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CAUGHT IN THE NET SPECIAL EDITION - POETRY FROM THE POETRY KIT
SUMMER COMPETITION
Editor - Jim Bennett for The Poetry Kit -
www.poetrykit.org
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CONTENTS
1 - JUDGES REPORT
2 - POETRY FROM THE POETRY KIT SUMMER COMPETITION 2015
Winning poem
Cairo
by
Lesley Burt (Christhurch, Dorset) Runner-up Just a Tree by Jean Hall (London)
Commended Poems
One Canada Square by Emily Anderson
(London) The Oxford Girl by Elinor Brooks (Swindon) London in the ’60s by Di Coffey (Falmouth)
Tourist by Oz Hardwick
(York) Perpendicular to Anything You Like by David Hawkins
(Bristol) Marx My Words by Michael James (Egham)
The Fetch
by
Andrew McDonnell (Norwich) Dunedin, October by Shereen Asha Murugayah (Dunedin, New Zealand) |
3 -
BIOGRAPHIES
4 - AFTERWORD
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1 - JUDGES REPORT BY MARK GILMAN
I was interesting to see the various ways in which the
theme was approached and had the pleasure of reading many very fine poems which
only failed to make the shortlist because of an extremely high overall standard.
The final shortlist were all outstanding poems, any
of which could have been a winner, so the choice was difficult and in the end
came down to which poem engaged me the most, and I judged this by the impression
it left a few days after reading.
In this case it was the poem CAIRO by Lesley Burt
that created the most memorable treatment and left an indelible impression.
I was particularly taken by the way in which she
captured the scene by referencing the view that was current against that which
was in photograph from before she was born.
I also want to mention the runner–up poem
JUST LIKE A TREE by Jean Hall, here was a poet who
took the small details, in this case the developing speech of a child, and
turned it into a memorable poem.
I was thrilled to read the contenders and would like
to congratulate everyone for producing some outstanding poetry, but a particular
well done to the winner and runner-up and the writers of the commended poems,
you gave me sleepless nights trying to figure out a way to pick an overall
winner. I hope everyone will enjoy these poems as much as I did. .
2 - POETRY FROM THE POETRY KIT SUMMER COMPETITION
Winning Poem
March 1940 - “Yours” and two of
the boys on
a ledge of rock about 40 feet above ground level.
We had a marvellous view of ...
and its
fertile valley through which flows the Nile.
Long before tourists, sellers of knickknacks;
before suburbs with McDonalds and Novotels
drifted close to the plateau; before he knew
those boys would die; before I was born; a lifetime
before grandchildren he would never meet:
he posed right here – the spot
where you can see
all three pyramids at once – in RAF
uniform,
wrote this on the photo, sent it to
my mother.
JUST A TREE
He’s learning to talk
learning about life through words.
To him it is just a tree,
the sky just the sky.
He often calls out bird.
It’s just a bird.
No metaphors, no similes,
no adjectives nor verbs yet.
He takes in their essence -
they are what they are.
But he learnt to say tree gone
when they cut it down.
He still said sky
even at nighttime.
He still said bird -
he could hear it singing.
One day he’ll learn
the tree was cut down for parking space,
a city sky is always bright at night,
understand why birds sing at midnight.
Emily Anderson
One Canada Square
The apex light of that ice prism
flashes
fifty-seven thousand times a day.
I see it from my Shadwell window
as it keeps its pounding pace.
I want its beat to quicken but it’s
stoic
like the people it lights up.
There’s been no thunder or
lightning in months,
no storm to break the drizzly
nights apart,
so I want to break them up myself.
With the throbbing light my beating
heart,
I want to run through streets I’ve
been warned off,
talk to unsafe types who talk to
themselves,
tear gilded strips off the richest
fabric,
launch stones through windows of
Canary Wharf,
burn and twist the metal of the
City.
Most of all, I want to take him
with me.
Blinking, unthinking, conspiring
with the wind,
the light doesn’t know the tumult
it’s causing.
The more it pulses,
the closer I am to telling him.
Elinor Brooks commended for the poem The Oxford Girl
The Oxford Girl
Here the city ends:
a final row of
houses, low, uneven,
face the waterside.
In the lamplight,
railings cast
their shadows on the
grass,
lay their stripes
like stitchmarks on
a scar
joining road to
river.
In an empty room
dust clings to
carpet
thickening into
fluff;
in the blackened
grate.
Deep under layers of
air
that weigh upon her
chest
and press her down
she lies beneath the
rippling waves
that flow across the
ceiling
night after lamplit
night.
Di Coffey commended for the poem London in the ’60s
London in the ’60s
A bedsit in Hampstead, forty stairs high,
newspaper squares in the communal loo,
sex and pot under a sloping ceiling,
and Dylan’s on the Sony.
Spag bols in The Witches’ Cauldron,
queuing at The Everyman
for Bergman’s ‘Wild Strawberries’
and Friday nights are Beethoven nights at the Proms.
