Winner
Martin Figura  "Morning Room"

The family sits round the table
ready for the meal, which is me
trussed up at the ankles and wrists
cooked to a golden finish like a chicken.

Uncle Philip as head of the family
sharpens the knife, carves slices
of flesh from my thighs and deftly
transfers them to oven-warmed plates.

Now everyone gets stuck into the broccoli
and potatoes. They are pouring gravy,
spooning stuffing from my rib cage.

Runner up
Christine McNeill "Côte d'Azur"

The old town spiralled up steps.
Cats sat for good purpose,
a caged parrot screeched Bonjour.
By a red door, a mongrel with independent yearnings.

Out of breath, we reached the cimètiere on the hill.
By the tomb of a Russian emigré who'd died of TB
I wanted to take off my clothes,
but among the many wreaths lost heart.

Back at the gîte, we mixed butter, flour, eggs.
Beat it to a smooth consistency,
poured in milk and whisked. Scooped the mixture
into paper cases, did the icing, pink, white, yellow, green.

It hardened quicker than expected;
you bent your head and bit into those gooey ridges:
I saw the love bite on your neck - not mine -
chrysanths, dyed blue, wilted in the sun.

Commended:-

Emily Dening "Hoopoe"

There,
a pother of gold and black,
curved beak in the baked ground,
curious lolloping walk.
I can still roll its latin name –
Upupa epops –
around my tongue.
How, age ten, I’d trace its picture
like an ache,
from my Observer book,
wanting more than
sparrow, blackbird, pigeon.
Not knowing it needs heat,
this delirious Spanish heat.
How could those colours fit
with my garden’s scribble
of privet and hawthorn,
and long lines of moss between the cracks.

Anne Osbourn "Brush Strokes"

Eva is an artist.
She paints chromosomes.
The gene for love, coloured red
lies close to the telomere
on chromosome five
next to envy
green as cat’s eyes.
Hope is polygenic,
scattered through the genome
like gold dust.

Anne Osbourn "Wood"

Wood anemone         a wild spring flower, Anemone nemorosa.
Wood engraver        a maker of wood engravings.
Wood fibre                 fibre obtained from wood, especially as material for paper.
Wood hyacinth            bluebells, roaming free.
Wood nymph           tree-dwelling dryads, light wingéd.
Wood pulp                   wood fibre reduced chemically or mechanically to pulp as raw materialfor paper.
Wood screw                a metal male screw with a slotted head and sharp point.
Wood sorrel            Oxalis acetosella, a small quiet plant with trifoliate leaves and white
                                   purple-veined flowers.
Wood spirit                 crude methanol obtained from wood.
Wood                           trees that stand together.

Martin Figura "Fixer"

My father gave me a Delmonta
twin lens reflex, a German camera
from the fifties. Taking a picture
with it was a slow and clumsy process,
everything was murky on the ground glass
and moved in the opposite direction
to what you expected.

I used it to photograph my new mother.
She loved the camera and it loved
her back. She held her baking under
its nose, straight from the oven; laughed
for it when she was drinking and smoking;
blew it kisses; paraded in each new dress
for it; closed her beautiful eyes and slept for it.

Later in the darkroom I would conjure
her up in a dish of liquid. Wash away
the silver, fix her, make her permanent.

2006 poetry competition - adjudicator's remarks

It was a pleasure to judge the competition.

I received 90 or poems. Those that floated to my attention – and I am only one reader, with his own biases and predilections – felt like poems that had been written by people who read poems, and were aware of the variety of poetic strategies employed by poets today.

There could have been more runners-up, but I decided at the outset that I would only choose five. My feeling was that there had to be a cut-off point, or the idea of being a runner-up would become meaningless.

The runners-up, I hope, are various: there’s a found poem, ‘Wood’, that I liked because it was a found poem, which I always think are strangely difficult to make work as well as ‘Wood’ does; I liked ‘Hoopoe’ for its fluency and its skilful refusal to rise to an easy finale; ‘Cote d’Azur’ is a witty, dark poem, that manages to suggest a whole exotic and erotic history in its spare 16 lines.

The winning poem edged just ahead of the runners-up. I liked its strangeness and its lucidity, and the way these two qualities were bound together. The entries came to me anonymously and – as you do when you read anonymous work – I wondered if ‘Morning Room’ was written by a man or woman: I decided that I couldn’t decide, and that this was another fine and unsettling thing about the poem.

Jacob Polley