock rusted shut by hours of elocution.
how now brown cow,
the teacher’s ruler across your legs.

We heard it escape sometimes.
a guttural uh on the phone to your sister,
saft or blart to a taxi driver
unpacking your bags from his boot.
I loved its thick drawl, g’s that rang.

Clearing your house, the only thing
I wanted was that box: jemmied open
to let years of lost words spill out —
bibble, fettle, tay, wum,
vowels ferrous as nails, consonants

you could lick the coal from.
I wanted to swallow them all: the pits,
railways, factories thunking and clanging
the night shift, the red brick
back-to-back you were born in.

I wanted to forge your voice
in my mouth, a blacksmith’s furnace:
shout it from the roofs,
send your words,like pigeons,
fluttering for home.

£50 Runners up prizes –

THE CURE – Bob Rogers

The philosopher’s treatment
Of a question is like the treatment
Of an illness (Wittgenstein)

To begin with, he said,
Stop telling yourself
that because everything dies
nothing makes :sense.

Ask yourself this:
because the last note
of a blackbird or flute
is followed by silence
do birdsong and music
signify nothing?

Look at this tree.
It grows the shape of itself,
puts out blossom and leaf,
gives the wind
visibility and sound.
Why is that meaningless
because it will die?

Think of it this way:
At the loneliest,
Outermost fringe of infinity,
and in the dreariest depths
of the ocean of entropy
it will still be a fact
that the tree did stand,
the bird did sing,
the flute did sound,
you were here.

That’s nothing but words,
just hot air, I said.

Well done! he replied.
Now can’t you see
that your words and mine
are two sides of a coin,
both of them nonsence?

In that case, I said,
why bother to speak?

That’s splendid! he said
Patting my shoulder
on the way to the door.
Why bother, indeed?

BUS RIDES WITH FAULKNER – Mike Bannister

Nine minutes from the factory gate,
in the quiet of a municipal library, I find myself
confronted, suddenly, by an ancient bear, in the woods
of Yoknapatawpha County; and for three years, night
and morning, ten mile between a hamlet and a town,
Faulkner is my friend and fellow traveller, aboard
the 147 Midland Red. Soon, I become the sly purloiner
of ‘works time’ reading Absalom, even at my bench,
transported by dark fables of the mythic South.

As the space is taken, money changes hands;
roads turn clamourous with all the light and shade
of human kind. Blood lines interweave, the present
embryonic in what went before. Compson, MacCaslin,
Sartoris, Varner, Snopes, each casual dynasty realised
through a Bourbon haze, by that shy genius, clothed
in huckleberry gear; the sole owner and proprietor
of a mansion at the river bend, a sawmill, and a jail,
places where the past has not quite started.

From half-remembered things, he moulds
a three-mile sentence, the clauses tentative at first;
the truth extemporised (it is the age of Jazz) fired
to perfection, given tongue: lingo of slaves and hunters,
the cadences of holy books, all miscegenate, with river
dirt, salt and time, like iron, enduring, magnificent.
Now, fifty years on, he waits for me; and some day
soon, we’ll ride again the dusty road to Jefferson,
me and the prince of modernists, the way it was.

EPITHALAMION – Richard Goodson

This moon does a human ear
pressed bloodless against the glass.
Do outlaws do monogamy?
Does my in-breath ape your out-breath?
You run towards me, your feet raising moths
like confetti in this borrowed light.

Here on the outhouse roof the tiles
still press the memory of the sun into my buttocks, calves and ankles.
I’ll be Achilles to our Patroclus,
Enkidu to your Gilgamesh,
Hadrian to your Antinous.
Come on up! Take my hand in holy, animal husbandry!

Have we not fought to walk in the same story?

This sky feels like the hold of an old Dakota,
musky with the weight of dark blue horses.
The whites of their eves are stars.

Let’s bail into our bodies’ finitude, jump down
into lavender; fireflies; transfused poppies.
Let’s make love on the earth.

We keep combusting,
retrieving our clothes from ashes.

The cast-iron Jesus at the edge of the maize-field hangs,
his thighs streaked with rust.
The sunflowers are on tenterhooks, about to do jade and flame again.
A quinine tang of air.
Something new.

I do
I do
I do.

AFTERLIFE – Jo Bell

I should have known that it would he like this.
I slow the engine, steer toward the bank
and throw the centre line to Dad
as if he’d know what to do with it.

On the towpath in their deck chairs
are my exes, Mv tiny suffragette grandmother
is learning, with her usual tight attention,
how to melt heroin in a spoon.

The mooring’s fast. I turn to speak with Dad
of boats, and all my lives since him;
as if a sycamore could fail to know
what happens when the keys spin out.

A RAT IN THE KITCHEN - Dawn Wood

The rat is happy in my sister’s kitchen.
He has access to dog pellets, makes a run

behind the cupboards. Mostly he squats above
the ceiling, weeing. He’s wily — proof:

he licks Nutella spread in the trap, and his lips.
He grows fat and gnaws more holes. His pee stinks.

She remembers a tale about soldiers stationed
in Belfast being given a neighbourly sandwich

by rebels: jam laced with ground glass,
so this is what she tries. Amazingly, it works.

I can hear Mrs White, arch consumer,
who we invented when we were children,

exclaiming this cartoon fact out of a bubble,
and her hygienic gloves and permed hair all a-whirl:

the rat is dead! and is decaying at its leisure,
vibrantly. Every morning there is a legion

of bluebottles and blowflies from maggots
rippling a creamy milk of rat in their guts.

My sister cannot eat in the kitchen, she cannot
invite anyone, even to the doorstep.

The smell hooks and bores and stalks, it progresses
through many fresh rouses, seeks all possibilities.

Finally, she stabs about blindly between the rafters
she roots out the body. The smell is still in her nose.

If one means an infestation, two are a plague.
My sister’s singing teacher, a pagan,

suggests that she bring a white flowering plant,
say, a geranium, inside, in a purple pot,

as an emblem of Saint Gabriel, who watches
over homes. And, one evening, she must pace

from room to room with a lit candle, chanting
with the attitude of a diva. This is far from
my sister’s character. She hasn’t smelled
a rat since. Mrs White is most amazed.

The following poems were commended:

General -

Making Fire – Simone Mansell Broome
Grampian House – Duncan Fraser
No talking, Food or Bicycle Allowed in the Library – C J Allen
Snow, like love – Jo Bell
The gift – Brian Burford
Allotment – Wayne Price
Download - Joan Michelson
The Agister’s Experiment - Gill Learner
Street Hermit – Mary Anne Perkins
The Juniper Tree – Pat Winslow

Local connection -

202983 Private Wakefield W G – Lawrence Harris
The Disused Tennis Courts – Peter Cash
Armitage Shanks – Clare Kirwan
Snow - A F Jackson
Home Again – Ben Wilkinson

Stafford Poetry Competion 2008-2009
A list of all the winners of the Stafford Poetry Competition

Stafford Under 16 Poetry Competition
Winning Poems of the 2008/9 competition.

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