TEIGNMOUTH POETRY FESTIVAL
POETRY COMPETITION 2024
POETRY COMPETITION 2024
THE 2024 RESULTS & WINNING POEMS ARE HERE
A big thanks to all poets who entered the Teignmouth Poetry Festival poetry competition 2024.
Here are our winners plus shortlisted and long listed poems and poets.
TEIGNMOUTH POETRY FESTIVAL OPEN POETRY COMPETITION
Winners:
1. As Long as You Breathe the Past, It’ll Keep Not Happening Jonathan Greenhause
2. Performance, Eighty Miles South of Louisville Tim Waller
3. Holding the Brevity Fiona Dignan
Highly Commended in alphabetical order
you used to call everyone queen and* AV Bridgwood
Your Neighbour Will Catch You Scott Elder
This Jar is Broken Lesley Mason
GRAHAM BURCHELL AWARD FOR DEVON POETS 2024
Winners:
1. someone should do something Ffion Mackenzie
2. Psychosis Jenny Hamlett
3. Caving Richard Side
Highly Commended in alphabetical order
An orchestral trumpet player contemplates
an explosion of syncopated panic Richard Side
Look into my Eyes Susan Taylor
Double Sarabande in 9/8 from Bach's First Sonata
for Solo Violin played on a railway line in Poland Richard Westcott
Longlist – Although the poems below didn’t make the shortlist, Judge Graeme Ryan said he really did enjoy these poems very much and they were definitely a big part of the decision making process.
Gauze from Gaza Helen Boyles
Nursing Chair Lesley Curwen
Endorsement Jonathan Hart
In Loutro Mark Haworth-Booth
Our Door John Lancaster
Hand Print Linda McDonald
Hag Stone Sue Proffitt
Clouding Vegas Dan Stathers
The Winning Open Poems
First Prize – Jonathan Greenhause
As Long as You Breathe the Past, It’ll Keep Not Happening
Amherst, Ohio: A dilapidated kitchen where clouds of mayflies
float like fairies outside the streaked window,
seek shelter in the pane’s splinter-cracks. A few miles off,
a deer stares through a glass-encased storefront
at another deer’s head mounted on the mahogany wall, as hours
tightrope across the withered hands
of the shop’s clock. Back by the woodstove, a baby’s mouth
widens, pupils zeroing in upon a copper spoon,
applesauce globs sloppily dripping from its undersides,
this utensil a raptor gliding towards its nest,
the father’s lips imitating a shriek. It’s December, 1899,
& the sun’s recently dipped, gravity
gently depositing it in the magnetic curvature of space,
Earth beset by its daily revolutions.
On the front steps, a cop sighs, scratches his crotch while eyeing
his oafish partner, who sheepishly knocks
while a hawk overhead loosens its clutch upon a rabbit’s spine,
as a polyphemus moth circles dizzily around
the swaying kitchen bulb, its wings painting swirled shadows
on blueprints stuck with wax to windows,
this evening beginning like any other, stars shimmering
like sequins stitched upon a panther’s hide,
the father awaiting his wife to arrive, both cops grave with news
that sends his spoon rattling to the linoleum.
Second Prize – Tim Waller
Performance, Eighty Miles South of Louisville
For personal reasons, Poetry Teignmouth are honouring
the poet's wishes not to publish this poem.
Third Prize – Fiona Dignan
Holding the Brevity
As summer turns, the thistles, once
purple urchins, soften to seed
And now the pathways and fields
are sleeping under blankets of down
as fine as the fluff that coated
the children as raw newborns
And for a moment
they believe it’s powdery snow
But this is a better enchantment
They finger its soft warmth, it is a substance
that grants permission
They collect these cotton clots
that do not melt in their hands
and toss the seeds on the breeze and stand
amongst all that potential
falling at their feet
Soon, they will scatter and set root
But for now, they run feral amongst
the floss. And you think of how
the seasons will turn and these bundles will
grow strong and sharp. Bristling things
you can no longer touch. But for now
there is all that cradling
of too brief a tenderness
Graham Burchell Award Winning Poems – Devon residents only
First Prize – Ffion Mackenzie
someone should do something
somewhere a baby is crying
I should search the house but I’m barefoot in the kitchen.
