TEIGNMOUTH POETRY FESTIVAL 2022– COMPETITION RESULTS
THE GRAHAM BURCHELL AWARD FOR DEVON POETS
THE GRAHAM BURCHELL AWARD FOR DEVON POETS
We are delighted to announce the results of the Graham Burchell Award for Devon Poets.
This award is part of our Teignmouth Poetry Festival Competition, specifically awarded for a poem submitted by a poet resident in Devon. The award is named in memory of our dear friend Graham Burchell who died in 2021.
The competition was judged by Rosie Jackson The winning, highly commended and commended poems were read at a special Awards Ceremony held at The Pavilions, Teignmouth on Saturday, 28th May, 2022.
First Prize Burying the Kitten - Sue Proffitt
Second Prize The Clergyman’s Daughter Contemplates
Opening a Book, 1175 - Emma Phillips
Third Prize Here - Mark Totterdell
Highly Commended
Pier - Jeff Skinner
Warbeth Cemetery - Julie-Ann Rowell
Peregrini - Helen Boyles
Snow-Owl - Chris Waters
Commended
Colourless - Mark Totterdell
ICE… - Helen Ashley
Plantago Lanceolota - Angela Howarth Martinot
This award is part of our Teignmouth Poetry Festival Competition, specifically awarded for a poem submitted by a poet resident in Devon. The award is named in memory of our dear friend Graham Burchell who died in 2021.
The competition was judged by Rosie Jackson The winning, highly commended and commended poems were read at a special Awards Ceremony held at The Pavilions, Teignmouth on Saturday, 28th May, 2022.
First Prize Burying the Kitten - Sue Proffitt
Second Prize The Clergyman’s Daughter Contemplates
Opening a Book, 1175 - Emma Phillips
Third Prize Here - Mark Totterdell
Highly Commended
Pier - Jeff Skinner
Warbeth Cemetery - Julie-Ann Rowell
Peregrini - Helen Boyles
Snow-Owl - Chris Waters
Commended
Colourless - Mark Totterdell
ICE… - Helen Ashley
Plantago Lanceolota - Angela Howarth Martinot
The Winning Poems
1st Prize - Graham Burchell Competition
Burying the kitten - Sue Proffitt
Not a poem about a kitten you think, but wait.
It was dark, late Summer. I went outside, dug a hole
in the front lawn. An effort, breaking thick snarls
of couch grass, more feeling than seeing and, yes, crying
how could I not have known that it wasn’t suckling,
its mother lifting herself heavily from it, shrugging it off,
sensing it was done for. I picked up my defeat, placed it
in the hole, a deeper black, and suddenly you were there,
come out to watch, boots close to my face, voice hushed
and angry. You dropped your blame in the hole. Walked away.
I wonder now what’s left, if I dig down. Roots yellow and knotty
as bones, not a trace of fur but something else, heavy as stone
and lightless landed there that night, foretold another ending.
Look, I’m putting my hand in, more feeling than seeing.
2nd Prize - Graham Burchell Competition
The Clergyman’s Daughter Contemplates Opening a Book, 1175 - Emma Phillips
She holds it gingerly, turns it in her hands
afraid to open it in case the moons of her fingernails
slip or crack like yolks beneath the weight of it.
She has watched him through the doorway,
seen her father’s hands pluck verse
with peculiar magic from the page to his throat.
Sometimes she forces herself to listen
as if she knew it would come to this.
She is good at reading people
knows that silence has as many hues as sunlight
and a word is like a seed
it needs the right conditions to take root.
Perhaps the book is the garden
her father scolds her with,
the one that holds her kind to account
for every wrong that followed.
How she hates that story,
she would like to mould her fingers to her ears
to make him stop it,
take her mother’s sharpest knife and cut through its core.
She longs to devour the fruit,
see him watch the juice run down her chin
Look father, she’d say, it’s only an apple.
3rd Prize - Graham Burchell Competition
Here - Mark Totterdell
Here at the edge of the forest track
are knuckles of folded bedrock. Solid stone
has buckled, mountains have been ground
down to stumps. You walk on.
Here is a felled ash, dismembered,
its flesh still pale, and there
by the fickle river is a fallen oak.
You curse the pitiless chainsaw and the storm.
You slog through fields. There are
the doomed Red Rubies in the mud,
huge eyes following you with a look that says
they know what the abattoir’s about.
