Michael Laskey's (Adjudicator) Remarks

Winner:     

Detente

The poem opens with a finely compressed image: the chalk and the slate do first light beautifully, as well as prefiguring the child beginning to learn, and giving it all a historical perspective - the situation about to be described is not new. It's a bold geological simile too, the two bodies lying back to back, seen as continents, their rock-like rigidity and coldness and maybe their fear suggested by 'petrified'. The reader assumes till the end of the second quatrain that there are only two bodies in the bed, that they have cold-shouldered one another, but at the turn of the sonnet - it's now that one notices the deft unemphatic rhymes - we discover there's a small child lying between them, their bedfellow. And innocently, ignorantly, against all the odds, the child tries ('starts on' is interesting: it implies surely that he will persist?) to bring them 'together', the poem's last word. Though it can't be done, we may have Detente.

Highly Commended

 View from the Lucam

This sophisticated poem achieves its engaging and convincing voice by impressionistically balancing technical terms like 'lucam' and 'wither pads', a colloquial naturalness e.g. 'what you get..' and 'kids' for children, with a slightly old fashioned tone/colour - the 'artist-gentleman', the 'grouch' (actually according to my OED 'U.S. slang 1903') and the 'effin' and blindin". The potential sentimentality of the subject is held in check by the sharp detail and in the last line by the painful desperation of 'claw back'.

Into the Open

A similar subject to 'Dust to Dust', but much sparer in its treatment, and much bleaker. A son or daughter sits with a dying mother in hospital, trying without success to hold onto her, to stay connected. The submerged metaphor of the mother as a boat drifting away is suggestive and the couplets, with their intermittent half and less-than-half rhymes - asleep/grief, nurses/measure, gone/again and us/doze - enact their lack of togetherness. The final mother/moth image is particularly strong.

Ghosts Might Be Like This

Admirably exploratory and unusual, this poem attempts to go beyond consciousness as we know it, managing to describe an awareness that no longer depends at all on the senses in detailed specific sensory terms, making the negative positive, each loss paradoxically a gain. The final simile is especially haunting.

Brother   

This poem broods on a sibling relationship - it is an act of brooding, slightly obsessive: 'you walk/endlessly', your 'stumbling' and 'the insistent piping call' all have a metaphorical force. It engages the reader by its restraint - what destination? whose blood? We don't know for sure, but we can make enough sense of the brother's two italicised remarks and the incident on the tennis court to be intrigued. Those two 'ours' - 'our list' and 'our house' - are interesting. And the subtle way the rain image, the flung 'handfuls of uncooked rice', prepares us for the wedding.

Final Descent

Vivid detail here and an inventive use of the ghazal form, with not just the end of each couplet repeating, but also the beginning; and with not just the 'rhyme' in the first line all the way through (puzzling, breakfasting, tracking, getting etc) but internal rhymes in the second line as well (streets/feet, alive/five, scores/four, freedom/three, losing/two) that only break down, like the relationship, in the last two verses.

Poems 

Detente

An image drawn with the chalk of morning
on the slate of night: tucked up back to back
their outlines, petrified in half-light, look
you might say like two continents climbing

out of a sea of sheets. All that's good - all
that lives - clings to the outward facing shores.
Hinterlands of backbone and cold shoulders
are what turn on their bedfellow - too small

to serve the full stretch in his cot alone,
still of their wilderness he shows no fear,
paddles in the middle of their ocean,

grabs archipelagos and - unaware

of what's involved and that it can't be done -
starts on hauling continents together.

 VIEW FROM THE LUCAM

Flatford Mill, 1821

There's not much light in lucams. What you get
comes mostly when the trap door's fastened back
to Set the winch-chain drop. However, ours
has got a knot hole, eye-height on one board,
widened by some young mill hand with a blade.

I listened to the harness jingling,
pressed my face against some grubby woodwork,
through a cobweb watched the unladen wain
enter the ford, team of three in red felt
wither pads, their waggoner, whip in hand,

flicking them onward, while my pa! Jacky whistled up his spaniel, snuffling in the shallows. A fisherman waded through reed beds and the artist-gentleman satin his favourite spot on the bank.

