Magazine and writing resources 

The short-listed poems provide glimpses into the lives of others. They catch moments which blend observation and reflection, or sometimes revelation, and they share them with the reader in a way which heighten the reader’s own sense of life. Finding a moth in a woodshed, swimming in grubby water, losing sense of the passing of time. 

 

All the poems use language which balances the mundane and everyday with the wonderful. I remember T S Eliot saying something about the importance of that.

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In one poem, winter days are weak-eyed; in another, the close observation of the tide retreating shows us shifting glints of pearl and pewter. Often the images themselves blend the everyday and the numinous: ‘I stare at the dandelions. You read the paper./ Rain turns to mist turns to sunshine’; after her death and burial a grandmother makes music with the wind/ as she did when she played the melodeon. The dandelions for all their humility seem to offer an unmediated experience which the newspaper does not; is there ever a wheezier, windier instrument that the melodeon?

 

All the poems know exactly where to begin. Plants are growing in my body begins one. The solitude is/ an unexpected present says another, a poem about swimming contains the wonderful insight: I am afraid of happiness.

 

The narratives of the poems are clear and succinct. One is set in a lightly fictionalised Pakistan and there we find that In the cookery class/ dry eyed girls boil earrings/ into barbed wire for their school. A mysterious and vaguely threatening image which lingers in the mind. In a fine poem about mourning and snow in October are the lines: and soon, I know,/ I’ll lose all trace of you, though I have mapped/ that daily trail along our gated paths and hedges/ we walked together, wind against our backs. Here, and throughout these poems, the control of the poet’s voice is well achieved and maintained. 

 

As the years go by, I find myself more and more seeking an open end to poems. Sometimes I find myself scratching out from my own poems the warm-up lines at the start to get to the arresting opening, to match in fact the the quality of opening achieved by so many of these poems, if not all. And then I steel myself to scratch out the end until I am back with the hint of an ending which works best to leave things just open enough. Of course, sometimes, after this, I am left with merely one or two lines. (Start again.)

 

If, therefore, I were to be bold enough to give any advice to these poets, it would be to ensure that the poem has not already ended before the final lines.  Are those lines necessary? Be wary of poems which close the gate politely behind them.

 

I like the way the Irish heritage in Family Tree is used and hinted at without dominating the poem. I like the way a family funeral is held in the poem as if in perpetuity. I know that weddings are the endings to comedies and funerals to tragedies, but that doesn’t stop my thinking there seem to be more family photographs of weddings than of funerals. Family Tree is a kind of 'funeral photograph' and it works as a condensed memorial and as the celebration of a remembered life, without being mawkish or trite. The trees are wrinkled and the roots cradle and the choice of these words is very finely judged. The aunts are shadowy and there are familiar melodies, which picks up that melodeon as well as the family. The poem allows itself to think aloud about this important memory and we follow the poem’s train of thought thoroughly engaged in its twists and turns.

 

What differentiates Zap sufficiently for me to plump for it as the ‘best’ of an excellent group is the wackiness of its subject matter: a man who has been struck twice by lightning. He looks as if he has been scarred by the experience: his hair a wild upstart frizz, and his eyes/ evasive and he places himself someway apart from the workers. He has earned his nickname because he has survived, met and dodged his maker. He is something of a prophet, then, something of a shaman. The poem both shies away from this version: I don’t think/ that was what he was feeling,/ right then, in the shade. I like the way the poem does not explain this, does not tell us what we was feeling. That open-endedness gives the reader pause for thought. On the other hand, perhaps there is some kind of wisdom to be found in Zap’s experience: He knew lightning/ is only looking/ for the earth. 

 

Zap does make the ordinary wonderful, but it also, at one and the same time, makes the extraordinary - a man who has survived two lightning strikes - into the mundane and everyday. I was grabbed by this poem when I first read it and it grabs me still after all the re-reading.

 

What do we learning from this? Not that we have to meet lightning survivors in distant climes in order to write a poem. No. But maybe that we peel away the layers of the ordinary and the extraordinary and try to mingle them up a bit so that the world is a little different when seen through the eyes of the poem we have written.

 

Winner: Zap; Runner-up: Family Tree;