I’m looking at the apple tree her last leaf ochre tinted
is drifting to the ground
her knuckled branches scarred and bony wave to someone in the wind
I wave too
In the kitchen on the table someone’s made a sandwich salmon with samphire
all under clingfilm
there will be one squeeze of lime and a little black pepper on
the tender pink body
the sandwich is cut into two I need to cut it into four or eight
I need to slice through the dead flesh until the table is a mortuary slab
I need a knife but the block has gone
I go from drawer to drawer no knives
from somewhere the baby is still crying
by the window someone has filled a plastic vase with winter lilies
I should sniff them devour the scent I should feel my heart race with pleasure
but my heart’s a steady hammer knocking on and on
the rain is hammering too firing bullets at the house
I open the door and step outside I know the air is frozen
I know the rain slaps my face and sends sacred water to wash my nakedness
I am changing into stone a garden statute
someone can tend to me and cut the ivy from my head
and I can rest there forever
a man bent double fights the wind his head half-hidden under a newspaper
he sees me and his mouth forms a perfect O
Once someone might have shouted catch a fly like that you know
I just stare back
I stare back and make my mouth a perfect O
from inside the baby keeps crying
why doesn't someone come
why doesn't someone feed the baby and rock her until she stops
someone should do something
Second prize – Jenny Hamlett
Psychosis
You were three when you said,
We got moon in the sky …
I ran inside to write it down.
You grew laughing,
playing, gentle with the kitten.
We cannot grasp the moon.
She grows and shrinks
dragging the tides.
We watched you move away
to live on her dark side.
One night your friends rang – frightened.
We found a prisoner sitting on dirty sheets
in a messy room.
Someone had come to steal your thoughts,
you said but they ran hither and thither
pixie led.
I tore up your childhood with your poem.
Countless moons passed.
The rags of us struggled on.
Like Sisyphus you pushed
your boulder up the cliffs
only to see it crash back down.
Happiness lurked in corners.
We took it out, dusted it
when you made a small step forwards –
volunteering perhaps.
Change came, slow and risky as if
you were a beetle crossing a motorway.
Medication of course,
but you had your own two cats.
The moon was full when I ran inside,
knelt to paste the pieces of your childhood together,
discovered I'd left out the last word that you'd said –
We got moon in the sky
flying.
Third Prize – Richard Side
Caving
Beneath the limestone karst of Mother’s
stare the caverns are collapsing.
Trapped, her thoughts are unaware
another way is lost and circle,
sink through porous calcite floors,
emerge in unexpected dreams
whose pools have calcified to fact
adhered to for a while, submerge
again, flow past the fossiled shell
and corral walls of boneyard maze,
confusion clear now in her birdbrain
gaze, as routes she thought were there
are gone. Some stuff remains: a dripstone
seized, a speleothem is grasped
(though grown to unfamiliar shape),
her face relaxing shows she’s pleased
her grip on things is still secure
though names elude. Then doubt returns,
her slender hold begins to slip
and moving water soon reclaims
its vagrant prize to seek the sea
through sumps, past airbells, over scree,
through dark cathedrals, chokes and belly
crawls, diverting now to Wookey
Hole, avoiding city centre.
OPEN COMPETITION
JUDGE - MALIKA BOOKER
JUDGE - MALIKA BOOKER
Malika Booker is a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage. She co-founded Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. With Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire, Malika is published in the Penguin Modern Poets Series 3, Your Family: Your Body (2017). A Cave Canem Fellow and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, she was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for her outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow in 2022. Malika is the first woman to win the Forward Prize Best Single Poem – Written category twice, first in 2020 with her poem The Little Miracles, commissioned by and published in Magma 75 (2019), and in 2023 with Libation, published in The Poetry Review (2022).
GRAHAM BURCHELL AWARD FOR DEVON POETS
JUDGE - GRAEME RYAN
JUDGE - GRAEME RYAN
Graeme Ryan was brought up in St Anne's on Sea, Lancashire. He taught English and Drama in the Southwest for many years and wrote seven full-length plays for young people, including Heartland, Hope Street and Tracks of the Free. Graeme won the Teignmouth Festival Open Poetry prize in 2018 and collaborated in The Poetry of Unknown Things for the 2023 festival. He is a co-chair of Somerset-based Fire River Poets and has read widely across the Southwest, most recently at Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey. His debut poetry collection Valley of the Kings was published in 2022.
Graeme Ryan was brought up in St Anne's on Sea, Lancashire. He taught English and Drama in the Southwest for many years and wrote seven full-length plays for young people, including Heartland, Hope Street and Tracks of the Free. Graeme won the Teignmouth Festival Open Poetry prize in 2018 and collaborated in The Poetry of Unknown Things for the 2023 festival. He is a co-chair of Somerset-based Fire River Poets and has read widely across the Southwest, most recently at Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey. His debut poetry collection Valley of the Kings was published in 2022.