3rd PLACE: ANNA CROWE

with her poem WATERWHEELS, AVIGNON

Water-wheels, Avignon

Straddling the entire breadth
of the stream, we turn

powering no machinery now –
no cloth for fulling,

no dyeing-vats to stir
(that tainted the brook

where now its pebbles shine) –
but letting the clear-eyed Sorgue

push down each paddle
to send the great wheel

clattering round for nothing
but the sheer pleasure

of moving to water’s rhythm.
We are like women

whose children have left home:
skirts kilted, paddling

we’re in our element, laughing,
tasting our mother-tongue.

 

WHAT THE ADJUDICATOR SAID
This deceptively simple, quiet poem grew on me over the weeks. It doesn't put a foot wrong. In my advice before the competition I said that good poems 'strike the reader as being exactly right'. The huge waterwheels, the setting, are evoked with economy and precision and the poem moves as effortlessly as the wheels themselves from description to a simile which opens it out: the wheels become women whose children have left home, 'skirts kilted, paddling … tasting our mother tongue'. All done with admirable lightness of touch.

Anna Crowe is co-founder and former Artistic Director of StAnza, Scotland's Poetry Festival. Her work has been recorded for the Poetry Archive, translated into several languages, and includes Skating Out of the House and Punk with Dulcimer (both Peterloo); and three Mariscat chapbooks, of which Figure in a Landscape, the elegiac sequence written in memory of her sister, received the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award and was a PBS Choice. Awarded a Travelling Scholarship by the Society of Authors, she has translated three books by Catalan poet, Joan Margarit, for Bloodaxe, and the work of Catalan poets, Josep Lluís Aguiló and Manuel Forcano, and Mexican poet, Pedro Serrano, for Arc. Her third collection, Not on the Side of the Gods, is forthcoming from Arc.

Results of the Autumn Voices over 70 poetry competition…

Results of the Autumn Voices over 70 poetry competition

First Thrift – Cynthia Kitchen, Preston, Lancs

Second Judy Collins – Pauline Plummer, North Shields

Third Waterwheels, Avignon – Anna Crowe, St.Andrews, Fife

Highly Commended

Ripeness is All – Janet Killeen, London

The Skin of her Eyelids – Pattie Palmer-Baker, Portland, Oregon

Commended

Break-up – Conrad Geller, Ashbury, Virginia

Eggs – Claire McLaughan, London

In Rustiques – Lynn Otty, Dumfries, Scotland

Rest of shortlist

The Beginning of the End – Mary Thomson, Glasgow

The Slow Dance – Myra Vennard, Ballycastle, N. Ireland

Incipient – Derek Sellen, Canterbury

Longlist

Hat – Valerie Morton, St Albans, Herts
Homecomings – Heather Walker, London
The Wild West Bus in Glasgow – Sylvia A.Telfer, Rutherglen, Glasgow
Elderly Truant – Diane Jackman, Diss, Norfolk
Wraiths – Peter Branson, Stoke-on-Trent
Night Flight from Liverpool – Gill McEvoy, Plymouth

Honesty – Stephanie Green, Edinburgh
Curtains – Roger Elkin, Biddulph Moor, Staffordshire
Walking in Arbuthnott – Eleanor Fordyce, Forfar, Scotland
False Hip – Jean Taylor, Edinburgh
The Ostrich Egg – Dai Vaughan, Glasgow
Speug – Donald Adamson, Dalbeattie, Scotland
The Tired Tourist's Villanelle – C. Rowe, Coventry
Gone – Alexander Hamilton, Tayavallich, Argyll
A Cambridge Romance – Mandy MacDonald, Aberdeen

Congratulations to everyone and thank you for entering the competition;
and a big thanks to A.C.Clarke for her adjudication.

1ST PLACE: CYNTHIA KITCHEN

with her poem THRIFT

I was born a Baby Boomer, always in crowded school years but often absent with chronic ill health which meant I could indulge in my mother's magazines and any books I could find while bed-bound.This seemed to develop an introspection and liking for my own company and got me out of swimming and games.The idea of being a writer grew but accompanied by the knowledge that I didn't know anything and certainly not enough to write with.This would take years and in the meantime I was expected to fulfil my mother's wishes and become a teacher.As she died aged 52 I had little choice but to honour this.

To my surprise I enjoyed teaching primary stage children,as they were then called, and worked full time,with one short break until age 60.Young children and the creative arts fit perfectly so I was able to indulge my passions.In the early 70's I discovered the Mersey Poets and a poem called "Mirror," by Sylvia Plath which had a profound effect on me.It was some time after I married and my son was born that the verse came thick and fast.I could hardly keep up with the writing of it. Short,marginal stuff but I couldn't stop reading poetry books by the masters.I have continued to write to the present day and it has been a long apprenticeship.Poetry is inexhaustible and I love its ambiguity and its search for the true.

