ESSEX POETRY FESTIVAL COMPETITION 2007

Adujdicators comments from Anne-Marie Fyfe

Commendeds: Denise Bennett & Roger Caldwell

Firstly a poem called Wartime Fur Coat by Denise Bennett. This comes complete with a reference point which is that the coat was Exhibit 141 in Portsmouth Museum and belonged to a Mrs Violet Adcock – but it turns out that the poem isn’t about Mrs Adcock or the Chinchilla Rabbits that went to make up her coat…

but about a memory of the 1950s, of a war-widowed mother singing of loss, and of a small boy hiding in a wardrobe cluttered with animal furs…

Memory poems are one of the most common submitted to comps. & they often need something to make them stand out. This one is very sharply observed.

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It’s very rare to find a philosophical essay on the Romantic era, the age of Enlightenment and the classical music of Sibelius in a poetry competition, particularly when the poem’s called, The Mountains of Essex, as I expect the poet, Roger Caldwell didn’t have much to go on, in terms of describing The Mountains of Essex…

But Keats talked about “negative capability” and this is a poet who has come up with a reflection on the absence of mountains…

How do you make a poem out of that?? hard to say… but the conjunction of a snowy day, of Sibelius’ music, and of images of vast Russian snow-covered plains seems to have given the poet a unique perspective on where Essex fits in with the romantic and the sublime.

So to the third, second and first places…

Firstly, third place goes to Diagonal House by Richard Halperin, which seems to me to take an idea, a patently absurd idea, and do what good poems do, which is to run with it in a credible fashion: and one of the attractive aspects of the poem is the conversational voice

“Of course the house is diagonal”, “Well, no matter what, you’ve got to say…”

That tone makes the absurdity believable and yet all the more absurd…The narrative voice in this poem makes it stand out… and of course I love anything to do with strange and quirky houses.

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In second place is Maureen  by Diana Pooley. This piece does something that many poems try to do, and few succeed…

and this one succeeds in a very concise, stylish poem.

The idea of fish flying through the air in an ordinary London street, has that touch of an image from Chagall, or a spaced out sixties cartoon, but two of the things it does, make it better than it might have been –

one is juxtaposing an ordinary, everyday name like Maureen with the richness of fish-names like Snapper and Barracuda and Big-eye Trevally…  who sounds like a gangster out of Guys and Dolls.

And the other achievement is the little narrative where one of the fish – a humpheaded Wrasse – and I don’t know what they look like – even though I have been to Sea World in Sydney Harbour – but I get the picture of his fat lips pressed against the glass and I get the connection that these fish have come to Maureen’s London street precisely because they’re from her home in Australia…

It’s a perfect example of how simplicity and under-played language can achieve stunning clarity. It’s one a lot of poets could learn from.

So, to come to Chemistry  by Sue Butler

Most judges, most readers of poems, generally feel they can tell where a poem’s going in the first few lines.

And when a poem starts, “Because my boss is ill and can’t go, I take a bus…” you might feel this was going to be quite mundane, quotidian, even boring…

if you hadn’t the pull of the title “Chemistry” still working on you, and the fact that you come immediately to “cider orchards” and “a small brewing town”…

Again inconclusive… but you’re taken forward through some very technical words, heightening the mystery,

to supper by the lake – which seems to place us somewhere in Europe, and supper “without your wife”

so we realise that the speaker is a woman, her business host is a man, and chemistry isn’t just fructoses and sucroses – though it’s that as well – but chemistry between two people.

To lurch from that lakeside supper to Mandelstamn’s neighbour and a fedora and possibly a wolf carrying off a deer, though that might be allegorical, and might also be about “Chemistry”, is a wonderful reading experience where each new turn of the line brings a surprise, a little shock, a sudden taking aback or explosive realisation…

A very good poem… and a very worthy first prize winner in a competition that gave me such pleasure and stimulation to read and judge and think about.