First Prize
Grevel Lindop

A Dozen Red Roses

This one’s for the wine: all those Burgundies,
Merlots, Cabernets Sauvignons, the Shiraz,
Blossom Hill, Gallo, Chilean
and so on and on; each bloodrich with the taste
of what happened and what might have happened. Next
one for the kiss, first kiss and last and those between —
they’re all nested together like layers of crystal, the
intense and the perfunctory, the brush
of the lips and the biting, the sucked, the tongued-in,
the ones that shake in the seizure of orgasm,
the goodnight, the goodbye, the burrowing into your neck,
I could go on but they’re all one, petals of a single
rose that keeps flowering. And this third rose is the heart,
dilating and contracting as you open
the door or the letter, pick up the phone, listen
or are disappointed. (For ‘you’ also read ‘I’.)
Frivolous fourth is for the lipstick: Cool Cinnamon,
Ruby Kiss, Fireball and the rest, an evening’s
stage lighting applied with a painter’s art
then wrecked with abandon or squandered on hands, tissues,
glasses, cheeks, the unnoticed margins
of where you went and what you did; and twinned
fifth and sixth, these for your nipples, firming to buds
one by one between my lips, raspberry
or coral, round them the delicate
frosted peach of your breasts, the skin awakened
to a frisson by my touch, a shudder of cool air
or, in sleep, by the spiderweb fringe of nightmare
trailed across your dreamflesh until I comfort you,
fitting body to body and murmuring, murmuring.
Seventh, a magic number for all my fantasies,
the times when we slept apart, my invocation
of you on top of me, under me, opening to me:
your mouth, your knees, your unexpected fingers
conjuring even in imagination
more out of me than I knew I had:
turning the other half-dreamed women formless,
fading them to transparencies, to less than ghosts,
with the full fury of your imagined presence
lit by desire, more tangible than longing,
an absence solider, more penetrable
than the being of anyone else. And eighth are the perfumes
you liked most, Diorella, Diorissimo,
Tendre Poison, Opium, anything
deep and musky and smelling of roses,
planting memories deep inside the body,
incarnating your presence, your absence, a breath in, a breath out.
Ninth, the Muses’ number, are the poems
I wrote you; and those I read by your light —
a glow that flared them from within
like paper lanterns with a fire at the heart:
poems of Yeats, of Graves, of Sir Thomas Wyatt,
of Neruda and Baudelaire, poems fragrant
with the subtle, starry sweat of the shivering mind
and the constellations of wind that chime their answers
to our breath, as the last stars answer the dew
on the leaves, moved by the same forces. And the tenth rose
is time, not a line but a perpetual
unfolding, out of nothing richly into
nothing, the eye — where we live — of an unrelenting
slow hurricane, millefiore of moments
reflecting each other, rose window of instants,
layered and nourishing with the exchanges of love.
The eleventh is for your own, your secret rose,
the bud and the petals, answering to my touch
or your own, delicate and dewed, intent focus
of the body’s adventurous projections, compass-rose
of its more-than-spatial map; eclipser of pride.
And the twelfth is a rose. Just a rose.
And is there a thirteenth, O an ominous extra?
Indeed there is, though unseen here, an offering
to the furies, to the kindly gods
that all our secrets stay secret, that the roses fade
and fall only with the end of our own day
which will be just the one, however far
apart its dawn and night, the hours between
falling in like petal on petal, each one deeper
and richer than before, all the way down
until the last, the invisible rose is content.

Second Prize
Chris Considine

Paradise Lost at the Lipstick Factory

How many weeks of lunch hours did it take
sitting in the yard with a small brown book?

My only taste of daylight between
the morning and the evening bus along the bypass.

Story of angels and abstractions – absences
more real than the women at the conveyor belt,

daughters of the fall. The homely women:
wives, mothers, engaged girls. And me,

shy and silent, circumnavigating the cosmos,
practising exam answers in my head.

Did my lips move (unkissed and naked)?
I might have learned more from the bright-mouthed gossip.

Down the travelling belt the little waxy pillars
process like something serious. Our quick fingers

pick and fit them, badged with our sweat and imprints,
into their plastic. On they glide, to pass

through gates of purifying flame that gloss them
to symbols of desire. All your fault, Eve —

dissatisfactions of mankind, unruly longings —
as I have read in the factory yard among the smokers

and chattering girls from the mixing room, their hands
and overalls stained every colour of geranium.

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Third Prize
Barbara Cumbers

The Chimney

The straight lines of houses constrain,
so follow the natural curvature of things — the way
the valley has folded itself
into the need that water has to flow;
   the way trees climb the slopes —
   alder, birch, beech and larch,
the occasional massiveness of oak; the way they cling
sideways, shifting stone aside to make room for themselves;
the life in the stone — liverworts, ferns,
   the mosses and lichens with unlearnable names
that fill the crevices. Like words filling the gaps
in life’s sense, they fill the moist places with greenness, clouding the outlines.
And always the walls are there,
   directing my footfalls downwards on the stone-floored track
      hemming me in with green stone.

