CAFE WRITERS COMPETITION:  JUDGE’S REPORT

 The four prize-winners and the fifteen shortlist poets are to be congratulated.  Their poems are an excellent demonstration of the strength, variety and individuality of the current state of poetry.  These poets emerged as clear cut winners and short-listers drawn from my longlist that was itself made up of substantial work.

 The four prize-winning poems held my interest from an initial reading, and continued to offer rich and compelling perspectives through subsequent readings for a number of reasons.

 THE CHICKEN THAT SAVED MY CHILDREN

The language here is musical, grounded, conversational, direct and active, carrying the personal and the wartime aspects of its narrative with grace, wit, and striking confidence.  Employing a muscular single stanza form, there is not a wasted word, nor uncompleted transition – a beautiful poem.

 MUD

This spare forceful sonnet's controlled and poignant rage proves that there is, for the original and insightful poet, always something new and important to be said about the first world war.  Here is a tactile, compelling, and unflinching poem. 

THE RADIOLOGIST AND THE CONSULTANT GYNAECOLOGIST

Another sonnet.  Wonderful to see this form appear twice in this list of winners. This poem achieves its shape on the page and in the mind with a telling balance between reticence and deep feeling.  The connection between the two women of the poet's title is portrayed with great poise;  deceptively quiet, the atmosphere of sorrow, mortality and friendship has great depth.  Each detail depicted here is unforced, essential, with much resting successfully on the exactness of the underplaying, and of the exactness of the each word's individual resonance – for example, 'authority'.

 THE WOMAN WHO WASHED HER HAIR IN THE ORCHARD

Again, a single stanza form, again controlled, and achieving a remarkable and dramatic momentum.  This poem has cinematic force and technique, and combines brilliant energy with profound reflection by presenting a single act of atrocity to stand, as microcosm, to the savagery of all war. 

 COUSINS

Here is a narrative poem existing, as all these four poems do, on the edge, and way out of the comfort zone.  The cousins of the title are vividly present, in their shared life experience, apparently safe in a village culture, holding hands 'in the shade of the banyan tree'...the build-up of events, and the poem's denouement, so well achieved, owes much to the poet's sense of the dramatic, and her close sympathetic observation of life in another culture. Use of a rhythmically strong ballad-line four line stanza pattern makes this a formidable poem.

 Further comments: 

Some poems focussed on unusual subject matter, including the first prize winner, where the heroine of the poem is a chicken, and other poets ranged imaginatively from a prose poem based on the death of Britney Spears, through the atmospheric gathering of daylight, to the reversals of curse to blessing (Seasonal), or the reversal of familiar ideas about poppies on Remembrance Day (Mud), to an identity formed by the eating of stone (Flint).

 But an unusual subject alone will not carry a poem into full realization.  These poets also possess much linguistic acuity, wit, lyricism and purpose. 

Other poets tackled more familiar subjects, but all achieved an original perspective, waking the reader up to the strangeness hidden within the familiar.

 Both approaches resulted in poems of vivid and exhilarating energy.  I was particularly struck by the avoidance of polemic in the poems concerning themselves with political or ecological issues, (The woman who washed her hair in the orchard, Cousins, and Drowning Bittersweet, for instance).

 I make no value judgement as to the use of unexpected or familiar themes, as the end result proves that the poets have all signed up to the magic of language, and wish to take it as far as it can go.  Yet no poem here is mannered, or obscure.  Clarity is a striking facet throughout.

 Now, as to poems that got as far as my longl-ist, but no further; these poems often missed their mark by not taking their energy far enough.  There was a broad sense of the loss of nerve, of a desire to stay in that comfort zone.  Such poems took paths very well trodden indeed. I felt these were poems I had read many times before.  I was not being shown anything new.  Perhaps the authors of such poems could find models and inspiration for future work by widening their experience of reading, be it in contemporary poetry, poetry from the past, or poetry in translation.  Such reading can only enrich our own poetry.  The winning and shortlisted poets here understand that reading widely is an essential part of the poet’s equipment.

 So, to those poets whose poems didn’t make it this year, I would advise you, if you are not already doing so, to read much much more; do it on a daily basis, on the bus, during your lunch-break, at the hairdresser,  halfway up a mountain, or in the Departure lounge at Gatwick.  Don’t starve your own poetry by not engaging with the feast of poetry that is out there or, indeed, already on your shelves, waiting to be read.   In the words of Wallace Stevens, ‘The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.’ 

28/01/2009   Penelope Shuttle

Penelope Shuttle lives in Cornwall and her eighth collection Redgrove's Wife was published in 2007 (Bloodaxe Books), and was shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Single Collection, and for the T. S. Elliott Award. She is a tutor for The Poetry School, the Arvon Foundation, Lapidus and Second Light Network, and was a judge of the 2007 National Poetry Competition. She is our guest at Cafe Writers on Monday 9th February 2009