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Results 2008 - Poetry Competition |
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The winning entries to the City of Derby Writing Competition 2008 are now included on this website. You can read the works in question by clicking on the links below. The results of this year's poetry competition are as follows:- [Link to Results 2008 - Short Story Competition] Poems 1st Prize John Godfrey The Insane Route
John Godfrey's poems have appeared in, among others, Acumen , Spokes , FatChance , Poetry Life, Interpreter’s House, The Frogmore Papers, and Seam . A small collection, Replaying the Echo, was published by Rockingham Press in 1995 and two of his poems appear in the anthology In the Company of Poets, (Hearing Eye Press, 2003). Since winning his first competition prize (4th in the Bridport in 1997) he has won 1st Prize in the Kent & Sussex (2000), the Chiltern Writers (2000), the Southport [humour] (2000), the Northampton (2002 and 2004), the Kick Start (2003), and the Peterloo, (2005). He’s been placed in many others, including Poetry Life (1998), the Berkshire (2000), Ver Poets (2001 & 2004), the Kick Start (2002 & 2005) and the Yorkshire Open (2003) and has been commended or shortlisted in over thirty more. The City of Derby Writing Competition (2008) is the latest, of course, to add to that long and distinguished list.
2nd Prize Diane Simkin Going Back
Diane has won, been placed, highly
commended and shortlisted in many competitions prior to her success in
the 2008 City of Derby Writing Competition. Some notable successes
include having won The Morris Cup for poetry at Gorseth Kernow (the
Cornish Gorsedd), 1st and 2nd prize in the Cotswold Writers' Open, 1st
prize in the DSJT Charitable Trust Open Poetry, 1st in The Salopian
Poetry Society's competition, and 1st and 2nd in the poetry category in
Lanner Writers annual competition.
3rd Prize C.J. Allen To Read the Relationship Between the Surfers and the Residents at Newquay
Clive Allen's poem The Other Side of Everything took second place in the 2007 City of Derby Writing Competition, and we could well be cutting and pasting these biographical details about him on a regular basis if he continues to write and send his work to our judges (who of course change annually and make their judgements with no knowledge of the identity of the writer). Just to remind you from last year in case you missed it, his prize-winning poetry has appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies - from Poetry Review to Modern Painters - and has been broadcast on BBC Radios 3 and 4. He is the author of The Art of Being Late for Work (1994), Elfshot (1998) and How Copenhagen Ended (2003). His latest collection, A Strange Arrangement: New & Collected Poems is available from Leafe Press – www.leafepress.com). In real life he works in an office, edits the reviews pages of Staple magazine and spends more time in record shops than is actually healthy for a grown man.
The following works are considered as Highly Commended poetry submissions to the competition:- Julia Key (1st) Still I Find You David Duncombe Benches Along the Towpath - Cromford Canal Margery Forester Dissolution The following works are considered as Commended poetry submissions to the competition:- C.J. Allen (1st) At Malham, 1975 Diane Simkin Too Much Digging Phil Powley Via Dolorosa
Judge's Report
My long list of twenty yielded the final nine after a good deal of pondering. Entries shifted position as I reread them, applying slightly different criteria each time. One really has to live with one’s short list for a while, reading individual pieces aloud — to oneself, to one’s partner. Of course, this contest was not jointly assessed by me and my wife, though I do admit running the finalists past her to see if she deemed any unworthy of being among the favoured. She didn’t. What criteria were used in the sifting? This was comparatively easy: years of writing my own, and reading others’, verse have honed my critical faculties enough for me to be able to nod or shake my head as each page was assimilated. Most poems disqualified themselves on two counts: they were insufficiently ambitious and / or they were insufficiently original — what Craig Raine has called ‘five-finger exercises’. A private rehearsal is not a public performance, and too many fell short because they were not fully realised. They were the work of people who wanted to write a poem and later convinced themselves they had actually done so. I’ve put a fair number of these into the ‘mag. not comp.’ category, meaning they could readily grace the pages of a poetry periodical but were not fledged to take flight into that necessary realm of imagination and control I was envisioning. They remained earthbound. Their makers were too easily satisfied. As to my selection, seven are free-verse pieces. This rather surprises me as I have a soft spot for the craftsmanship of rhyme and metre. Yet craftsmanship is also to be found when rhyme and metre are absent. Not buoyed up by either, the writing then has to surprise, delight, or unsettle according to its tensions and accuracy. The final nine are not distinguished by sloppiness of diction and mostly find their target with admirable economy.
