Grevel Lindop
A Dozen Red Roses

Grevel Lindop was born in Liverpool in 1948. His Selected Poems appeared from Carcanet in 2000. His next collection, Playing With Fire, is due in 2006.

Read the poem >

Judge's Report
Penelope Shuttle

One day towards the end of June I collected the competition entries in London, and while I was having a coffee in a café and reading Lorca, the poems stashed in carrier bags at my feet, someone stole my handbag, which I'd neglected to secure by putting my foot through the strap as I usually do. Thankfully, the thief did not take the poems, so I got them safely home and began reading. After a sustained immersion, with much re-reading, I was left with two piles, one thick (the poems to be set aside) and a thin pile of 15 poems, the shortlist from which the winners were to be chosen. Next, I put the shortlist poems aside for a week, in order to return to them afresh, to take them by surprise, to cleanse my response.

Then I began to wonder about the poems in the bigger pile. Why had those poems not worked for me? The vast majority used predictable subject matter, their language and form lacked energy and surprise, and were poems I felt I'd read many times before.

Some poems contained beautiful individual lines, and others fascinating ideas and descriptions, but in these and other cases the poems as a whole didn't catch fire. Telling images were left high and dry among tired verbal processes, and ideas were not propelled by vivid development into a fully realized poem.

It occurred to me that many of the entrants could benefit by extending the range of their poetry reading, to explore more fully contemporary and classic poetry, both in English and in translation. Many writers needed to widen and deepen their wordhoard and poetry sensibility. As Christine Pugh says in the June 05 issue of Poetry, ‘Might it be that what is missing in the work of some younger poets is not “experience” at all, but reading that is deep enough to effect changes in the self?’

Recently I was in Andalucia, walking in the high sierras. We saw a new man-made waterfall. To create this, water had been chanelled along conduits through the mountains from a lagoon near the summits, and then poured down in this waterfall to feed the Guadalquivir, a river in danger of drying up. This is called ‘stream supply’. Think of this as metaphor for writing poetry. We need to read waterfalls of poetry, in order to prevent imaginative drought.

I returned to my 15-poem shortlist. The winner declared itself swiftly, and I gradually winnowed the rest till I had two other winners and four commendations. These seven poems offer access to what Yeats called ‘the poet's secret working mind’. Each poem relished the imagination as a liberating agent, was ambitious in subject and language, and each created what Lorca saw as ‘the poetic fact’, when everything the reader needs to experience the poem is contained within it. These poems create reality as well as observing it, and they have sensuous intelligence, can be smelled, tasted, felt. This brings me to the three main prize-winners.

‘The Chimney’ (third prize) by Barbara Cumbers has four long stanzas composed of long lines powerfully depicting a landscape of water, trees, hilltops, and at the epicentre of the poem, an old abandoned industrial chimney. The poet asks us to ‘follow the natural curvature of things’ and explores the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. I like the severity of the poem, avoiding any eco sentimentality; I note its restraint, through which emotion is conveyed in a measured calm voice.

In ‘Paradise Lost at the Lipstick Factory’ by Chris Considine (second prize), John Milton and cosmetics productively coincide. I loved the immediacy of beginning the poem with a question, and in 11 swift moving sharp-eyed and sharp-eared couplets, the poem evokes the student in a vacation job at a lipstick factory, reading Paradise Lost in her lunchbreak. She wonders if she'd have learned more about life from talking with her co-workers, and speculates about the uses of art, about what constitutes ‘real life’. The ‘gates of purifying flame’ through which the lipsticks pass on the conveyor belt mirror the fiery gates through which Eve was expelled from Eden — a very striking trope.

In the poem that wins the first prize, ‘A Dozen Red Roses’, Grevel Lindop sets himself the hard task of taking the familiar romantic image of a dozen red roses, and making it new. Written in one stanza, the poem certainly achieves that. Each rose represents a different aspect of a love affair. I loved the clarity and precision with which each rose is revealed. After nine vivid examples of what each rose stands for (red wine, kisses, the heart, lipsticks, left nipple, right nipple, for the times the lovers slept apart, perfumes, poems) we come to the tenth rose which is time — making a beautiful and skilful turn in the poem, centring the lovers in time.

The conclusion is a surprise. We come to the 13th rose, the invisible rose that though ‘ominous’ is also an ‘offering to the furies’, in the hope that this love will last. It is also, of course, an echo and refutation of Blake’s ‘O Rose, thou art sick’, and maybe a homage to the lines Rilke wrote for his own epitaph: ‘Rose, oh the pure contradiction, delight / of being no one's sleep under so many lids.’

Penelope Shuttle lives in Cornwall and was married to Peter Redgrove (1932–2003). Since her first collection of poems, The Orchard Upstairs, appeared from Oxford University Press in 1981, she has published six other volumes, plus a Selected Poems in 1998, all from Oxford. Three of her books are Poetry Book Society Recommendations, including her most recent, A Leaf Out of His Book (Oxford Poets/Carcanet, 1999). Her new collection, Redgrove’s Wife, appears in 2005.

Chris Considine
Paradise Lost at the Lipstick Factory

Chris Considine's publications include Swaledale Sketchbook
(Smith/Doorstop), which was short listed for the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2002, and Learning to Look (Peterloo, 2003). A new collection, Quarll, is due in December.
Read the poem >

Barbara Cumbers
The Chimney

Barbara Cumbers lives in London. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines including The Rialto, Smith's Knoll, Envoi and The Interpreter's House.

Read the poem >

Commended

Elizabeth Gowing
Zennor Mermaid

Commended

Robert Saxton
Beauty and the Ghost

Robert Saxton is the author of two published books of poetry, The Promise Clinic (Enitharmon 1994) and Manganese (Carcanet 2003); he has just completed a third collection, entitled Local Honey.

Commended

Christopher Southgate
The Archive Room

Christopher Southgate lives on the edge of Dartmoor. In the past he has been a research scientist, a house-husband, a bookseller and a mental health chaplain. His forthcoming collection, his fifth, is Easing the Gravity Field: Poems of Science and Love, due out from Shoestring Press in February 2006.

Commended

Victor Tapner
Pocahontas Prepares for an Audience at Court

Victor Tapner's poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies, including Bloodaxe's The Honey Gatherers. Part of his prehistory sequence Flatlands was the bursary winner in the 2005 Writers Inc. Writers-of-the-Year Competition, and he won the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2000. He works as a journalist on the Financial Times.

The prizes were awarded and the poems read at our Autumn Launch on Wednesday 19th October, at the Gallery at Foyles, 2nd floor, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H. This was Poetry London's sixth Competition.

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