Words of London Poetry Contest 2006 Judge

Michael Symmons Roberts

Much has been said about poems that show up in poetry competitions. Judges are warned to look out for various pitfalls among the anonymous
verses. There’s the cynical poem that turns showy tricks to make it stand out from the crowd. Then there’s the
workshop poem with a great central idea but no heart. There’s even the rare but dangerous poem by a famous poet of the past sent in to be overlooked, and thereby to prove that contemporary poetry is in crisis.

I’m glad to say that the vast majority of poems I read for Poetry London were well worth the reading. Some were let down by a loose line or two, or could do with more drafts to sharpen the form. Some lacked fire, or ice, or failed to live up to their title or opening. Many others would sit comfortably in the pages of a good magazine, and that made the task harder than I’d expected.

Early in July, a huge parcel of poems – stripped of names but number-coded – was delivered to my door, and in the first week I read all of them to make some initial judgements. By the end of that process, the batch of poems was down to a quarter of its original size. I set them aside for a few days, then came back and read the surviving poems again, reducing the batch to about 50.

It took me two more stages (each getting harder as I had to ditch poems I liked) to get the batch down to a final ten from which to pick the three prizewinners and four commended poems. That final shortlist was made up of poems that wouldn’t leave me alone. Most of them had caught my eye at the beginning of the summer in the first sifting, and had grown stronger with each reading since.

The four commended poems included two impressive poetic sequences (one linked by narrative, one by theme), a quietly striking reflection on place and relationship, and a well focused telling of a captured moment in rural Ireland.

After much shuffling of the pack, I settled on three very different prizewinners. The third prize goes to a poem built on a striking idea and written subtly in the voice of a character from recent history. ‘Jacqueline Kennedy’s Guided Tour of the White House’ establishes its voice from the first line, and has telling (and sometimes chilling) details throughout. Recent history is hard to write about, but in this poem the former First Lady’s strong sense of her place in history, her role as a custodian, and the undertow of anxiety come through strongly.

Second prize goes to a poem that stood out a mile. ‘Happy Ending’ took me by surprise from its simple and strange first line. At different times it made me think of Stevie Smith, of the Ahlbergs’ stories for children, of Walt Whitman. It’s whimsical and surreal and deceptively straightforward. And it does have a happy ending too, and a lilting last line. This idiosyncratic lyric poem grew on me each time I read it.

In the end, the first prize went to a poem with a central image so strong that it struck me from day one – ‘Sunday at the Skin Launderette’. To sustain and develop that image with such richness and variety in a form as difficult as a sestina is a real achievement. Many sestinas run out of steam, or overstretch their subject. This one seems comfortable in its own skin (apologies), and wears its form lightly. I was struck by the juxtaposition of wonderful descriptions of this strange ritual – ‘fragile as sushi’, ‘her cobweb elbows’ – with the ordinariness of it. I felt – as a reader – that this bizarre scene had really been witnessed, that I could witness it myself any rainy Sunday in any launderette. Even the ordinariness of the rain was made extraordinary. I was even more struck by the delicacy with which the poem draws its characters. The painstaking stripping and washing of skins – which in other hands could be grotesque or comical – is made beautiful and moving.

I was delighted to find, as I reached the final stages of the judging – having taken no notice of the code numbers on the poems – that another poem by the writer of ‘Sunday at the Skin Launderette’ had been in my final ten, and had just missed out on a place among the commended. That was a poem with a very different subject and approach, but clearly handled with the same skill and confidence. If those two poems are anything to go by, this is a poet with a strong voice, formally adept and with something to say. I, for one, will be watching with interest to see what she does next.


Michael Symmons Roberts has published four acclaimed collections of poems. His most recent, Corpus (Cape 2004), won the Whitbread Poetry Award - and was shortlisted for the Forward, Eliot and Griffin prizes. He is also known for his work on BBC Radio and for his collaborations with the composer James MacMillan. A first novel, Patrick's Alphabet, is published by Cape this year. Born in 1963, he lives in Cheshire.


Second Prize
rachel curzon
Happy Ending

Rachel Curzon was born in Leeds and now lives and works in Hampshire. She seems to be the only person who thinks she’s kept her accent. Rachel has had poems published in Mslexia and the MUP’s Watermark Anthology.

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Third Prize
victor tapner
Jacqueline Kennedy's Guided Tour of the White House

Victor Tapner’s poems have been published widely 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. His poem Pocahontas Prepares for an Audience at Court was commended in last year’s Poetry London competition. He works in London as a journalist on the Financial Times.

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Commendations are awarded to

BA Humar for
'Newstead Abbey'

Michael W Thomas for
'Cows in a Corofin Field'

Alex Heald for
'The Magician Escapes the Mob, Disguised as Himself'

Kate Noakes for
'Iron'