The City of Derby Short Story an

Results 2007 - Poetry Competition

Poetry Judge 2007:-

The winning entries to the City of Derby Writing Competition 2007 are now included on this website in our Archive. You can read the works in question by clicking on the links below. The results of this year's poetry competition are given below, together with our judge's report:- [Link to Results 2007 - Short Story Competition]

Poems

1st Prize Kate Rhodes Portrait of my Husband as a Light Bulb

Kate Rhodes

Kate Rhodes was born in London in 1964. She finished an English degree in 1987, before going on to complete a PhD at the University of Essex on the work of the American dramatist Tennessee Williams in 1993. Since that time she has worked as an English teacher in a sixth form college and more recently as a university lecturer. Currently she works for the Open University and as an adult learning tutor for the WEA. Kate lived for several years in North America during the 1990s. During 1997-8 she was the Cole and Drey Scholar at Rollins Liberal Arts College in Florida. She now lives in Suffolk.

2nd Prize C.J. Allen The Other Side of Everything

C.J. Allen

C. J. Allen’s prize-winning poetry has appeared in a wide range of magazines & anthologies - from Poetry Review to Modern Painters - and has been broadcast on BBC Radios 3 & 4. He is the author of The Art of Being Late for Work (1994), Elfshot (1998) & How Copenhagen Ended (2003). His latest collection, A Strange Arrangement: New & Collected Poems is just out from Leafe Press – www.leafepress.com). In real life he works in an office, edits the reviews pages of Staple magazine & spends more time in record shops than is actually healthy for a grown man.

3rd Prize Noel Williams Another's Lilac

Noel Williams

Noel was born in Sheffield in 1952, a city he loves, so he's lived there most of his life, with brief excursions to Oxford, where he met Carrol, and Cambridge, where he married her, 32 years ago. He’s currently a student on Sheffield Hallam University’s MA Writing, (as well as an academic in the university). He’s won Sheffield’s “Off the Shelf” poetry prize, and over the last years his poetry has been published in magazines such as The Interpreter’s House, Iota, The Ugly Tree, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Carillon and The New Writer. He’s also a regular performer at Sheffield’s popular “Words Aloud” open mike poetry nights.

You can find details and some examples of his work at: http://www.wordsaloud.org/ (search for “Noel”). He writes stories as well as poetry, and you can find his blog at: http://www.blogstoday.co.uk/bloghome.aspx?username=noelwilliams Contact him at: noelwilliams@blueyonder.co.uk.

The following works are considered as Highly Commended poetry submissions to the competition:-

Ron Scowcroft Returning to Ben's Cottage at All Hallows Eve

Kate Rhodes My Father Never Went Out

Phil Powley The Great War Plague

Roger Elkin Drawing Blood

Kathleen Bell Sestina - 1917

David Grubb Pig Days

Judge's Report

There was a wonderful variety in the poems submitted for this year's competition, both in terms of their formal extent and the range of their subject matter, but the overwhelming majority of poems submitted were very personal in content and expression and, in some cases, extremely private. In these poems I often felt privileged to have been the reader of something so strongly felt, and to experience that electric arc between a reader and a writer's emotional or psychological world. I had expected perhaps to see more political material – poems about the current war in Iraq, or about ecological or humanitarian issues – but perhaps for many people these issues are already beginning to feel too familiar to provide the kind of spark needed to fire a new poem into life. As I read and re-read, the poems which kept coming to the top of the pile were those which seemed to be doing something with language which struck me straight away as fresh and original, and which worked on my ear as much as on my mind's eye. The poems which formed my final shortlist also had what I can only describe as a kind of authority, exploring not just feelings but also ideas and imagery and which, importantly, looked as if they knew what they were doing with form.

The first, second and third prize-winners succeeded impressively on all these fronts, and the decision to make the final ranking between the three poems took me several days, since their different strengths were so finely balanced up against one another. Another's Lilac (third prize) is a tremendously original poem. Its richly vivid atmosphere is worked with such an actively sensuous apprehension, and its phrasing held with such fine concentration and economy, that I knew from the first time I read this that it was going to be on my shortlist. The Other Side of Everything (second prize) caught my attention immediately for its formal ambition and delicacy, and for the subtly expressed sympathy which the speaker in the poem feels presently for a remembered classmate, the idea that across the years the connection between the two children's experience is still live and current in some way that is significant for us all. Portrait of My Husband as a Light Bulb (first prize), although its title is a little reminiscent of Selima Hill's work, is nevertheless a gift of a poem, to the reader, to the idea of 'husband' or partner, to the poet too in the writing perhaps. It has many qualities shared in part by the other two prize-winners – vivid imagery, economy, formal control - but most significantly it has that quality of imaginative curiosity by which a poem seems to arrive at a kind of vision which only the writing of the poem could have opened up.

Jane Draycott September 2007