Joanna Boulter
Still Life With Figs

Joanna Boulter was awarded a distinction last year in Newcastle University’s MA in Writing Poetry. In the same year she gained a Northern Promise Award which has enabled her to complete a book-length poetry sequence on the composer Shostakovich. Her third poetry pamphlet, The Hallucinogenic Effects of Breathing, is published this year.
Read the poem >

It was an honour to be invited to judge the Poetry London Competition, and a responsibility to be the sole arbiter. Some good poems reveal themselves immediately, while others take longer to get to know. It seemed safest to read each one as if it were a potential winner and to see how it stood up, then to return to all the better poems a second time. The important thing for me was not so much a preferred kind of poetry, but whether poets were successful and had achieved distinction in whatever kind they’d written. I set off trying, at first, not to think too much about what I was looking for, but to see how I got on in the world these poems created.

I was impressed by the ambition and richness in the work of many of the writers and the willingness to experiment which was often apparent. Sometimes I was frustrated, where, for example, some sharp editing could have turned a promising poem into a really good one, or where a piece was densely descriptive, (often of a foreign place), but didn’t seem ‘to go anywhere’. Some poems appeared rather strained and artificial, weighed down with words. I thought of Ted Hughes’ insights in ‘Poetry in the Making’ ‘…imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.’

The poems that rose to the top were those where the language was actually a route to the experience beyond, so the writing ‘took flight’, breathed its own life. I was delighted with the winning poems, each one exemplary in its use of language, its music and its formal qualities. These poets knew where to break a line, how to use a simple word when it was appropriate, how to create drama or surprise, and, through their own engagement, their work engaged me. Achieving a boldness, originality and emotional directness untypical of the ‘competition poem’, the writers held experience up to the light. ‘Still Life With Figs’ is a stunning example of how even the most painful experience can yield a poem which gives a kind of delight. The poet of ‘When I was God’ has a very distinctive voice, and deploys a macabre humour. ‘Different Lives’ captures lyrically and suggestively, a meeting of the worlds of childhood and adulthood. The commended poems (interestingly, three of them set in America) were also very strong.

Poetry is a difficult art. Its secrets can be hard to discover, hard to put into practice. A writer can labour away at it unsuccessfully, then something better comes, almost unsought, as if from nowhere. As most poets would admit, it is much easier to identify a good poem than to write one! Yet here is the evidence that exciting poetry endures. Competitions attach price tags, fortunate for some, but really it’s absurd – the value of a fine poem is ‘beyond rubies’.

Moniza Alvi

Moniza Alvi was born in Pakistan. She has published four collections of poetry. The Country at My Shoulder (OUP 1993) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Whitbread poetry prizes, and selected for the New Generation Poets promotion. Her collected poems Carrying My Wife, was published by Bloodaxe in 2000 and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her most recent collection is Souls (2002). She received a Cholmondeley Award from The Society of Authors in 2002.

Simon Rees-Roberts
When I was God

Simon Rees-Roberts’ poetry has been published in magazines including Magma, Carapace and Codicil. He has won prizes in the Lancaster Literary Festival, New Writer, Norwich and Leicester Poetry Society competitions. He is also a painter.
Read the poem >

Sarah Salway
Different Lives

Sarah Salway lives in Kent where she is a part-time creative writing tutor with the University of Kent at Canterbury. Her poems have been published in Acumen and Mslexia. Her first novel, Something Beginning With, will be published by Bloomsbury in Spring 2004, and she is currently writing her second.
Read the poem >

Commended

Marlo Bester-Sproul
Bees

Marlo Bester-Sproul, who was raised in the U.S. and Belgium, has a BA in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Sussex. She has previously been published in various magazines including Orbis, Staple, Stride and Magma.
Read the poem >

Commended

Alice Kavounas
Flags

Alice Kavounas was born in Manhattan to Greek parents and has lived in NYC, London and now Cornwall. Her second collection is The Invited (Sinclair-Stevenson) and her work has been widely published and reviewed in literary magazines including the TLS, London Magazine, Granta, LRB, New England Review/Broad Loaf Quarterly and broadcast on the BBC.
Read the poem >

Commended

Jane Monson
The Sandman

Jane Monson is in her first year of a Creative and Critical Writing PhD on ‘Baudelaire and the Prose Poem’. She previously gained a Creative Writing MA in poetry at Norwich. Her work has been published in three anthologies, Magpie, Reactions and White Noise. She has reviewed poetry for the British Journal of Canadian Studies and has been short-listed for an Eric Gregory Award.
Read the poem >

Commended

Lesley Perrins
Empire State Building

Lesley Perrins lives in Woking, Surrey, where she works for the Alzheimer’s Society and is also a counsellor — work that reflects her interest in the nature of mind and identity, subjects she intends to explore further in her poetry.
Read the poem >

The first, second and third prizewinners were published in the Summer 2003 issue of Poetry London. The prizes were awarded and the poems read at our Summer Launch at 7pm on Thursday 26th June, in the auditorium of Waterstones, 203 Piccadilly, London. This was Poetry London's fourth Competition.

Finally, Poetry London are very grateful to all the people who entered the Competition.