Chris Barber and Shakespeare vie in Regent’s Park,
Carnaby Street is exploding with colour,
short skirts and knickers are on display everywhere
and there’s skinny dipping up on the Heath.
‘Cooking’ bitter is 1/10d in The Flask,
‘Best’ is two bob.
People are shacking up together, taking the pill.
We are making and composing and writing
and we know we’ve invented
life.
Oz Hardwick commended for the poem Tourist
Tourist
I set off early,
excited, anticipating,
caught the first
train, settled down
in the empty
compartment, opened the guide
to check I wouldn’t
miss anything important.
The streets,
it said, are the most picturesque
in the country: cobbles gleaming,
winding,
fringed with bright shop fronts, stalls,
surprises at every turn, scents
and voices flavouring clear air.
Follow them to the castle, its foundation
lost,
but rebuilt, augmented, decorated more
sumptuously
by successive generations, tastefully
grand.
Walk the bright halls, kaleidoscoped by
windows
to rival St Denis, then marvel
at tapestried chambers, walls shimmering
like a mirage of paradise. Then stroll
across lawns,
through parks and gardens, through wild
menageries,
each beast and bird tame and curious.
When it’s time to dine, you’ll be spoilt
for choice,
the local wine is internationally
renowned
and the cosmopolitan cuisine exceptional.
Enjoy your meal overlooking the bay,
where the beach is a golden knife slicing
into glass. Then pass the afternoon
amongst the countless galleries and
museums,
the churches and places of historical
significance.
After dark, the city comes alive,
pulsating to infectious rhythms and the
sway
of dancers, but down every alleyway
there’s a quiet café to hide away.
Then, just once in every lifetime,
the Grand Carnival
– the reason for my visit.
I looked again at
the pictures, read details
of masks, costumes,
origins and traditions,
solemn rituals and
spontaneous outpourings,
feasts, fireworks,
devotion and excess.
I closed my eyes,
imagining, anticipating.
I woke after
nightfall, the train stationary,
the only light a
yellow glow
from a gas mantle on
the empty platform.
I gathered my bag,
my coat, my camera,
rushed into the cold
night. A figure
stood at the
turnstile, barely visible
in shadow. Still
half asleep, I approached,
asked where I was.
He shrugged, clearly
not understanding. I
said the name
of my destination.
He pointed back
the way I’d come,
the track disappearing,
merging with night.
Coming to my senses,
I did what I should
have done first,
riffled through the
guide to the useful phrases.
Checking
pronunciation in the dim light,
I asked the time of
the next train back.
Beneath his peaked
cap, his face
was barely visible,
but I’m sure I saw
a smile I couldn’t
read, before he turned,
reached for the
mantle, and left me in darkness.
David Hawkins commended for the poem Perpendicular to Anything You Like
Perpendicular to
Anything You Like
In Managua, Nicaragua,
after the big earthquake
they built a new cathedral
in the middle of a field of grass,
a new epicentre
with the whole city
rippling out from it,
a curious and unfamiliar edifice
cut out from the horizons
that pull towards it.
It seems to be about shapes:
circles, rectangles, domes, squares
and even a triangle
slotted into each other,
sliding in front of one another,
multiplying perspective –
height x width x depth x vanishing.
The idea of something holy
is an unnecessary complication
that gathers around it
taut and expectant.
You want to throw a semi-precious stone
into the concrete chasms
to hear how many times
its echo will skim
among the cupolas,
to shake the wind
out of the orderly rows of palm trees
and send it off down the streets
proclaiming an uneasy peace.
When the rains come
the whole thing turns a darker grey.
Messy black birds tug heavily
at the angled sky above.
While across the field
at each intersection between blocks
there is a pair of shoes
dangling from the telegraph wires.
Michael James commended for the poem Marx My Words
Marx My Words
The trouble with being single again
Is having to go to clubs to meet
Women who don’t know who Karl Marx is.
And while she did wear the Marx mask
I could see through the roughly cut eye holes
That her heart wasn’t in it.
Even though I would wear the Lenin mask
She kept forgetting the words we’d rehearsed
So that capital didn’t need labour.
And the whole tone of the encounter changed,
No longer socialism-infused-sex
But something slightly less predictable
Andrew McDonnell commended for the poem The Fetch
The Fetch
I tried to remember
how I loved in this city;
I tried to fetch
back memories
from a state between sleep
and the moth-bothered lamps;
I
slipped out the city
and it slipped from inside me
from the suitcase I carried at my side
from my mouth and from my eyes;
last night I said goodbye to the city
to the town planners, the marching bands
and the Sunday Traders
to my wife and her canary
to the vertiginous music
to the smoke free bars
to the giant strawberries
to the floodlit car parks,
the graffiti, the pigeons and cycle paths
and soon I was crossing dual carriageways
out into the fields
and then on further into marshes
taking a line
drawn from overlaid maps
like scarves over mirrors
they would show the way,
to fall between worlds
- I was told the droving lanes
would suddenly appear
the greenways, by-ways,
the ghost lines
the bittern booming in the reeds
of Poly-Olbion -
but the maps were no longer
in my suitcase
the city had held them back.
