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Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition July 2010
Judges report
By Derek Adams
It was enjoyable reading
so many interesting poems, but it was hard work judging the
competition, there were a lot of very good poems entered,
and getting it down to a shortlist of 25 was hard, let alone
the last 15.
I read the short listed
25 over and over again, it was difficult to choose the
winners but in the end the same poems kept catching my eye,
so here they are…
First Prize:
Eleonora of
Toledo laughs at a pantomime dildo
Well the
title stood out for a start! When I read this poem the first
time I was struck by the direct language. Unaware of whom
Eleonora of Toledo was, I didn’t need to know, because I had
a delightfully human portrait of her here in the poem.
Pregnant with her eighth child, at the theatre, laughing at
the sight of the giant’s wooden appendage “bursting out so
unexpectedly,” the baby’s kicks “chiding her bawdiness”.
In the third
stanza we get the throwaway piece of information “quite soon
/ they'll die of fever”, which is chillingly echoed in the
last lines, “fine
gold threads nosing from black silk / like grave worms.”
This is the work of a skilled
poet, perfectly constructed line endings and some subtle
internal rhymes.
Second prize: Ink
I liked the way this poem
meanders between the domestic (buying fetish gear in the
market, lunch with friends, opening the post) and the
cosmopolitan (Columbians writing love messages on bank note,
Iranian students protesting on bank notes, an Asylum seeker
in L.A) without losing its way. The narrator paints her “life
in lurid detail” to make her friends jealous, but this is a
front, she hints that not everything is alright. We hear of
people “never stop moving”, fleeing, “taking off”, an
estranged father who has moved on. All this anxiety is
focused on Tor (mentioned only in the first and last
stanzas) who has gone of to the fetish ball “to collect her
award.” The relationship between these two is not explicit,
daughter or partner? The narrator stays up all night waiting
for Tor to come home. The ink that runs through the poem (on
bank notes, in notebooks) appears as tattoo of a dollar sign
on Tor’s arm which smudges when rubbed with the narrators
licked finger; once again reminding us not everything is
what it seems, not even this is permanent.
Third
prize: Civvies
This story
of a school trip to the Imperial War Museum is wonderfully
paced, it hooked me with its first sentence, then reeled me
slowly through incident after incident to land me with a
great last line. I don’t know if the poet is a teacher, but
this poem has authenticity, even if it is all made up, we
believe in it. Even if, sadly, “Nobody chewed the words / of
"Dulce et Decorum est" thoroughly.”
Highly
commended:
Contemplation Over the After Eights,
a poem of
food and murder, what’s not to like! Right from the start
this poem has a darkness beneath each stanza’s description
of a restaurant meal and when it gets violent, it is turned
into a food metaphor. This is a poem that builds well and
has a climax that makes you look back into the poem.
Mother,
a poem of a mother suffering a bout of post-natal reality,
feeling alone, missing adult company, instead she has “big
tearful, trustful eyes” that “follow her around like guilt.”
She also misses her own body, replaced by heavy breasts and
a “deflated belly”. I particularly like the sense of unease
left by the last line,
Climate
Change,
is a nicely
constructed three act poem. Starting with the domestic, a
fridge with a “faulty thermostat.” Moving on to the global
“Species / on the verge of extinction.” Then turning to the
personal, in the “trapped / heat of a previous
relationship.” Clinched with a good last line.
Moving
pictures,
this is a
truly clever little poem that can be read two ways,
literally. Constructed in two columns side by side, which
can be read vertically down each column separately or read
across the two columns horizontally. Either way you get a
satisfying little poem.
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