Here in the grass around this crumbling church,
you see, below a yew tree, the excavations
of dynasties of stubborn badgers
unmindful of exhuming yellow bones.
This is the lane where the ground slipped,
an acre shifting after tons of rain.
It took the tarmac yards downhill,
and made your map obsolete overnight.
You’re on your way down now.
There are the snowdrops, looking too small,
too frail, to bear the weight you lay on them.
Here they are now. Here they are.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1st Prize - Graham Burchell Competition
Burying the kitten - Sue Proffitt
Not a poem about a kitten you think, but wait.
It was dark, late Summer. I went outside, dug a hole
in the front lawn. An effort, breaking thick snarls
of couch grass, more feeling than seeing and, yes, crying
how could I not have known that it wasn’t suckling,
its mother lifting herself heavily from it, shrugging it off,
sensing it was done for. I picked up my defeat, placed it
in the hole, a deeper black, and suddenly you were there,
come out to watch, boots close to my face, voice hushed
and angry. You dropped your blame in the hole. Walked away.
I wonder now what’s left, if I dig down. Roots yellow and knotty
as bones, not a trace of fur but something else, heavy as stone
and lightless landed there that night, foretold another ending.
Look, I’m putting my hand in, more feeling than seeing.
2nd Prize - Graham Burchell Competition
The Clergyman’s Daughter Contemplates Opening a Book, 1175 - Emma Phillips
She holds it gingerly, turns it in her hands
afraid to open it in case the moons of her fingernails
slip or crack like yolks beneath the weight of it.
She has watched him through the doorway,
seen her father’s hands pluck verse
with peculiar magic from the page to his throat.
Sometimes she forces herself to listen
as if she knew it would come to this.
She is good at reading people
knows that silence has as many hues as sunlight
and a word is like a seed
it needs the right conditions to take root.
Perhaps the book is the garden
her father scolds her with,
the one that holds her kind to account
for every wrong that followed.
How she hates that story,
she would like to mould her fingers to her ears
to make him stop it,
take her mother’s sharpest knife and cut through its core.
She longs to devour the fruit,
see him watch the juice run down her chin
Look father, she’d say, it’s only an apple.
3rd Prize - Graham Burchell Competition
Here - Mark Totterdell
Here at the edge of the forest track
are knuckles of folded bedrock. Solid stone
has buckled, mountains have been ground
down to stumps. You walk on.
Here is a felled ash, dismembered,
its flesh still pale, and there
by the fickle river is a fallen oak.
You curse the pitiless chainsaw and the storm.
You slog through fields. There are
the doomed Red Rubies in the mud,
huge eyes following you with a look that says
they know what the abattoir’s about.
Here in the grass around this crumbling church,
you see, below a yew tree, the excavations
of dynasties of stubborn badgers
unmindful of exhuming yellow bones.
This is the lane where the ground slipped,
an acre shifting after tons of rain.
It took the tarmac yards downhill,
and made your map obsolete overnight.
You’re on your way down now.
There are the snowdrops, looking too small,
too frail, to bear the weight you lay on them.
Here they are now. Here they are.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Rosie Jackson’s comments on the short-listed and winning poems.
I read 280 odd poems for this comp. There were many about Devon and Dartmoor, nature, relationships, death and memories. Lots of variety. Quite a few I felt frustrated with because they started well and finished badly, or didn’t really finish at all, I think endings are so important and it’s always worth going that extra mile in revising to make sure the endings work. I swear by Jo Bell’s advice in editing a poem – Arrive late, leave early. I think with more editing, many of the poems would have greatly improved.
I worked to a long list of about 40, then to 20, but the final 10 really jumped out. The really time-consuming thing was the difficult job of placing these 10 in the right order. But after much agonising, I do feel I’ve done them justice.
Commended (in alphabetical order)
Ice by Helen Ashley
I noticed Katrina listed this too among her long list.
This is a lovely play on the sound of language, here the word ‘ice’ and what it holds and conjures up of winter magic. Ice shapes things – sculptures, stalactites - enfolds things - branches, leaves - edges things, stills things – water, lakes. The poem is well crafted and frames its meaning beautifully from the title and first lines - Ice holds in its sound /the slivers of itself.. - to the end which neatly captures the meaning of the whole, working with assonance to keep our attention on the sound of the word. Say ice and embrace the whole dark of winter in that one bright syllable.
