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Sentinel Annual Poetry Competition 2011
Results
First Prize: £500.00 goes to TERRY JONES for
'The Causation of the Virgin Mother in a Tipperary Barn'
Second Prize: £250.00 goes to LINDA BURNETT
for 'Honesty in Winter'
Third Prize: £125.00 goes to JEN CAMPBELL for
'The Chicken, The Egg and My Sister'
High Commendation Prizes:
£25.00 to
STEPHEN DEMPSEY for 'On Balance'
£25.00 to LYNN
ROBERTS for 'Turner: Rain, Steam, and Speed'
£25.00 to HARRY
BATTY for 'Goose Green'
£25.00 to PAUL
GROVES for 'From on High'
£25.00 to
GERALDINE PAINE for 'Her Riley'
First publication: The 8 Prize-winning poems above
will receive first publication in Sentinel Champions
magazine #9, February 2012.
Here is the
Judge's Report
Sentinel Annual Poetry
Competition 2011 –
adjudication report by
Roger Elkin
It was a pleasure to adjudicate the 2011 Sentinel
Annual Poetry Competition. The standard was very
high and the arrival at a short-list and final
positioning took several readings over several days and
with an incalculable amount of agonising.
The opening lines of one entry, Parts of the
Artistic Whole, provided a focus right from an
initial reading,
The words I write, I want them to be poetry,
To fall into tune with the pronunciation that is yours,
a rhyme that is mine
But a rhythm that we share.
These reminded me that what is important in all writing,
and particularly poetry, is the balance between what is
being said, and how it is said – meaning and means;
content and form; message and technique – and the
realisation that they are interdependent. Is this why so
few poems were written is traditional forms? For, apart
from a handful of sonnets and a couple of sestinas, most
of the writing was in what could be loosely called “free
verse”, as can be seen by the poems featuring in my
final choice. However, the writing of successful “free
verse” is as exacting an art as other forms – not just a
matter of “wanting”, or of breaking up words into
arbitrarily-divided lines; but the subtle use of
cadential rhythm, anaphora and parallelism to convey and
support the poem’s idea-system. I hope that this is
evident in the 8 poems chosen from the 363 entries.
Here, in no particular order of excellence, are the five
Highly Commended poems:
Her Riley: in six unrhymed couplets, the
poem conveys the careful search in a stacked garage, and
the revealing not only of a Riley car – “rare beauty …
last taxed Nineteen-Sixty”, but also offers a glance
into the driver of the car. This is a delightful cameo:
pointed, sensitive and economical.
From on High: the poem’s structure is
superbly crafted in five-lined stanzas fused by subtle
use of (half) rhyme. The poet, looking down on his
lover’s household via the use of Google maps, discovers
that he has been deceived. This time, the vehicle – “his
yellow car” – is evidence of betrayal in a foundering
affair, reinforced by the symbolic use of seasonal
cooling-off, “like an eternal winter”.
Goose Green: the moving account of the
death of a soldier-friend in the 1982 combat in the
Falklands War is conveyed by the parallel exploration of
fact and fiction: the Audie Murphy of film fantasy who
could “shoot one hundred Nazis … with one gun / And one
magazine” is set in opposition to the death of Tom “my
number one oppo who’s laid there freezing”. The writing
is uncluttered; the experience, unsentimentalised.
Turner – Rain, steam and speed: the poem
explores Turner’s 1844 painting of that title in four
short verses, with tight imagery and precise diction:
the nineteenth century “bunching its muscles for the
leap / into the twentieth”, and nature depicted as
having “every tantrum … crashing and whirling and
erupting / like a vast chord / from an elemental
orchestra / about the harp note / of man”. Very
effective writing.
On Balance: a superb description of
looking down from the cliff edge, and viewing not only
sea and sand, but time, geology, pre-history, evolution,
the past. The writing is charged with emotion and
conveyed by exact diction and description; the imagery
is startlingly fresh: “To ride screaming astride black
sickle backs of swifts, / Looping at noonday, alien,
starwards”.
Now to the Prize Winners:
Third Prize goes to the chicken, the egg
and my sister. This is a surreal poem, powerful
in its intensity, and disturbing in the vision it
portrays. The writing unnerves via its rather
matter-of-factual frankness; its exact depictions of
individual acts of mutilation; and its exploration of
illogical rationality. Each word is employed efficiently
and effectively to convey the horror. Even though very
few adjectives are used, the writing is visual; the tone
almost coldly non-judgemental. The poem manages to
contain the horror, the mental torture via a calculated
use of technique. The poem takes risks; and brings them
off!
Second Prize goes to Honesty in Winter,
a sensitive depiction of the seed heads of the plant
which simultaneously explores the tensions between
belief and betrayal; Christianity and Moon worship.
Consider the way in which the use of diction plots the
thought informing the poem, building up the picture
incrementally via close detail and visual and tactile
imagery, and the balance of negative and positive in
almost every line or grouping of reference. If you
doubt this, then write out for yourself the parallel
lists of adjectives, nouns and verbs!
First Prize goes to The Causation of the
Virgin Mother in a Tipperary Barn. This poem
caught my attention right from the start. What a riot of
writing in this mixture of the actual and mythical; the
real and imagined. There is a concrete realization of
the “lovely girl” and all her physical attributes which
are conveyed in a sensuous, sensual portrayal both of
participator and event – but thankfully(!) suggested
rather than too explicitly explored. Diction, image,
tone and stance combine to present a rich, effusive,
evasive narrative. Simultaneously, there is a real sense
of the presence of the narrator – and the rhythms of his
speaking voice are exquisitely conveyed with humour, an
eye to detail and a sense of tongue-in-cheekness coupled
with questioning credulousness that underpins the use of
the title’s “causation”. What is important here is what
is not said: the reader has to do some of
the work. In the hands of an unskilled writer this could
have proved limiting; in this instance, the poem gains
from the risk-taking. Superb, enviable writing. Well
done!
My congratulations go to the writers of the winning
poems; and my thanks to all who entered for letting me
share a space in their poetic worlds.
Thanks, too, to Nnorom Azuonye and the Sentinel Poetry
Movement for their efficiency and organization, and for
inviting me to adjudicate.
Long may poetry flourish!
Roger Elkin
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Roger
has won over 150 prizes and places, including 35 firsts, in
international poetry competitions. Author of Fixing Things and No
Laughing Matter, he was shortlisted for the Bloodaxe New Blood
Book-length competition (1987). He was one of 10 shortlisted (out of
4,000 entries) for the Strokestown International Poetry Competition
(2003), and one of 6 shortlisted for the Keele University Poetry
Prize (2007). His poetry has received the Lake Aske Memorial Award
(1982 & 1987), the Douglas Gibson Memorial Award (1986), the Sylvia
Plath Award for Poems about Women (1986), the Hugh MacDiarmid Trophy
(2003) and the first recipient of the Howard Sergeant Memorial Award
for Services to Poetry in 1987. He was literary advisor to the Leek
Arts Festival, for whom he organized an International Poetry
Competition (1982-1992); the co-Editor (1985-1988) of Prospice, the
international literary quarterly, issues 17-25 inclusive; and sole
Editor of Envoi 1991-2006, (issues 101-145). He was also judge of
the Sentinel Annual Poetry Competition 2010 which was won by
Christian Ward. 