‘At Malham, 1975’ by Clive Allen of Nottingham, the best of the ‘Commended’s, appeared in the last competition I judged. Its unusual touches — ‘Rapunzelish’, ‘centripetal’, ‘doltishly’ — show confidence and do not annoy through being overly abstruse. It is peopled, set alfresco, and nicely balances softness (water) and hardness (prehistoric rubble). It counterpoints movement with stasis (‘spills’ vs ‘stand’, ‘motion’ vs ‘stillness’), and alternates between the present and longer time spans (‘a second’ vs ‘a generation’). Clearly its creator is a writer to watch.
‘Too Much Digging’, by Diane Simkin of Camborne, impresses by its sustained tone and truthfulness. While not normally a fan of excessively short lines such as ‘an alien race’, I was drawn towards several entries which used such a construction. Here there is assured enjambment, the flow guiding the eye while the mind admires the exactness of the language. Anyone who can write like this is able to step outside themselves and empathise effortlessly with others: here, denizens from millennia ago. A thoughtful poem which commands my respect.
‘Via Dolorosa’, by Phil Powley of Lymington, is nimble and not in the least overwritten. One wonders whether he happened upon the final image before he started. This type of terse understatement can be attractive. Moreover, we do not have ‘So I carried the cross up the nave / ahead of vicar and choir / in front of my classmates’ but ‘So I carried the cross. Up the nave / ahead of vicar and choir. // In front of my classmates.’ Such a staccato effect intensifies the edgy atmosphere. Every line alludes to self or others via personal pronouns or, in the case of line five, priest and choristers. There are no add-on extras, no ornamental superfluities. The directness balances the indeterminacy of place (Which country are we in? Only the title has geographic specificity) in an intriguing way.
Among the ‘Highly Commended’s, ‘Dissolution’ by Margery Forester of Axminster is something of a tour de force. Few contemporary poems so assuredly lodge themselves in the distant past. It is populated and lively and has the relative novelty of direct speech. A couple of its words — ‘poniard’ and ‘beadsman’ —sent me to the dictionary. The font is quite dense and almost off-putting, but the energy of the narrative is beguiling. It could well tempt another adjudicator more than it tempted me, meriting largesse in due course.
‘Benches Along The Towpath — Cromford Canal’, by David Duncombe of Matlock, is resoundingly unshowy. From the unglamorous title, the lines descend in an orderly fashion, each sentence having a stanza to itself. Here, interstanzaic gaps do not signify rhyming verse; instead, they usher in the equivalent of new paragraphs as the writer shifts our attention to further elements in the landscape. First we have the memorial plaques; then the trappings of a defunct industrial past, enlivened now by wildlife; next the river, and the railway; and lastly the road. The final image is of ‘a man walking slowly, heading towards / the tunnel of a redundant canal’. I cannot be the only reader to sense that the protagonist himself feels redundant, either through that bittersweet euphemism ‘natural wastage’ or through retirement proper; or to regard that approaching tunnel as a symbol for death. Such a pedestrian tone need not be tedious; here it is measured, particular, and attractive.
‘Still I find you’, by Julia Key of York, is a pared-down poem with an unobtrusive voice, the best of the ‘Highly Commended’s. It’s an examination of loss and longing: of love betrayed or broken, or of bereavement. Sentiments are distilled to an irreducible minimum, yet this does not divest them of emotional charge. It is eased along by alliteration — ‘snowdrops’ and ‘sneezed’; ‘blackbird’ and ‘blue’; ‘nothing now’; ‘smile’, ‘smell’, and ‘smouldering’; ‘stale’ and ‘still’; ‘taunts’ and ‘take’; ‘morning mist’; and ‘sticky stones’; and it ends in an undemonstrative rhyme: ‘voice’ and ‘choice’. Such sureness of touch could be the polished product of a Creative Writing class, images listed in the hope that they exceed the sum of their parts, or might delineate real experience, ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ as Wordsworth had it. My troubling inability to decide whether artful dissemblance or painful recall are on show obliged me — reluctantly — to place it no higher than fourth.
