RESULTS OF OUR SEPTEMBER POETRY COMPETITION
Judge's Report on the Poetry Competition with the theme of 'Month'
This was a popular subject with 211 submissions which made good reading, the months mostly being on memories or nature. Most were in free verse but there were two forms: one villanelle and eight sonnets. I admired the audacity of a poet with the pseudonym ‘Toastingfork’ who, in his poem on January, found a rhyme for ‘month’ with ‘thirty-oneth’!
There were two clear winners which were, in order, February Fog in Abu Dhabi by Paul Freeman and August the Fox by John Pring.
It is such a pleasant and interesting task judging others’ poems and a privilege to be privy to their thoughts. I do thank all the poets who enter. I regret that I am unable to give feedback on individual poems other than the two winners due to the sheer volume of entries.
- Dorothy Pope
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The Winner of the £100 prize - February Fog in Abu Dhabi
A nebula of sight-resistant fog
creeps in at night, proceeding to erect
a barricade of cotton wool to clog
the air. Eyeball integrity is wrecked.
My universe attunes itself to sound:
a solitary cricket’s scratching legs,
pedestrians whose muffled footfalls pound
and cars that roll down roads like hollow kegs.
The streetlight punctuation dot, dot, dots
the pavements and the junctions where I walk
(their hazy shades illuming landmark spots)
and avenues where falling leaf-drops talk.
Yet fog is like nocturnal-driven fears;
come daylight’s sun-kissed glow, it disappears.
- Paul Freeman
February Fog in Abu Dhabi captures the scene in a beautifully composed sonnet. Again and again the poet delights the reader with surprise phrases: ‘sight-resistant fog’, ‘like hollow kegs’, ‘falling leaf-drops talk’. The regularity of the well-chosen rhymes fits the subject perfectly. The turn of thought in the final couplet – ‘Yet fog is like nocturnal-driven fears’ – not only gives us a splendid simile but it is an excellent way of reflecting on the effect the fog has on a viewer. The last two words – it disappears – close a well-written poem perfectly.
- Dorothy Pope
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The Runner-up and winner of the £50 prize - August The Fox
I watched him gather
himself along the hedgerow,
the strange logic
of his movement a vapour
through the dawn-lit field.
It could have been hours,
or minutes, watching
the slow thumbstroke
of flame, the morning
held softly on the edge
of breaking.
- John Pring
The opening words of the poem introduce the fox in a personal way. ‘Gather himself’ is an unusual expression here, but so fitting. The poet is not content with mere description – ‘strange logic’, ‘vapour’ and ‘catch our attention’, just as the fox caught the poet’s eye. Time passes unnoticed – did the poet watch for minutes or hours? The fox becomes a ‘thumbstroke of flame’ as morning breaks. Short as it is, the poem is appropriate for a quick sighting of a fox. A longer poem would not have done justice to the sighting. The poem starts with a personal observation but the poet does not intrude in the rest of the poem – the scene is entirely of the fox. This is an excellent poetic exercise.
- Dorothy Pope