2024 Open Poetry Competition Results

Helen Ivory: Judge’s Report

Black Eyes / Gloucestershire Poetry Society 2024 Open Poetry Competition

When judging a poetry competition, you are compelled to ask yourself questions –

the biggest of these: What is Poetry?  And then looking at each of the poems Is this it? Still further questions as you’re arranging a smaller and smaller pile of poems into a fan shape on the floor –  Does this poem invite a second reading?  And when you put the poem down  after several readings in which it has continued to unpack itself in your head and go into another room and start to do something altogether different – Does the poem call to you?  Has it secreted parts of itself inside your head, in your heart?  The further along the enquiry goes,  the more subjective the search becomes. 

Two of my favourite quotes about poetry are from Donald Hall who writes that a poem is: “human inside talking to human inside.”  And then there is Charles Simic who says something so utterly Charles Simic: “Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.”  These quotes express something about what I personally look for in a poem.  There should be a human connection – I need to feel the poem as well as engage with it intellectually.  The feeling part of a poem might be difficult to articulate, but it’s the element that will for me, warrant the poem further readings.

So, upon further investigations I am looking closely at those mismatched shoes, the mystery of them. Just what is down that dark alley?  It’s not so much solving a puzzle – because a puzzle has particular ends - it’s  more to do with working out what it’s doing and why a poem might have a certain effect on you.   Sometimes you never know exactly what it is and sometimes it can be a mutable thing, depending on where you are in your life.  I’ve learnt to be ok with that.  There is something to be said for not picking apart a living thing in order to interrogate what gives it life.

These particular poems connected with me in the selection process and refused leave my head. 

In first place 20 Ways to Skin a Spell.  I am drawn to spells, I have written them myself, so was a little wary of being seduced by this poem for simply that reason.  I walked away from it a few times, but it kept tapping me on the shoulder – surprise! This poem is a manifestation of serious play.  I enjoyed the experimental nature of its mechanism and also its layout which feels a completely logical, backwards ghosting of each line.  It reads like a performance and I hear those between-lines played shakily on an old fashioned wax record,  spun widdershins.  I love the richly charged language and how the poem uses both science and spell making practices in its recipe for disarming a virus.  

In second place The fox withstanding centres on another subject I know a lot about – domestic abuse.  Akin to the first placed poem, I stood back from this for a bit because it speaks directly to me, and I was wary of it.  But it called to me again and again and wouldn’t let me go. The extended metaphor unmakes itself halfway through as the fox as spirit guide speaks up, so the narrator can look you square in the eye and state exactly what fear can do.  This poem is ‘human inside talking to human inside’, and it spoke directly to me.  

In third place Sarah Polgrain’s Song of the Wind is a rich and wonderful narrative poem, based on a dark true story/ folk story.  I loved the language of this poem, the Cornish dialect – it’s a joy to read out loud.

Highly Commended:

Mistle Thrush is written in the voice of a mistle thrush which has heard a lot about itself in folklore and such.  The poem shows how creatures carry so much human fear and imagination on their shoulders when transmuted to symbol and story.

Josephine Lay: Judge’s Report

Black Eyes / Gloucestershire Poetry Society 2024 Open Poetry Competition

GPS Friendship Prize

This year, 2024, there were an increased number of entries to the GPS Open Poetry Competition, which made the job of longlisting more challenging. Friendship Group entries, however, were slightly down, maybe because we brought the date of the competition forward a month, I don’t know.

One friendship member has a special mention in the overall competition for the poem, ‘Mistle Thrush’, so congratulations to that poet. For me, there wasn’t a particular single poem that stood out as an obvious winner. There were in fact five poems that caught my attention and remained with me so that I had to return to them all and reread them many times. Because of that I found it hard to choose just one winner. Therefore, this year the prize will be split between two very different poems.

Several facets of the poem Crystal glinted at me, in its pared back style. An example of good editing, where less is more. The sharp contrast of the start of the poem to its dark ending, had me re reading it over and over.  The second poem that caught me emotionally was The Grandmother Hypothesis. May be because I am a grandmother, I related to its message. This quite short poem packs so much into a few lines; the desiccation expected in old age, tears shed with the pain of watching children suffer unnecessarily, and finally the thought that other life forms have a deeper understanding of unity than we do.

Other poems that commended themselves to me were: Elevations – I loved learning what only the stonemason sees. Advent 2023 – a powerful way of portraying war in the Middle East. You Made me a Corn Dolly – a tight and poignant poem.

The GPS Friendship Prize jointly goes to: 

Crystal – Iris Anne Lewis

The Grandmother Hypothesis – Rhian Thomas

Highly Commended:

Elevations – Julie Allan

Advent 2023 – Tudor Griffiths

You Made Me a Corn Dolly – Sue Finch

Highly Commended in the overall competition by judge Helen Ivory:

Mistle Thrush – Carol Sheppard