Having judged a fair few poetry competitions now, I’ve learned not to expect any great fidelity to place. That we live in a global village is a truism repeated to the point of tedium. Judging competitions gives the adjudicator a privileged snapshot of what’s globally preoccupying, engaging, interesting, worrying and exciting a control group of, in this case, 1400 entrants. This competition was also global in the sense that this year, for the first time, the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society accepted international entries online.
It will probably come as no surprise when I report that many poems reacted to one of the worst natural disasters in living memory, the Boxing Day tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. Given that the closing date for entries to this competition was 31st January 2005, one can see how such work constitutes a very rapid response. Many fine poets have been willing and able to respond to unfolding national events, to write the civic, public-addressed poem, and, in our own time, to engage with global breaking news, while perhaps never abandoning more reflective, lyrical modes. This kind of ‘latitude of ability’ is a gift, so I wouldn’t routinely knock such responses. However, little I found in the entries in the late winter of 2005 could compare with the awful images of almost Biblical inundation and panic captured on shaky camcorders.
But Kent & Sussex also attracted work on subjects ranging from art (lots of getting inside the painting, photograph or movie), astronomy, the natural world, language (lots of what gets lost in translation), history (personal, local, national and global), domesticity, love (corporeal and metaphysical) and home. I came across monkey kidney cells being harvested, a nun in a blue Toyota Corolla, the deliberate demolition of speed cameras, pure physics derived from buzzards, a confessional manual from 1584 and a fire alarm in the Tate Modern.
In amongst all these recherché themes and wonders, there were also some poems which operated at the local level, and which concentrated upon the part of the world where this competition has its home and origin. And so I was pleased to turn up flint and chalk, to find myself walking along a Roman road or on the Weald, to stumble upon orchards and the names of local wild flowers – in short, all those things an urbanite from the North like me is supposed to dislike. Though nothing from Penshurst Place, though I suppose Sidneyesque sonnet sequencing is seriously curtailed by the 40-line limit.
Of this year’s runners up: ‘Greenfinches’ brought out the twitcher in me, though its recognition of the greenfinches’ ‘fierce black eyes’ suggests someone who has actually noticed these birds and spent time watching them; an undertow of passerine indifference and ‘ingratitude’ clinched it; I found the poem ‘Naples’ irreverent, unimpressed, slightly savage and jaundiced, as well as economical and surprising in its diction; ‘Poem Written in Glue’ on the other hand is a Bachelardian fantasy, a Cornell box of a poem assembled before the reader’s eyes: I somehow got past that repeated, imploring ‘Come…’ to enjoy its play with scale and richness; ‘City Love Songs (II)’ comes on like a hyper-enjambed paean to the contemporary city, where everything seems to be happening at once; I particularly admired its deployment of those tricky clauses at the end, there.
And so the final 3. Joan Hewitt’s ‘White’ chimes with other enquiries into and essays on this non-colour, like Melville’s ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’, and manages to find room for high art and voile ‘blurring the yard’s bricks/and the dustbin to ethereal’ in its stanzas, and reminds us ‘White is what you’re not supposed/to write’. With ‘The Revolutionary’, Gregory Leadbetter notices how revolutions begin in the wind, with their own primary little ‘no’. Enough room is left for the reader to enter and occupy the poem’s world, which seems to posit a yawning gap between a modest ‘calling for change’ and doing nothing. The winner this year is Neil Fleming for ‘Louisa Oriel, 1960-2000’. There’s great skill evident in the opening stanza, a rhetorical drawing in of the reader’s attention, and once this is allied to a slightly unusual rhyming structure, one gets the sense all kinds of things have been turned up and discovered in the writing. Quatrains seem natural for elegy, ever since Gray used them for the ‘Elegy’, though this poem is elegiac in a quieter way, unpacking ideas of distance and perception along the way to its moving, valedictory close.