Open Poetry Competition - Adjudicator's Report

 Peter Forbes

 

 

I approached the competition as I used to approach the postbag at Poetry Review - tried just to let the poems work on me, tried not to have too many preconceptions. But I must confess that in my last two or three years at the magazine I developed an antipathy towards poems about poetry, poems that celebrated their own wisdom and their own procedures. I like poems that get about in the world. I'm not sure if I let the occasional poem about poetry through but I was very tough on them.

 

But the winning poem in the competition is totally self-referential. It is a winning poem in both senses, it has a lot of charm and it certainly disarmed my defences. Caroline Cook's ‘Dipity’ is a rather un-English poem. It's a bit like the Beats without bad language or it might have been by a recent favourite of mine, the American poet Mark Halliday. It has a wonderful relaxed loping feel to it and to me totally beguiling. I'm sure harder-nosed critics than I try to be might find it a little cute, in the pejorative sense, but I'm having none of that. When I first put it aside I thought that might be a little too cute. But it rose and rose. It is so pleasure giving, you want to read it over and over. And that's not true of so many poems.

 

The poems I liked were all different and all good of their kind. Barbara Daniel's 'Sleeping' shares a wry wisdom with 'Dipity' but is more grounded in the everyday - what could be more everyday than the rubbish that drops through cracks in our lives and is never seen again, beneath the floorboards, biros, paperclips, a picnic spoon? Richard Wilbur once wrote a poem on this theme and I was glad to see another.

 

Roger Kendall's 'Two Ways to eat a Pomegranate’ is more overtly poetic, evoking 'sunburned Eastern kings', Pluto, Persephone and Demeter, but it's a sensuous celebratory poem that makes us look again at something exotic that has become to commonplace: the pomegranate.

 

John Greening has become the laureate of Huntingdonshire. He's very aware of how flat that place seems to those who don't live there. It is epitomized by local resident John Major. Greening writes poems of Anywhere that happen to be located in Huntingdonshire. And he charts the currents running beneath the apparently placid surfaces of this place: 'Too much cancer in the village'.

 

Ann Kelly's 'May Blossom' has an epigraph by Ted Hughes but it reminds me more of Plath: 'A scarlet pearl // grows on her pricked thumb./ Is it sweet decadence? / The hint of sex she guesses at?'

 

Kathleen Kummer's 'Invitation to the Dance' is a sestina, one of my favourite forms. Unlike its relative the villanelle, I never get tired of sestinas.

 

I like light verse and the great master is Lewis Carroll. Like the winning poem, Laura Sheridan's 'He Wished He'd Never Gone to Blackpool' has a lot of charm. I forgave the poetic inversion in stanza 4 because of its overall attractive performance.