Plantago Lanceolata by Angela Howarth Martinot
I love poems that celebrate things in the margins and waysides, things we call weeds and often fail to properly notice. This poem draws attention to Ribwort plantain – a plant that I know well by sight but didn’t till now know the name of – which is a common weed on cultivated or disturbed land. Angela plays with the plant’s different names, and different uses, and I loved how she gave the poem a political edge when she talked about one of its names – As White-man’s footsteps we followed your plough/when you turned the New World upside down. The end points to the way plants connect through roots under the surface, and how we could learn from them and find our own answers there, in subtle and mutual connection.
Colourless by Mart Totterdell
It’s hard to write anything original about snowdrops, but Mark Totterdell does it here (and in his 3rd prize poem too). Neat tercets give the voice confidence, and the observation and metaphors are very fine – an urgency of earth-spikes.. treble blades unturning.. angled lamp, split-shaded. I didn’t know the legend at the end about ill fortune attending if you pluck snowdrops for the house. I like to learn new things in poems, and now I know!
Highly Commended
Peregrini by Helen Boyles
I read this poem as a description of how we project strangeness and otherness onto foreigners, refugees, people seeking shelter. Helen likens them to displaced birds and animals, and shows how easy it is to imagine dark motives and suspicion, when really we know so little about them: ‘they carry stories/in their eyes we cannot read.’ There’s a disturbing quality to this poem that woke me up and alerted me to our worrying inhospitality.
Warbeth Cemetery by Julie-Ann Rowell
Sometimes just a couple of lines can lift a poem off the page and leave it in the memory. The last 2 lines here do that for me, talking about a man buried in Warbeth Cemetery on Orkney – I only want white birds, kelp alive/in the water, his rarity. Such an unusual word to end on. And the poem has earned that ending by its spareness, short couplets and restrained yet telling details. An easterly skelps me/layers of stone step to the sand. I could feel the wind blowing through this one, hear the sea, feel the dead and living so close. Wonderful poem.
Pier by Jeff Skinner
Another excellent poem that very nearly made the top 3. It’s skilfully crafted, with well- balanced tercets. And manages to travel through time back and forth like the tide itself, ‘listing’ so many stories that collect around the pier – Keats came here, honeymooners, someone scattering ashes, the hour after high tide’s best, she’s told/ an offshore wind. I loved having so many tiny narratives plaited together, it really captured a busy seaside front (I’m assuming Teignmouth, because of the Keats connection) and I think this poem should go up on the promenade, or in the amusement arcade!
Snow Owl by Chris Waters
This is a richly visual and haunting poem, the snow-owl becomes a creature of dream. (I’ve just discovered from Google that Snow Owl is a legendary pet from Christmas 2020, which rather detracts and distracts from the poem, I don’t know if that reference was intentional or not.) But here the creature becomes mythical , the lost representative of a world that has all but disappeared, a landscape of snow and ice and all that is vanishing in nature. why/ no shivering calls/ this last dark winter – /and why no ice feathers/ of the old snows we remember? Evocative and moving.
3rd place
Here by Mark Totterdell
The movement and presence of this poem are stunning. The speaker, presumably addressing the self as ‘you’, is walking down through stones, fields, villages, from the large landscape to the small, once mountains to snowdrops. What’s immediately arresting are the sounds, the wonderful internal rhymes and echoes… here at the edge of the forest track/ are knuckles of folded bedrock. Solid stone has buckled… by the fickle river is a fallen oak. The quatrains hold the movement in a sure tone, and there’s a masterly evocation of time, of things slipping towards death - the Red Rubies in the mud / huge eyes following you with a look that says/ they know what the abattoir’s about. Nothing is permanent, land is slipping, and the beauty we find – like the tiny snowdrops – is both celebrated yet vulnerable. You’re on your way down now./ These are the snowdrops, looking too small,/ too frail, to bear the weight you lay on them./Here they are now. Here they are. This is a splendid poem to save and memorise.
2nd place
The Clergyman’s Daughter Contemplates Opening a Book, 1175 by Emma Phillips
This captured many of my favourite themes: a powerful feminist fable about spirituality and how destructive and far-reaching is so much patriarchal religion. The ‘plot’ is deceptively simple: a young woman resisting reading the Bible because it contains such an oppressive and repressive message for women in its most essential story of Eve, held responsible for all the sin and suffering of the world. But it’s the way Emma has made this narrative so immediate and used such original imagery that makes it work so well, e.g. The daughter sees her father pluck verse with peculiar magic from the page to his throat . The present tense stresses this is a story for all time. (And left me unsure about the need for a date in the title.) The use of the apple at the end is wonderfully dramatic.
