TEIGNMOUTH POETRY FESTIVAL 2021 – COMPETITION RESULTS
 
​OPEN COMPETITION

Open Competition Winners – Judged by Helen Ivory
First Prize                 Rosie Jackson           - Light Makes it Easy
Second Prize            Elena Croitoru           - The Last Wedding
Third Prize                Jo Haslam               - When auntie was a crow
 
Commended in alphabetical order:
Jean Atkin                         - Monsters              
Chrissy Banks                    - Eine Kleine Nacht Musik
Ruth Beddow                    - What have I built   
Tina Cole                          - What I told the Wren
Ken Evans                        - The White-Out      
Pamela Job                      - Embarkation
Graeme Ryan                   - Look At Monday      
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​The Winning Poems
1st Prize – Open Competition
Light Makes it Easy by Rosie Jackson

You’re moving at last. It’s a place you saw once
in a dream: blue sky, white house, long slope of grass.
It’s how, if you could live on after your body,
you might shape the afterlife. Pears are about to fall.
Poems come flooding in. Stars tell you of the beauty,
the necessity, of transit. You don’t care about anything
you’ve lost. This is your home now: chairs floating
under the vines, paths white with salt. You never thought
you could pack up your old walls so easily. You’ve never
been so ready to let go. The stones of your old life
are on their knees. The kitchen table must be left behind.
The king-sized bed is too large. But you no longer want space
inside, only outside, where apples are falling, blackberries
stud the hedgerow. Let no one throw cold water.
You know now you are mortal. Your clutter is so much
punctuation. How clear the light makes things.
In the distance you can see the needle’s eye. How good
to let your possessions go. How good to leave behind
all power but the power of trees, to lean towards your words,
your silences, your sweet earthly body, your home
that nests in this place between field and forest
like a foretaste of the afterlife, like something you glimpsed
once in a dream – a blossom of rain, petals falling. 

​Listen to Rosie reading her poem below

​2nd Prize – Open Competition 
The Last Wedding by Elena Croitoru 

That night was so dark that I could not find
my way out of it. My mother placed her Soviet-red
lipstick in an envelope purse while my father
                  
lingered by the bathroom sink, his face half-eaten
by the dark, his scars like minute bullet marks.
The reflection in the mirror was yet another place
 
he couldn't run to. He didn’t pack the toothbrushes & said
that when one is not allowed to return home
the desire to cleanse oneself disappears first. My mother
 
wore her cream wool cardigan though I knew
it wouldn’t keep her warm in a bare concrete room.
She said my aunt would come if they weren’t back
 
by morning. She looked out of the window
at the militiaman who watched our balcony
from below, the way one would watch
 
the funeral of someone still moving.
My mother put on low-heeled shoes
which glistened red, like the underlay of skin
 
because a body could only take so much
dancing. She looked at me as if forgetting
was the hardest way to live.

​
3rd Prize – Open Competition                                                                                                                           
When auntie was a crow by Jo Haslam                                                                                         
 
You could hear her the length of the hospital ward,
the rasped aarrk, aark aark she couldn’t stop
so the woman in the next bed
clapped on her headphones, the manager
come from the care home said no, as they all did,
and no wonder; who could sleep
through all that cawing, who’d want a crow
or jackdaw to feed, put to bed,
who’d want to lift the cumbersome body ,
sweep up the shed feathers , chance the claws
and  fierce beak.  And what would you feed her
when everything’s pushed away. What she needs
is relief, some quiet  to soothe her, some food
she could eat; a mole or skinned squirrel,
peanuts or ants; and some place to fly from.
And she’d fly if she could, if she hadn’t fallen,
rolled on the floor in the night, flailing and calling
unable to shift the dense bones; if her unwieldy limbs
weren’t caught in the cellular blanket; if
she had a branch to perch on black winged, ready
to lift in the dazzle of sky and no weight at all.

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Judge’s report by Helen Ivory
It’s such a responsibility to judge a poetry competition and it makes you think very hard about what a poem is, who you are, and what you are looking for.  You know that in the box of around 1500 poems, you must find your winners; the whole experience becomes a quest.  Every day you go into the box with hope in your heart that one of the poems will sing out to you. 
 
Much has been written about what makes a ‘good poem’.  If everyone read everything that’s been written on this subject and adhered strictly to it, we’d all be writing good, potentially prize-winning poems every time we sat down with our notebooks or keyboards. Write an original and startling metaphor; write a brightly drawn image; write with one ear on the music of language; write honestly with your brain and your whole being, but don’t make it clunky or obvious.  Don’t tell the reader what to think, coax them into feeling how you feel.  This is what we say, in words, black and white - as if it were as simple as that.   Something occult goes on when we write.  Something unpindownable and mystical, that they used to call the poetic trance, and now put down to the unconscious.  And we poets leap around with our metaphorical moth nets trying to capture these crepuscular happenings and then translate them into words others can read by the clear light of day.  It is hard to write about writing without wafting into metaphor, it seems. 
 
