Results of March Poetry Competition
JUDGE’S REPORT
Of the 159 poems submitted to this competition themed FURNITURE most were about beds and chairs in great variety and mostly in terms of yearning or remembering. The clear winner is Green Man by Gabriel Griffin and the runner-up is Plastic Chair by Wes Viola.
Green Man is a poem of astonishing imaginative power. The poet involves the reader in his exploration of wood still alive in furniture with scattered questions. The personification of wood is a powerful tool in the interpretation of random noises. Just as it is possible to discover life in apparently dead wood, the poet sprinkles the surprise of rhyme throughout his poem – not end rhymes but rhymes concealed like the life in his wood, across the lines: leaves, breeze, sighs, skies, cries. Translating wood noises into human sounds, moans and groans and grunting, adds weight to the contention that wood stays alive even after the hacksaw has done its work. In eighteen lines the poem does enough to persuade us that a room may be filled with the size of wood that has refused to die, an unquiet ghost, perhaps the green man of myth.
Plastic Chair. Addressing a plastic chair as though it were a sentient being gives this poem its persuasive pull. We are strangely led to sympathise with the plastic chair positioned in a laundry instead of enjoying the beauty of the outdoors. The poet asks the chair simple questions as if to suppose it looks back with regret on a better world than the utilitarian location of the laundromat. It is clever to take the plastic piece of furniture and introduce to it scenes of nature as if the chair could look forward to a day when leaves fall on it or squirrels and birds play beside it. If poetry invites us to see things in a new, exciting way, this poem does that successfully. It cleverly transforms a plastic seat into something for which we can feel pity.
Dorothy Pope, Judge
GREEN MAN by Gabriel Griffin
Ever been woken by the furniture shrieking,
the wardrobe’s sighing, a chest of drawers
grunting under its load? You know wood talks,
but don’t want to listen to its slow lament.
Only when the floorboards snap under unseen steps
and you turn yet again in the bed wakeful and irritated,
the moon mocking through the window, the cypress
pointing a long finger on the wall, do you wonder
why wood isn’t dead? What kills it, if the chainsaw
and the axe don’t, how to silence its groans?
Shutting it up won’t shut it up. So you
listen at night to its low grieving for leaves,
its moans for the breeze it once caught
in its boughs, its sighs for wings and wide
open skies, its cries in the night for the kisses
of stars, while all the time a hammering thought
makes a box in your mind. Where – cross
your fingers and hope – dead wood flowers.
PLASTIC CHAIR by Wes Viola
in the coin laundry,
do you dream of hyacinths and hoverflies?
Of lemonade on the lawn?
Did you ever taste a cooling rain
on your plastic arms and legs?
On the way here to this tiled floor, perhaps.
In the moments of movement
between the door of the car you arrived in,
and the door to the laundromat -
the glass door that locks itself like clockwork at 10pm -
perhaps that was a day of gentle rain.
One day, in any case, I do suppose
you might retire from this utilitarian place
to a garden; a manicured little landscape
where the leaves will gather in your seat
there to dry to crisps in the Autumn sun,
where lively birds and squirrels can perch
on the proud green arch of your back
and where at last your plastic arms, your plastic legs
can finally fade to white in the sun.