1st place
Burying the Kitten by Sue Proffitt
I tried very hard not to give this first prize! I have an aversion to cat poems and as soon as I saw the title I thought, oh my god, a cat poem, more than that, a dying cat poem, no thanks. But see how cleverly the poet disarmed me in the very first line – Not a poem about a kitten you think, but wait. Immediately I thought ah, this poet knows what they are doing. And the next line takes us straight into time and place and action. All simple language and seemingly simple acts. Late summer, dark, digging a hole in the lawn to bury a cat. Then the level of the poem gets deeper and deeper. It’s about loss, it’s about a relationship not working, your boots close to my face; it’s about defeat and grief, the searing death of a relationship. And though, on one level, the death of the cat represents all this, it is also a real creature, a real scene, this isn’t reduced to allegory. There seems to me to be level after level of meaning and feeling reverberating out of this apparently small and simple incident. The speaker is lost in a black hole, struggling to understand her loss and defeat, and it’s clear this is being told years later, yet the loss still reverberates, the meaning of it all still impossible to fully retrieve. I love this depth of feeling. And love too the form of this poem, 14 lines, an unrhymed sonnet, love the unpretentious language, love the address to the reader, and the way the daring humour of that throwing-me-off-my-guard opening leads to something so darkly rich, poignant, moving. So though I tried not to, I did have to give in and give this first prize.
I read 280 odd poems for this comp. There were many about Devon and Dartmoor, nature, relationships, death and memories. Lots of variety. Quite a few I felt frustrated with because they started well and finished badly, or didn’t really finish at all, I think endings are so important and it’s always worth going that extra mile in revising to make sure the endings work. I swear by Jo Bell’s advice in editing a poem – Arrive late, leave early. I think with more editing, many of the poems would have greatly improved.
I worked to a long list of about 40, then to 20, but the final 10 really jumped out. The really time-consuming thing was the difficult job of placing these 10 in the right order. But after much agonising, I do feel I’ve done them justice.
Commended (in alphabetical order)
Ice by Helen Ashley
I noticed Katrina listed this too among her long list.
This is a lovely play on the sound of language, here the word ‘ice’ and what it holds and conjures up of winter magic. Ice shapes things – sculptures, stalactites - enfolds things - branches, leaves - edges things, stills things – water, lakes. The poem is well crafted and frames its meaning beautifully from the title and first lines - Ice holds in its sound /the slivers of itself.. - to the end which neatly captures the meaning of the whole, working with assonance to keep our attention on the sound of the word. Say ice and embrace the whole dark of winter in that one bright syllable.
Plantago Lanceolata by Angela Howarth Martinot
I love poems that celebrate things in the margins and waysides, things we call weeds and often fail to properly notice. This poem draws attention to Ribwort plantain – a plant that I know well by sight but didn’t till now know the name of – which is a common weed on cultivated or disturbed land. Angela plays with the plant’s different names, and different uses, and I loved how she gave the poem a political edge when she talked about one of its names – As White-man’s footsteps we followed your plough/when you turned the New World upside down. The end points to the way plants connect through roots under the surface, and how we could learn from them and find our own answers there, in subtle and mutual connection.
Colourless by Mart Totterdell
It’s hard to write anything original about snowdrops, but Mark Totterdell does it here (and in his 3rd prize poem too). Neat tercets give the voice confidence, and the observation and metaphors are very fine – an urgency of earth-spikes.. treble blades unturning.. angled lamp, split-shaded. I didn’t know the legend at the end about ill fortune attending if you pluck snowdrops for the house. I like to learn new things in poems, and now I know!
Highly Commended
Peregrini by Helen Boyles
I read this poem as a description of how we project strangeness and otherness onto foreigners, refugees, people seeking shelter. Helen likens them to displaced birds and animals, and shows how easy it is to imagine dark motives and suspicion, when really we know so little about them: ‘they carry stories/in their eyes we cannot read.’ There’s a disturbing quality to this poem that woke me up and alerted me to our worrying inhospitality.