I have been mainly published in anthologies:Ver Poets,The University of Central Lancashire,Envoi,Marigolds grow wild on platforms etc.Two poems were prize winners in the Lancaster Literature Festival anthologies,one poem won third prize in Ver Poets Open Competition and I was a prize winner in the Bridport Prize International Competition 2006.My volume of poems was published by Headland Publications in 2008. Recently I have adjudicated poetry competitions and have really enjoyed reading, absorbing and reassessing my beliefs and insights."Poems won from silence."

When I was a child my parents had a battered, old caravan in an idyll of a place in Cumbria.It was primitive,water from a stream,leaking roof and inefficient oil stove.We children ran wild in the woods,shores and fields,only returning for meals. I still visit this magical,unspoilt area.Earlier this year,walking on the beach I was struck by the sea pinks growing on the rocks and later the memory of the old Threepenny bit with a design of these flowers on the reverse side.Later,trying to write about my mother picking Lily of the Valley,(back breaking work) in the woods to sell on to the florist, I wasn't making any headway.I had to dig deeper and the word Thrift was the inspiration.The poem is not autobiographical but it resonates with my mother's struggle in the 1950's to make ends meet.

It was such a thrill to hear Thrift had been selected for first prize and was a boost to my morale as I had begun to think "sending work out," should be left to the young.It's terrifically rewarding to think a recently written poem by a 71 year old can be a winner.I do believe that we are capable of developing and learning until the inevitable and we owe it to ourselves to keep our senses sharp and our minds open to the unusual,the quirky and the great solace that a country walk can bring.

Thrift

I grew up with the sound
of small change skimming my ears
cutting through the kitchen fug,
the one bulb nightmare
and being caught, for a loaf,
a pint of milk, sugar butties
for tea. My mother
was an expert at this, with one hand
tied she could toss the monies
of her purse and the air would toss
some back. We survived Winter
rolled on to Spring. She spent
all of herself on this circus act. When
I needed a cuddle, a goodnight kiss
she was out with the travelling coins
flying, shrugging want and rain
from her outstretched palms. "It tips
the bailiffs from our tracks," was all
she would say as I followed
her shadow on some street fending
Lupus from our door.
She practiced her tricks, some low
some high, using the wiring to balance
all books. I wouldn't look
at how her fingers were starting to split.
There came a day when her hands
fell to shakes, the family dropped
like the coins out of reach...
"Parkinson's,"the Social said when
we'd asked for the millionth time.
I turned my back to continue her art...
but they took us away.

WHAT THE ADJUDICATOR SAID

This was a strong contender from the start. Without sentimentality and with careful placing of telling details – 'one bulb nightmare', 'I followed her shadow on some street', 'her hands fell to shakes' - the writer tells an ultimately tragic story of poverty and loss with complete assurance. The control of tone and narrative pace is notable - down to the last bald line 'but they took us away'. An excellent poem.

Judge’s Report on Autumn Voices Poetry Competition

A.C.Clarke writes:

Every time I judge a poetry competition I am reminded of how much talent is so little rewarded. I received poems of every kind, ballads, sonnets, acrostics, free verse, intensely private, fiercely indignant, humorous, melancholy - and not one that did not give me pleasure of some kind, whether from a well-turned phrase, a striking observation, or a wry recognition of the limitations of age. The latter was a theme of the poems to an almost dismaying extent, even if many of them shook a fist at oncoming weakness and mortality. All of them, regardless of subject, exhibited a maturity of tone which reflected years of experience, as one might expect. I was not consciously looking for this but it was palpably present.

The task of the judge though is to judge, which means weighing one poem against another. It's never easy – the judge has to say goodbye to many poems that have struck a chord - and no choice can ever be 'right'. I have been guided always not by the question 'do I like what this poem is about?' but the question 'in my judgement does this work as a poem?' Do its language, form, cadence, imagery all work together to produce that sense of completeness which is always recognisable when it's met, though not so easy to define?

Any poetry competition judge will tell you that the final choices from a shortlist are the hardest bit and so it proved. Those at the top of the list moved in and out of contention. However, the top three remained steadily in the top three after three or four readings of the entire entry, though the order kept changing, showing how hard it was to choose between them. I could have awarded joint prizes but decided against it.

Finally if you were disappointed this time, don't take it to heart too much (says one who always takes it to heart more than she should). Look at the poem again, send it elsewhere (tweaked a bit if you feel it needs it) and see what happens. There are other competitions, other judges. Or try a magazine: editors are not concerned with assigning ranks to poems, only with whether they are good poems and fit the current issue of the mag. Thank you to all who submitted and good luck with your future writing.

See A.C.Clarke’s comments with each of the winning poems.