ESSEX POETRY COMPETITION: JUDGE’S REPORT
George Szirtes

Judging poetry competitions is in some ways a cruel business.  You can't stop to remark a decent piece of work here and there, or hesitate too long over poems of undoubted value. You constantly have to be asking yourself the question: is this poem a likely winner?

That, at least, is what you say to yourself. In actual fact you find yourself reading and re-reading everything that seem to have some worth. And since you can't read through hundreds of poems in one go without growing dizzy, the reading has to be done in spurts and each time you have to wind your mind up to the task and to gauge the broad average standard if only so you can see what rises above it.

People often ask what is a prize winning poem, and I have in fact written briefly on that  subject for the Poetry School. I am not going to go back over that, only to say that a prize winning poem is not necessarily the same thing as a good poem in a collection. There tends to be something unusually vivid in a successful competition poem, something clear-cut, however subtle. Being vivid is not the same as being dramatic and certainly not the same as being flashy: it is more to do with a conspicuous lightness of touch, conspicuous economy - a conspicuous subtlety then, if that doesn't seem a contradiction.  The prize winning poem goes out by itself in a crowd and is noticed, not because it is strange or sets out to dazzle, not just because of its dress, but the way it takes possession of the space around it. The poem makes you want to come back to it and reread it, because however good it read the first time you don't think you've got everything from it.

Great poems are those you can come back to an almost infinite number of times. They hold their ground and move in the space of language, among all other poems, with a grace, assurance and self-possession that seems inexhaustible.

In this case the winning poems had to move among roughly four hundred others.  Whittling those down to forty, then twenty is not too painful. It is always the last ten or dozen that are the real problem, because they possess conspicuous virtues and must do to have got this far.

There were fine poems there by Maureen Almond, Giles Goodland, Noel Williams, Angela France, Sarah Welch and Madaline Parsons, mostly poets whose names I knew once they had been revealed. I knew them to be good poets. Sometimes it was particular lines in poems full of good lines that drew me. Giles Goodland's in his poem called The Horse where  "the ducks troubling the river / the clouds falling into the puddle, // releases each from its name'. Noel Williams's " grain so fine on walls and floor and clothes that it clogged / my nostrils with rich silt; a warm perfumed frost' in Sunburn. Angela France’s ‘At night he’s a crackle of paper he couldn’t read, / the tap of a pipe, a grumble at poor coal on the fire’ from Homecoming.

There were two excellent poems by Jenny Morris that came close to winning. Her poem Above begins wonderfully: ‘Sky, you are an upside-down / ocean of strange singing fish: / sadhonking V’s of geese’, (‘sadhonking’ is an excellent single word) and her mysterious and sinister encounter in Waiting for Rain where the female figure has ‘pockets full of pills, / cyanide capsules. A knife, a rope, / the means of escape’ is compulsive reading. And Valerie Morton’s brilliantly balanced terza-rima sonnet Solitaire hangs perfectly in the ear, and is hard to quote from because it depends on an acute sense of form to hold the whole experience, the memory of a meeting at the Gare du Nord, in its own crystalline sphere of air.

Any of the poems I mentioned might have won, and possibly on another day they would have. At this stage I must admit I bring in my wife, Clarissa, and get her thoughts. Though an artist, not a poet, she has a very good ear for poetry and it’s great to have an outside view once down to the last six or so. It doesn’t mean she chooses the winner: it means I see the poems as someone else might see them. Seeing and hearing are the keys.

In the end I gave third prize to Ryan Watley’s Elevator Talk, a pantoum based on an overheard conversation. There is always the question of what is damn clever and what is only damn clever. This is damn clever and much more: it forms that which would normally fly into the realm of the inconsequential into a shape that carries significance. The poem was not trying to present the reader with anything overtly poetic, but trusted to the poetry of ordinary things by re-ordering them and giving them a dramatic value” ‘Brian? Brian – I’ll call you later, mate: it’s important’ is an unlikely but effective line to go out on.

I also loved we had a little summer by Wes Lee. There are poems, a little like ‘Elevator Talk’, that seem to be hardly there at all but move the heart with the least amount of apparent effort. Like Valerie Morton’s Solitaire this too was the memory of a meeting. The poem focuses in on a drinking glass whose particularity is noted and dwelt on. The last three lines draw the poem together, almost incidentally. The glass is ‘The thing that feels right in your mouth, / the thing you cannot do with out, the thing / you convince yourself you cannot do without.’ That sounds so ordinary, even the penultimate line break somehow offhand, that by very contrast the contained rises. It is often the sense of what is not said that haunts a poem. The poem, in effect, makes a perfect space for the unsaid.

The winning poem does something similar but on a bigger scale and with a wider scope. Robert Butler’s In another country is mostly what it says on the packet of the title, but this other country is one of strange reversals, one in which ‘flames burn without light or heat’ where ‘The food is wholesome but / you may find your weight fluctuating’. There are soldiers whose breath ‘steams in the cold’ one of whom ‘has lost a glove / and tucks his hand inside his coat / like a favoured pet.’ So far, so weird. This is no country you could actually visit. This country is simply another condition of things, wrought by disorientation and detail. The poem, with its slightly distant, faintly official tone, reintroduces us to the world we know through a world that is complete in itself yet other. It is not just an act of the imagination, a mental act, but a mode of feeling too. It was the tenderness of the hand inside the coat that clinched it for me: suddenly the alien was human, beyond the personal but imbued with the personal through an odd disorientated act of empathy.

It is salutary for a poem to resist poetry just a little, just enough for the pressure to build up at that not entirely closed door. All three prize winning poems do this. Robert Butler’s did so most powerfully. First prize to him.