Warbeth Cemetery by Julie-Ann Rowell
Sometimes just a couple of lines can lift a poem off the page and leave it in the memory. The last 2 lines here do that for me, talking about a man buried in Warbeth Cemetery on Orkney – I only want white birds, kelp alive/in the water, his rarity. Such an unusual word to end on. And the poem has earned that ending by its spareness, short couplets and restrained yet telling details. An easterly skelps me/layers of stone step to the sand. I could feel the wind blowing through this one, hear the sea, feel the dead and living so close. Wonderful poem.
Pier by Jeff Skinner
Another excellent poem that very nearly made the top 3. It’s skilfully crafted, with well- balanced tercets. And manages to travel through time back and forth like the tide itself, ‘listing’ so many stories that collect around the pier – Keats came here, honeymooners, someone scattering ashes, the hour after high tide’s best, she’s told/ an offshore wind. I loved having so many tiny narratives plaited together, it really captured a busy seaside front (I’m assuming Teignmouth, because of the Keats connection) and I think this poem should go up on the promenade, or in the amusement arcade!
Snow Owl by Chris Waters
This is a richly visual and haunting poem, the snow-owl becomes a creature of dream. (I’ve just discovered from Google that Snow Owl is a legendary pet from Christmas 2020, which rather detracts and distracts from the poem, I don’t know if that reference was intentional or not.) But here the creature becomes mythical , the lost representative of a world that has all but disappeared, a landscape of snow and ice and all that is vanishing in nature. why/ no shivering calls/ this last dark winter – /and why no ice feathers/ of the old snows we remember? Evocative and moving.
3rd place
Here by Mark Totterdell
The movement and presence of this poem are stunning. The speaker, presumably addressing the self as ‘you’, is walking down through stones, fields, villages, from the large landscape to the small, once mountains to snowdrops. What’s immediately arresting are the sounds, the wonderful internal rhymes and echoes… here at the edge of the forest track/ are knuckles of folded bedrock. Solid stone has buckled… by the fickle river is a fallen oak. The quatrains hold the movement in a sure tone, and there’s a masterly evocation of time, of things slipping towards death - the Red Rubies in the mud / huge eyes following you with a look that says/ they know what the abattoir’s about. Nothing is permanent, land is slipping, and the beauty we find – like the tiny snowdrops – is both celebrated yet vulnerable. You’re on your way down now./ These are the snowdrops, looking too small,/ too frail, to bear the weight you lay on them./Here they are now. Here they are. This is a splendid poem to save and memorise.
2nd place
The Clergyman’s Daughter Contemplates Opening a Book, 1175 by Emma Phillips
This captured many of my favourite themes: a powerful feminist fable about spirituality and how destructive and far-reaching is so much patriarchal religion. The ‘plot’ is deceptively simple: a young woman resisting reading the Bible because it contains such an oppressive and repressive message for women in its most essential story of Eve, held responsible for all the sin and suffering of the world. But it’s the way Emma has made this narrative so immediate and used such original imagery that makes it work so well, e.g. The daughter sees her father pluck verse with peculiar magic from the page to his throat . The present tense stresses this is a story for all time. (And left me unsure about the need for a date in the title.) The use of the apple at the end is wonderfully dramatic.
1st place
Burying the Kitten by Sue Proffitt
I tried very hard not to give this first prize! I have an aversion to cat poems and as soon as I saw the title I thought, oh my god, a cat poem, more than that, a dying cat poem, no thanks. But see how cleverly the poet disarmed me in the very first line – Not a poem about a kitten you think, but wait. Immediately I thought ah, this poet knows what they are doing. And the next line takes us straight into time and place and action. All simple language and seemingly simple acts. Late summer, dark, digging a hole in the lawn to bury a cat. Then the level of the poem gets deeper and deeper. It’s about loss, it’s about a relationship not working, your boots close to my face; it’s about defeat and grief, the searing death of a relationship. And though, on one level, the death of the cat represents all this, it is also a real creature, a real scene, this isn’t reduced to allegory. There seems to me to be level after level of meaning and feeling reverberating out of this apparently small and simple incident. The speaker is lost in a black hole, struggling to understand her loss and defeat, and it’s clear this is being told years later, yet the loss still reverberates, the meaning of it all still impossible to fully retrieve. I love this depth of feeling. And love too the form of this poem, 14 lines, an unrhymed sonnet, love the unpretentious language, love the address to the reader, and the way the daring humour of that throwing-me-off-my-guard opening leads to something so darkly rich, poignant, moving. So though I tried not to, I did have to give in and give this first prize.