The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Third Prize-winner - Victor Tapner

Victor Tapner was first-prize winner in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2000, and has also won awards in other competitions, including last year’s Poetry London. He has recently completed two as yet unpublished collections: Charades, a series of persona poems, and Flatlands, a prehistory cycle, part of which won the Writers Inc Writers-of-the-Year bursary award in 2005. His poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies, and he is included in The Honey Gatherers (Bloodaxe, 2003). He lives in Essex and works as a journalist on the Financial Times.

Elizabeth Blackwell’s Five Hundred Cuts

Botanical artist Blackwell produced her book ’A Curious Herbal’ in weekly parts
between 1737 and 1739, containing 500 illustrations of medicinal plants
with text supplied by her husband from his cell in a debtors’ prison

The Physick Garden is at its best now,
much visited by sparrow and field moth.

Most mornings I sketch after breakfast,
dressing the paper with honest colours,

the bitter red of the love apple, white
of the opium poppy, so sweet an anodine

when the seed pods ripen, St John’s wort,
its flowers a most delicate yellow,

a tincture of which, in spirit of wine,
is commended against Melancholy & Madness.

Often the curator and his wife take the air,
his arm around her comely waist.

Today they stopped to untangle a quince
and she plucked him a head of honeysuckle.

What pretty cure-alls to furnish
an apothecary’s box, seeds bred

for crushing, stems for bruising,
petals to be drained of their scents

for the purging of fevers and pleurisies.
Balms and balsams deck the hedgerows,

but none that can soothe these hours.
Each noonday, on return to my lodgings,

I pass a bank grown thick with nettles
and remember the description you sent:

the juice is thought good
for all kinds of inward bleedings.

Would that this were medicine enough
to bring relief, or quicken the passing.

I work late now the days are long
till the room darkens with shadows

and I mourn the loss of line. It’s then
that I picture a candle on a table,

a closed casement with no moon,
your quill busy tending its own garden.

Time, perhaps, to refresh my lamp.
I have drawings to finish, plates to engrave,

pages to prepare for printing, pairings
once made that have no unmaking:

chicory and camomile, dandelion and clove.
Tomorrow, as always, I’ll be up at first light

to go down to the coachman. I want your words
for ladies thistle, the chaste tree, the wild rose.