The path is set, and I reach the chimney,
   taller than the tallest tree, the remnant of the powerhouse
of steam-looms, now redundant. It looks too slender to stand,
the dead and branchless trunk of a stone ash tree.
The ash at its foot that was part of its being is gone
and it has become a part of the nature of the place
along with the sheep-grazed tops and the treelessness of the horizon.
Even the rocks we have changed to suit ourselves, directing
the river with them, forcing the water through
   the furnace of our necessity
that is necessity no longer. Yet the chimney still stands,
its base lichened, circled in grey-green,
drained and delicate, like the life that forms it
   symbiotic on a substrate of chimney, breathing this air.

The track takes me upwards, to where calluna and bilberry
vie for the soil and the sunlight.
   The trees grow thinner; the illusion
of ruined buildings flickers
   behind them — the walls of a quarry,
the scars where the stone of the chimney and the mill was taken
and tipped
   into the valley.
The dust and devastation have become invisible,
   but the walls remain.

In the rush of the wind comes the sound of a wren,
enormous in the undergrowth, a song delimited by wren-ness
as the chimney is shaped by its purpose.
   Our gods are always with us,
      made powerful by their dwelling place.
Here are the gods of song and of pathways,
who decree permitted notes, permitted places
edged by walls no less firm
   than those of stone pointing to the sky,
      directing us along the way
      where many feet have gone before;
      the slow erosion of the familiar.

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Commendation
Elizabeth Gowing

Zennor Mermaid

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Commendation
Robert Saxton

Beauty and the Ghost

With his hands as much as with his speech
he persuades me –
not by touching but by muybridging
silently down the oak staircase,
beauty’s flickering analogue.

‘There’ll always be light beyond your reach.’
He serenades me,
a lyric of the blood libel haemorrhaging
with the rough grace
of flamenco, like a zealous farm dog

or Dr Mesmer’s pale carnival leech.
He bruises me,
tightening every drumskin of my lodging,
from face-towel to pillowcase,
clammy to my cheek like a frog –

the way riding schools used to preach.
He confuses me,
a feint of courtesy to sprig my ravishing,
whose only escape is the fireplace,
door to the secret synagogue

where in the flames, blushing peach,
he ripens me
to a bloom of memories, rummaging
through my dear life’s bookcase
for a rare erotic dialogue

no emeritus would dare to teach.
He frightens me,
an undercliff atom-exchange, merging
dressing-table with face,
neighbour with wife, milk with hedgehog.

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Commendation
Christopher Southgate

The Archive Room

I move the acid-free bookmark to a later place.
I note, with the sharpened pencil provided,
the date of edition, printer’s font,
dedication to His Grace.
But who laid the feather,
white, fine-filamented gift
on the title page? In what garden
did he give it her?
What stemmed in secret
from the gift given and received?
Why did she leave, on that other page, a hundred pages in,
at the description of the calling of a saint
a sprig of dried lilac?

She had to hide the love
that trembled to touch
   could not help but touch
the beloved, the love that ran its fingers
through his fine hair
   phoned at the wrong time, wrote poems
      to his shoulders, his wrists,
      his soul, was soon over,
was remembered always.

He was at a creative writing class
where significant objects
were circulated as writing starters
and stole two
tucking them between different leaves
of a book also stolen
later returned to the archive
after the medication stabilised.

They were spies
and used the words
   he after the feather
      she after the lilac
      to encipher
         national betrayals.

It was simply, between saints,
that she placed the feather
to recall him to the vision of Hildegard
and he the lilac
to quote to her the heart stiffening
for Ash Wednesday.

From the acid-free air
of the Archive Room
I inhale the answers
and write them gratefully
in that sharpened air
with the pencil provided.

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Commendation
Victor Tapner

Pocahontas Prepares for an Audience at Court

Whenever we looked from the deck
those long weeks
the sea touched the sky on every side,
and some calm nights
as I took the air, the moon laid a path
from the stern.

Now I wake in a room
with a window of glass
whose lattice panes
throw a net of shadows on the coverlet.

Each evening my sheets
are warmed with a pan of coals
that scent the dark
like ashes of yellow pine,

the velvet drapes that close me in
when the maid has gone
are heavy as deerskin,

the water in the jug on the trestle
is clean enough to wash mussels.

My lady teaches me how to dress,
to walk in a farthingale,
to tuck the kirtles and carry a flounce,
to drop a curtsy
and sit without choking
in a corset stiffened with bones.
My neck is held in a cage of lace.

So many words I’ve learnt
since the day we sailed
that my husband says I’m ready
to suffer a speech. And yet

these hours my mind turns
head to heel, my tongue stumbles,
my hand trembles like a child’s
as my lady adjusts the cuffs.

I fidget on the backstool
while she combs
the snaggles from my hair.
The oaken floor at my feet gleams
like the tidepool where I swam
with my sisters through eel grass,
catching blue crabs and sea-stars.

And so it is each morning
when I leave my sleep
to the cry of night herons,
pelicans lifting from the shallows,

then the call of many voices
like a day when strangers come.

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