Then you came into view on Willie Lott's old landing stage. I swiftly made a mess of Master Spider's handiwork. You rolled your left sleeve shoulder high and knelt to fill the pitcher from the stream. A sunburst turned

your skin to butter-gold. Some grouch below me yelled out, "Are you going to haul these effin' and blindtn' grain sacks up or not?" The stone he flung clanged against metalwork. I gave you one last glance, got on with it.

Three score of harvests have been reaped since then,
the kids you bore me have got kids themselves
and now I'm squinting through the spy-hole
of an old man's memories, eager to
claw back the day I first clapped eyes on you.

INTO THE OPEN

I read between the lines: your face asleep 
contorting sometimes - pain or grief,

or just involuntary tugging as
a hawser's loosed? You wake. I stroke

your face, your feet, but feel
I can't connect. You mouth a word.

Try on a smile for size. The nurses 
check your drips and tethers, measure

input, output, turn you. Kind and clean, 
the gentle masks of faces as they touch

places that made me. But you've gone 
far from your anchorage again.

I search for ties to haul on, signs of all
you meant a long time back. And find

you're such a long way out, I can't
catch your drift.

But still hold tight for both of us 
to something beyond sense. I doze

beside your berth. Wake; see night
pressing a loosely fluttering face

to window glass:
a giant moth trembling, lit

by everything it cannot reach.

Ghosts Might Be Like This

There was a man
who in an ordinary place
lost everything but gained
a kind of wisdom, waking
to find himself beyond hearing;
sensing instead, as if inside his head,
a rapturous murmur like a million tiny birds
filtered by light years,
a heavenly tinnitus;

who clapped his hands and heard no noise
yet felt the air disturbed;
who saw beneath a soundless sea lugworms
and tubeworms writhe in sand
and molluscs stretch feathery tongues
to catch small creatures;

who, during days that followed
as senses sloughed off one by one,
the scent of apples, the mellowness of milk,
the tightness of clasped fingers,
as each skin peeled off, one by one,
felt not empty but overflowing,
not bereft but blessed
by the murmured music in his mind;

who, in his final blindness,
explored the unfelt contours of his face,
the bone below each cheek, the orbit of each eye;
who lay beneath the stars and knew precisely
the unimaginable distance of each,
who felt precisely
each fleck of starlight on his face,
could count them photon by photon.

Then, towards the end, he knew that ghosts might be like this, like a speck of light, like a chink in the blank wall, like a tiny reverberation more insistent than the rest.

 

Brother

It's not on our list of
destinations. Over the
phone. Bald as that. No
room for a second
thought.

Unless, of course, you are already there

being handed those words

to carry around with you

as you walk

endlessly
along the shoreline

stumbling on fat pebbles

to the insistent piping call of the oystercatcher

the saline shelf subsiding beneath you

as you bend over to examine a piece of sea-worn
driftwood

Or sitting in the house
rain flinging itself, handfuls of uncooked rice,
at the windowpane
as you revisit other places
the wedding gift rejected
not in keeping with the style of our house

the metal mesh gate
left to swing
as he strode onto the tennis court
to claim his half-hour
never even noticing the blood

I find all these places now
in the gaps between the pebbles
in the lashing of the rain

Final descent

After two weeks of puzzling at map folds like hapless origami students we identify London streets from six thousand feet.

After two weeks of breakfasting on oolong and quiver-fresh sushi tea and shortbread keep us alive at five thousand feet.

After two weeks of tracking the Tokyo Giants in the Herald Tribune we're settling other scores at four thousand feet.

After two weeks of getting by with pointing and grunting our tongues find freedom at three thousand feet.

After two weeks of searching for train lines in neon labyrinths we're losing our way at two thousand feet.

After two weeks of sticking out as huge and clumsy gaijins context is everything at one thousand feet.

After two weeks of smiling for the sake of the album we're at zero.