Third is the indigestibly titled ‘To Read the Relationship Between the Surfers and the Residents at Newquay’. By Clive Allen of Nottingham, it’s about nothing out of the ordinary but essays something I enjoy: the analysing of place with thoughtful particularity. It regards its subject with painterly precision (I’m thinking of Canaletto not Jackson Pollock) and speaks for Everyman as it deals methodically with the second person singular. I-me-mine nowhere intrudes. Nor does any specific day, month, or year, though we are led to believe it’s summer by that reference to ‘the leaden / vaulting of a sudden storm’ (very English!), the camper-vans, ‘the blond bucks in their wetsuits’, ‘the beach / at night flecked with the sparks from driftwood bonfires’. The poet, as unseen sage, guides us gently (‘First, you have to understand the way…’, then ‘You have to feel the surge…’, then ‘You need to look…’, ‘You need to see…’, and ‘You have to know…’). Those imperatives have restrained authority. None of the set tasks is especially onerous. Each invites inspection of fairly routine phenomena which are essentially the building blocks of daily existence. This is underlined in the final stanza, where attention is drawn to ‘those who stand at blackened windows quietly / reflecting on a life, while farther out / the Atlantic gathers, waiting to explode’. This can seem presageful of the person’s eventual demise, which is as inevitable as the tide. ‘You have to know what you would make of that’ is a concluding line made memorable by its understatement. Either through religion or philosophy, each of us has to come to terms in some satisfactory fashion with what it is that renders us human (our next breath) and mortal (our last breath).
‘Going Back’, by Diane Simkin of Camborne, squeaked into second position and presented problems. Its skilful skirting of Romantic and Gothic sensibilities (e.g. ‘scatters petals like jewels’, ‘the sinking, the sickness, the guilt and the pain’, ‘the poison of memories’, ‘my torment’) made me wonder whether this amounted to mere cleverness. The versifier knows how to commit words to paper; but was the rhythm (predominantly anapaestic tetrameter) too insistent, the scenario too cannily accomplished for its own good? And what to make of ‘Bright hopes, happy laughter and innocent play’? Could one have, in context, ‘dull hopes, sad laughter, or guilty play’? In other words, was a degree of tautology present, a gilding of the lily? Whether intellectual exercise or something ennobled by flashes of veracity, its unflagging brio ultimately won me round.
Finally we come to ‘The Insane Route’, by John Godfrey of Hitchin, whose forty lines give us an insight into an inland-waterway holiday. Just as such a vacation is leisurely, this poem meanders meaningfully down the page. Stanzas one and two have a sentence all to themselves, while stanza three’s sentence flows halfway into stanza four. The last two standard sentences similarly annex plenty of space. While ‘Steve, Liz, Paul, and Sue’ are dedicatees, the lines yield no names of places or people. The first stanza sets the scene, though some poets might have discarded it and started with stanza two. To do so would be to lose a little of the poem’s languorous charm. The writer uses semicolons adeptly (this is not to be sniffed at); and the unhurried pace continues, only to be challenged by aches ‘from winding paddles, straining / to move lock-gates and swing bridges, / manhandling our sulky lump // …palms sore from gripping ropes’. This is immediately dissipated by the confirmation ‘Yet we laughed frequently’.
As in the previous canal poem, not a lot happens — but not a lot is meant to. We have instead a celebration of classless calm and civility, simple pleasures which defy today’s hustle and bustle. The travellers are ‘forced to adopt / the pace of the seventeen-nineties’ and are none the worse for that. Initially, you’d imagine a better title might be in order. The novelist John Steinbeck said, admittedly apropos of novels, “I’ve never been a title man. I don’t give a damn what it is called.” I beg to differ. Titles do matter, in poetry as in prose. Martin Amis called his second work of fiction Dead Babies, a reason advanced by some as to why fewer copies than expected were sold, especially (one might suppose) to female readers. In the piece under consideration the seemingly awkward label is an oblique reference to words spoken by a character in Macbeth. Banquo exclaims on the ‘blasted heath’, “Or have we eaten on the insane root / That takes the reason prisoner?” Extra Brownie points for that. Indeed, first prize for the poem as a whole.
Paul Groves |
John Godfrey
Diane Simkin
C.J. Allen