Emily Dickinson wrote of the physical reaction that poetry had on her. There is nothing wafty about a physical reaction, especially the way she writes it:
 
“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
 
It’s a good yardstick, I think, or certainly what attracts me to poems. I am not interested in poetry as a purely intellectual exercise, although there is certainly validity in that and I do not want to begin to suggest there should be only one type of poetry.  How boring would that be!
 
I read the poems in numerical order (each poem has been given a number to track it) and the poem I eventually named as the winner was poem 597.  Light Makes it Easy stayed with me from the moment I read it, and became parked on a shelf at the back of my head as ‘winning poem?’  When you find a poem like this, you are looking for other poems to have the same magical connection with, or some that come close. 
 
First Prize
 
Light Makes it Easy is a beautiful poem. The tone is so warm and kind, and carries you like a guided meditation inside a single stanza.  I think that if the afterlife is like the ultimate coming home this poem envisions, I would let go of possessions easily for this peace.  ‘Your clutter is so much punctuation’ says the poem ‘How good to leave behind all power but the power of trees.’ 
 
I enjoyed that the poem began and ended with the the vision of this place in a dream ‘like a foretaste of the afterlife’.  I’m also impressed at how a spiritual and metaphysical subject is handled in such a tangible way, and how I could see a house quite clearly to begin with, then simply a paradise as the fixtures and furnishings melt away.  This poem will stay with me for a long time.
 
Second Prize
 
The Last Wedding is a highly visual cinematic poem and feels like it is scene from a much bigger story.  The narrator’s parents are taken away by militia in the middle of the night, and the poem’s focus is on what to take with you when that happens.  
 
I was drawn to the commonplace details of toothbrushes and the way the mother of the poem places her’ Soviet-red lipstick in an envelope purse’ - a deliberate and deft action, incongruous against the stark backdrop.  ‘She looked out of the window/ at the militiaman who watched our balcony/ from below, the way one would watch/ the funeral of someone still moving’ gave me a bigger chill each time I read it.  If this is part of a bigger story, I want to read more.
 
Third Prize
 
When auntie was a crow took me right back to when my grandmother was in a dementia ward.  I have no idea if the auntie of the poem is in a dementia ward, but the woman in the next bed to my grandmother made crow noises and to a little girl that was terrifying.  ‘and no wonder;’, says the poem ‘who’d want a crow/ or jackdaw to feed ... chance the claws/ and fierce beak’. 
 
I admired that the narrator skillfully depicts the crow-like behavior, sees how this behavior can be threatening - yet in a humane heart, longs to pick her up from the floor where she’s fallen; to help her ‘lift in the dazzle of sky and no weight at all.’ 
 

Commended Poems

The White-Out is a moving poem about how to deal with a person’s room after they have died.  The closely observed details of the way a carpet is imprinted by the habitual movements of a person and how those ‘tracks now damped by towels/and steamed with an iron to raise the flush’, can almost vanish them, is poignant in its practicality.
 
Eine Kleine Nacht Musik is the third poem on the theme of death in my selection.   When you judge a poetry competition, you will read a lot of poems about death and physical decline.  It is hard to write about these things originally, and I believe that all of these poems do.  This poem an ekphrastic piece of the Dorothea Tanning painting of the same name.  The poem imagines the hotel in the painting as the place where the dead live: ‘in the veined walls’ always trying to reach us ‘but voiceless as mist/ how can they?’ I very much like the logic of this.
 
Look at Money is a compelling sequence that does exactly what the title says.  I love the muscular language and the anthropomorphism of the protagonist, and the way it is reduced to a worthless material which is only good for burning: ‘The nights grow cold.  Tip a suitcase of notes/ onto flames to stay alive.’
 
What I told the Wren is a tender praise poem and a confessional, all at once.  Do not be afraid, the narrator tells the wren in ‘schoolgirl French’, while herself being fearful of gravity.  I was drawn to the language and surprise of this poem and could feel the barely there weight of the wren on my own hand: ‘She is one grain, a handful of lentils.’
 
Monsters . . .these monsters are all around.  They are the street lamps that stand over us ‘hissing, like cats doing build-up to a fight.’  They are on standby all about the house ‘so commonplace, we shrug/ and blank each mad red eye, put out the bin . . .’ this poem is a masterclass in making strange and gave me the shudders!
 
Embarkation sees a woman on a ferry crossing between Greek islands, after having trusted the wrong man.  She is in a liminal state in many senses and the second part of the poem, following a sonnet-like turn, gives a sense that she might break free as ‘Chains rattle, the anchor weighs/ and they exit the port.’  I like how the poem is partly in what feels like her own colloquial voice, then lifts into more heightened language, giving ballast to the experience.
 
What have I built appeals to the maker in me.  I love the Wunderkammer of objects, all so solid and so very there, and how the trajectory of the poem moves through years and various makings.  And outsiders ‘ask what I have built and my mouth forms/ the shape of nothing. Nothing of consequence . . .’ I think this is the fear of every maker - to be asked to explain yourself
 
Helen Ivory
March 2021
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