Cardiff International Poetry Competition

 2010 Cardiff International Poetry Competition
Adjudication

By Jackie Kay and Zoë Skoulding 

As judges, we were looking for poems that startled and involved us, that were memorable, that felt fresh and alive. We had very strong entries and the final choice was difficult to make. We found it easy to get down to our last favourite forty or so, and then beyond that it was a question of taste and preference. All of our winning poems and our runners-up impressed us. Each felt as if they had something to say, and opened up new discoveries for us.

First Prize poem The Bees is not so much a poem about bees as a poem that does something bee-like, cross-pollinating words to make a landscape that sings in an unexpectedly fertile language. The poem is full of double-takes, like ‘pursuing a faint ascent’ or ‘run of the million’. Some of these, like the ‘speed or seed cameras’ introduce a fusion of natural and man-made elements, registering without sentimentalizing the interaction between humans and landscapes that is currently threatening real bee populations. However, the delight of the poem is in how these ideas combine with its sound, and the way that the line endings propel it along in constant movement: ‘the songs in us sweep down loud / canyons’. Sounds seem to breed each other, as in ‘plant-planets’ or ‘thirstless thistles’ in language that is always regenerating.

Second place poem Tambourine gracefully explores the spaces in language, the silences of what escapes communication. It’s a poem about not speaking, what can’t be said, and yet it says it, creating a subtle tension through its repetition of ‘I was trying to tell you something’. Its repetitions are musical phrases that build into long lines, gradually accumulating in rhythm until the crescendo at the end of the second sentence with the sudden noise of the tambourine. The contrast between the whiteness and silence of the snow, and the redness and racket of the tambourine, creates a striking connection between image and sound.

Third place poem Taking Delivery, like all good poems, works on many levels. Even the title has many meanings, reminding us of the process of giving birth as well as the more obvious accepting a delivery of groceries. The poem's impact is felt in its restraint, in what is not said, and also in the echoing visual images, the cheese in the cellophane and the baby boy born with a caul; it is a tender and moving poem. The loss is powerful, tangible, as if the only tears the poem can cry are the frozen packs starting to melt. It is a brilliant example of how a poem can work through letting objects do the emoting.

Runners-up:

My Father from Extant Sources takes a forensic approach to family history, and it is this contrast between closeness and distance that creates the poem’s impact, not to mention its humour. The attempt to organize memory though the subtitled headings draws attention to its unreliability, and the skewed picture of the past that emerges through the fragments of what is left behind. Despite the bravado of the opening, ‘He was a bad bastard, well shot of him’, the detailed attention to the traces left by a life hints at an affection that is left unspoken.

Lásko (‘darling’ in Czech) is full of dreamlike and uneasy longing. It’s compelling in its treatment of an absence in which everything is displaced. In the myopic focus on moss, crystals and dust, or the anxiety about seedlings and deer eating shoots of young trees, what emerges is the impossibility of describing loss itself. At the same time, a wonderfully precise registering of detail conveys the specificity of the place in which that loss is felt – ‘The gate is stiff, the metal bucket that props it shut /stuck into the mud.’ The use of Czech place names accentuates the simultaneous familiarity and absolute foreignness of the world as seen by the lover.

Shaking the Bottle is inventive as well as startling. The poem shakes you up and surprises your sensibility. There's much to admire here, the sizzling language, the brio and verve, and the way that the poem makes you uncomfortable by linking the celebration with the painful knowledge of events elsewhere. An explosive birthday champagne cork at the beginning of the poem is matched by the incendiary message in the bottle at the end. The poem jumps in time and memory as violently as the bomb in the second part, and packs a powerful punch. Clever stuff.

Tswana combines a storytelling quality with a lovely lyricism. It involves the reader on the journey and is very visual as well as strong in its voice, which draws you in. It is incantatory and rhythmic, making you think of journeys, of meetings and partings. It's very moving, the exchange of dried meat from the spine of an ox with the bread from the earth oven is just as crucial as the exchange of stories. Tswana shows how we survive on a combination of myth and meal, and how the imagination thrives alongside a more difficult reality. The inner voice is just as potent as the outer one 'beneath a rainbringing sky.'

Two Kids captures one of those moments, that is specific and detailed, that lives in exactly that point in time and yet spans a possible lifetime. We have all had moments like this where looking at somebody else illuminates the self. There's something brilliant about the way the theme of the strange and the familiar works in this poem, and the intimate impact a stranger can have. The stranger can of course be your self, your own past. The poem makes you think about how brief life is. It is a travelling poem, from place to place and across time.