And then it appeared to me
a fetch, a doppelganger
of the city I had loved and left
and like a face in the water
it looked at me strangely
as if it were my hands
which had been trying to drown it
in its own reflection,
and stood before me shyly,
not wanting to catch my eye,
so I entered in and my
suitcase became heavy
with new maps and possibilities
but when I checked them
there were blueprints of buildings
that had never been
tramways and railway lines
dropped in my lap like spaghetti
and I realised the city
could never be recovered from memory
it was a ghost train
without the ghosts, or I, a giant
rampaging in toytown
that had long before seen
the last eviction
and in the empty streets echoes
I caught a glimpse of what was me
as I turned like Goya’s monster
with myself
between my
teeth.
Shereen Asha Murugayah commended for the poem Dunedin, October
Dunedin, October
Broken
bottles like diamonds
ground
into pavement.
The sun
slants through leafless trees,
lost in
the gloom, gives up.
Ducks
tuck their heads
in the
shade.
The
heat bakes pink blossoms,
scent
rising, beer and burnt coffee.
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3 - BIOGRAPHIES
Lesley Burt
Lesley Burt lives in Christchurch, Dorset. Her poetry has been published online,
including at Poetry
Kit, Long Exposure,
and Lancaster University’s
Flash, and in magazines and anthologies including
Tears in the Fence,
The Interpreters House,
Sarasvati and
The Cinnamon Anthology, Her chapter, ‘Considering connotation: the impact
and implications of language in poetry’ is included in
Teaching Creative Writing
(2012) ed. Elaine Walker.
Jean Hall
Jean didn't
start writing again until her two children were grown up and her poems draw on
her life experiences. Jean was educated in England and France and lived in Spain
as a teenager and was influenced by poems in other languages. Her poems have
appeared in magazines and newspapers, also in several anthologies: In the
Company of Poets, Still Lives, Warning: May Contain Nuts, Splinters of Light and
more recently in Fanfare, Poems by Contemporary Women Poets. In 2003, she
appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Jean is very grateful to her tutors,
namely Anne-Marie Fyfe, Gillian Clarke, Maura Dooley and Roger McGough, who have
influenced and encouraged her, as well as regular meetings with fellow poets,The
Lambs. For ten years Jean organised poetry evenings as fund-raisers for The
North London Hospice and often reads at The Torriano and The Troubadour.
Emily Anderson
Elinor Brooks
was born in
Edinburgh but now lives in Swindon where, recently retired from teaching, she
works as a volunteer for The Reader organisation. A founder member of BlueGate
Poets (now Poetry Swindon), she enjoys collaborating, exhibiting and sometimes
performing with local artists and musicians. Her poems have appeared on fridge
magnets, on the Big Screen and even on an Ad-shel: her work has been published
in a number of magazines and anthologies including
Domestic Cherry,
And Other Poems,
The Listening Walk (Bath
Poetry Café anthology) and The Other Side
of Sleep (Arachne Press).
Di Coffey
Oz Hardwick
is a
York-based writer, photographer and musician, who has been published extensively
worldwide, and has read everywhere from Glastonbury Festival to New York, via
countless back rooms of pubs. His latest poetry collection (his fifth) is
The Ringmaster’s Apprentice (Valley
Press, 2014). A keen collaborator with other artists, his tanka sequence
co-written with Amina Alyal, Close as
Second Skins (Indigo Dreams, 2015) was shortlisted in the Best Collaborative
Work category at 2015’s Saboteur Awards.
Oz is
Professor of English and Programme Leader for English and Writing at Leeds
Trinity University. In an academic capacity, he has published the monograph,
English Medieval Misericords: The Margins
of Meaning (Boydell, 2011), edited a number of books on the Middle Ages and
myth, and written many articles on the Middle Ages and medievalism.
www.ozhardwick.co.uk
David Hawkins
is an ecologist and editor from Bristol. He has work forthcoming from Dunlin Press. He sings with the band Until the Bird.'
Michael James
Andrew McDonnell
Shereen Asha Murugayah
Originally from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Shereen currently resides in Dunedin, New Zealand pursuing her postgraduate degree.
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4 - Afterword
Email Poetry Kit -
info@poetrykit.org - if you would like
to tell us what you think.
We are looking for other poets to feature in
this series, and are open to submissions. Please send one poem and a short
bio to - info@poetrykit.org
Thank you for taking the time to read Caught in the Net. Our other magazine s
are Transparent Words ands Poetry Kit Magazine, which are webzines on the Poetry Kit site and this can be found at -
http://www.poetrykit.org/