The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

First Prize-winner - Jane Routh

Jane Routh is a photographer and writer who looks after a flock of geese, an Ancient Semi-Natural Woodland, some new woods and a few fields in North Lancashire. Her collection Circumnavigation (2002) won the Poetry Business Competition and was shortlisted for a Forward Prize for best first collection. Her second book Teach Yourself Mapmaking (2006) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

 
The Gift of Boats

A present, you say, fishing out of the blue
carrier bag a small oar, and another,
then four more stowed in a black currach,
futtocks and knees pressing her skins;
next a lobster boat, with warps and pots
and a keep-net on board, a coat of red lead
on her bottom ready for winter
(though something's slightly skewiff
with her wheelhouse) and a last handful
of marker buoys with tiny cork floats
flagged blue and green and two in red,
not made from a kit, by a modeller,
but by someone who knew about boats
-their lines and their stemposts and deadwoods –
a man with gift for a seaworthy boat,
whom we reconstruct from his work:
cautious (the extra oars) and precise, a man
who likes to plan ahead (the coloured flags),
a man who's worked the boats himself
(those double floats) with big hands
that made lobsterpots slightly out of scale,
a make-do-and-mend man,
down to the strandline among rocks
after an onshore wind: a few floats,
a mooring line, a well-varnished hatchboard
just right for his chicken coop door
and a piece of marine ply, an odd shape,
but enough for the wheelhouse roof
he's painted white, a man whose own boat
was a salvage job he reclaimed,
with an old Lister engine stripped down
on the kitchen table over winter, saying
he minded the tides and wouldn't need
more than seven knots, she was sound
-like these two up on their cradles
re-glued and caulked and made ready for sea,
£3 each from the junk shop, and underpriced.