The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Judges: Les Murray
Gwyneth Lewis

It’s often lamented that poets are not financially well remunerated for their work, but this competition is not a case in point. The Cardiff International Poetry Competition offers substantial prize money for a single poem. Indeed, seeing the quality of most of the poems submitted, both Les and I began to regret that we don’t compete more often ourselves. Many of the poems submitted had elements of poetry in them - wise insight, memorable facts or phrases, an attempt to embody an aspect of  life in words- but a very small proportion possessed that surface electricity of language by which we recognise poetry with a capital P.

The shortlisted poems had a number of different virtues. Some looked at the world slightly askance: "Today my granddaughter looked inside my printer/ and thanked the deity for giving her a picture". One poet celebrated the symbol for nothing, thinking of "Andrea Saxton/ with the dot on the palm of her hand she’s done in black pen/ and shows to the girls and the boys she likes." Another imagines an apocalyptic parade, ending with "the baby trying to walk like a soldier,/ and, after the baby trying to walk like a soldier, the glass-blowers/ and after the glass-blowers, the road itself, curling." Some caught the speech rhythms of people, as in "The Lord and Lady of Rhiwbina". We all know somebody awkward like the person described by this speaker:
 
 There being so many of us, I thought I’d spread the load
 Around. I asked her ladyship to do dessert. She said, I don’t expect
 To visit people’s houses, and bring my own
 
 Bloody dinner.

Some poets picked important topics, like immigration: "Round here the racism’s mainly puerile…" or noticed the unusual: "That girl born with a claw for a hand,/ fingers fused together like a lobster,/ makes no bones about it." Another imagined the "Last Carp in the Abbey Pond", its death in the bright moment when "a milk-white hand reached through the sky." Others set up a rhythm from fact: "The width of a man’s thumb was one inch/ The print left by his shoe measured roughly one foot", while another poet watched men build alder fences in Poland: " they huddle on the village bench, vodka/ tilting, fence unfinished,/ job forgotten. That is the urgency." Yet another re-described Joseph Wright of Derby’s famous painting of an "Experiment on a bird in the air pump", a family group watching as the "bird, our pet, did not revive,/ No lips revealed the faux pas of surprise."

The winners went one better than those on the shortlist, and brought their visions into sharp rhythmic, metaphorical or imaginative focus. "Unreel" took the unpromising subject of a piece of unravelled cassette tape seen on a street, and made it an ode to the unspoken, showing admirable metaphorical dexterity: "a contour, an isobar… a crime-scene cordon in a country field// or a deep, dark string of gut gone dry." Another poet became fascinated by a Sumerian tablet, and also used metaphor to tease out its historical and cultural importance: "A giant incisor, cutting through time…" or "A loaf of words,/ Polished white by age, or use, or sand": indeed, this cuneiform writing has fed our civilizations for centuries, an enduring bread.

The winner, though, stood out because of a breadth of human sympathy in his or her work, and a refusal to be undaunted by a catastrophe which has already spawned many bad and indifferent poems: the Boxing Day Tsunami. The poem opens with a simplicity which we never mistake for innocence, as the atmosphere of doom builds up: "The beach was crowded with tourists,/ some of them Buddhist, some of them/ sunworshippers lying in bronzed rows/ on the sand." The photographer notices the fences surrounding the properties of the rich, but the surface of his pictures gradually unravel:

 he realised the dresses
 hanging on fences were not laundry
 or flags or dolls woven among the barbed
 wire... The little blue dress was a child
 who may or may not have been playing
 in an enclosed garden. What does it
 matter now which side of the fence
 she was on when the big wave struck?

This surreal and disturbing consideration of the social upheaval caused by natural disaster was memorable and electric enough to win the prize. Congratulations to all the poets on the shortlist and to the top three.

Gwyneth Lewis