Cardiff International Poetry Competition

2007 Cardiff International Poetry Competition
Judges Adjudication

By Owen Sheers and Kathleen Jamie

One of the joys of judging a competition is that one is given a privileged overview of what is happening in people’s hearts and minds at a given moment in time. This is especially true of an international competition. Although the poems are judged anonymously, we can be sure they have been submitted from far and wide. It’s heartening to be reminded that, despite what the papers say, the world is full of people who are sensitive, talented, observant, witty, disciplined, painstaking, clever, and insightful. Their concerns, our concerns, the things closest to our hearts, the things which delight or puzzle or move us, are not revealed by magazines and opinion polls.

There was no shortage of good poems submitted to this year’s competition. Our task as judges, of course, was to select a very few as winners, with one, only one, overall winner. Although we were working independent of each other, we were looking for the same thing. As we read through the hundreds of poems sent us, we were seeking poems that surprised us, that displayed some formal dexterity; poems in which, to quote Keith Douglas ‘every word works for its place in the line’; poems which created and sustained their own worlds of language, vision and idea. Our standards were high from the offset, and many poems met them on first reading. Many also, did not. Strong opening lines gave way to poems that lost direction, faltered in their language. Others simply tried too hard, until we could see ‘the veins bulging in the biro’ (Heaney). Others read like very good early drafts, with very good future poems held within their current forms. There HAD to be a grasp of technique – not necessarily complete mastery of form, none of our winners are strictly formal, but an awareness of rhythm, rhyme or half- rhyme, assonance, rhythm, tone, pace. The many entries which showed no grasp of technique at all were not given a second reading.

We were surprised by how often certain currents of theme and subject matter rose through the large number of submissions. There were, for example, a lot of famous faces in these poems. Actors, writers, philosophers were all given voice. Memory too, specifically childhood memories, held sway over many poems. The majority of poems were in the first person – a lot fewer managed to move beyond the purely subjective orbit to make a personal experience resonate in the universal. Those that did, however, did so powerfully and were placed on the pile to be read again.

We each selected twenty favourites, and then we conferred. We were relieved and pleased to discover we had enough poems in common to quickly assemble a shortlist, and furthermore, that the poems we’d selected were pretty various in form, voice and content. So, then came the reading again. By now memory, that most useful editing tool, was employing its influence. The poems that stayed with us, that left a line, a stanza a thought, reverberating within us through our day to day lives, began to make themselves felt, to exert their ability to make a reader see the world in a new and different light.

The desire to be ‘in a safe pair of hands’ also came to the fore. After reading hundreds of poems it is a relief to encounter a voice, a command of language, in which you feel both guided and engaged.

Lastly, the sound of the poems became important for us. We read the short-list aloud and listened to the music, the tunes of these final poems – for the half-rhyme, the assonance, the rhythm and the metre that gave these poems their pulse and heartbeats.

And that, through putting our ear to the short-listed poems, to listening not only to what they have to say, but also how they say it, was, along with our other criteria how we came to decide upon our final winners and runners up.

Thus, in third place we have Elizabeth Blackwell’s Five Hundred Cuts - An assured, beautifully paced poem in which the subject and style complement and reflect each other perfectly. We loved the inhabiting of the speaker’s voice, the suppressed desire and anguish beneath the careful, meticulous language. The poem also re-invigorates the names and descriptions of the plants and flowers, and in so doing, releases what could be everyday language, investing it with a powerful metaphoric charge. The poem had a confidence and a restrained pathos that lived with us.

Second prize went to On Shyness a poem  both judges kept coming back to because of the peculiar, eerie atmosphere it creates, and the fact that it took two or three readings before we understood quite who was speaking.  It’s a wholly original poem, not shy at all. Through the single emotion of shyness the speaker finds affinity with the sea, horses, an executioner. It takes bold risks to achieve its uncanny effects and the surprising close.
 
Our winner was the confident, sustained Self-Portrait in a Broken Wing Mirror.  Read this poem aloud to really appreciate the complexity and skill of its sound world. Half, slant and internal rhymes create a subtle echo-chamber of constant self-referral, (in keeping with the title), while the setting and action are paced with a filmic quality of simultaneous intensity and distance. A powerfully visual poem, it draws upon demotic language and subject to create a wry, calm, yet disturbing, contemplation of the modern fractured self.