BOPC Judge's Summary - John Powell Ward

 

There were some seven hundred entries. I read them all.
There were numerous topics, numerous styles. Tourism, domestic incident, sex and love, nature and ecology, religion and (some) anti-religion. youth and old age, illness and death, world political or military events, or homely and local ones. Fewer were concerned with schools, farms, supermarkets, offices or sport, but there was a quota of ecological if no longer much 'nature' poetry. Some had imaginary narrators; said by a baby, a dandelion, a frog. Some were tours-de-force; puzzles with a last-line key, palindromes, switches, mirrors. There were poems about computers,, mobile phones, and indeed language, or writing itself. There were list-poems and 'last-line' poems. There were imitations of Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas. There were sonnets, sestinas and villanelles Sometimes a poet's three or four poems were of even quality, while with others one poem would outshine the rest.
Certainly only a small proportion seemed possible winners. But on the upside, most poems said something, had some content. Gone are the days it seems when a competition's entry was inflated by countless brief popular-song lyrics or greeting-card verses. There were very few of those. Far more often a poem said much and interestingly. It felt as if many entrants were reading at least the literary magazines and attending poetry-writing classes and maybe getting into stronger meat too. One curiosity, to me anyway, was the number of entries which really lacked much poetic quality yet still made compulsive reading. It was as if not having to turn them into poems left the writer free to pour stuff out as it came. There were obsessions about war, sex, religion, politics and all the areas listed above, occasionally resentfully or worse, more often on a general theme of 'why don't - ' (people do this or that, get off my back, stop ruining the country etc). But it certainly wasn't all negative; there were grateful poems - for life, health, jobs, travel, loving spouses, adorable grandchildren - and poems of thought and complex feeling. They were often touching; they truly were.
How then were they not poems? They remained untransformed, and - most commonly - they were simply too long. So often you wanted to cut a stanza, or draw a line two-thirds way through and say, stop there. This was a media-age entry; chat, pub-talk, newspaper echo; it seemed a key feature. Just a few poems were short, and formally perfect in rhyme, rhythm and scansion. Such can readily win the reader's instinctive confidence, but it isn't the time's characteristic mode, which wants more sheer information.
But the overall concluding sense is positive. Here in the now traditional ascending order are the poems I was left with at the end. First, in alphabetical order of their titles, the most compelling twenty poems outside the three prizewinners. This was rather too many to comment on individually without putting some ahead of others when all of these, I thought, deserved a mention. I only hope that this will give these poets at least some satisfaction - which they have certainly earned. Here they are:

Ash (Christopher Jenkin-Jones), Closed Circuit (John Godfrey), Czech-Slovak Border, 2 a.m. (David Duncombe), Dark Light (Michael Hutchinson), Excommunicado ( Sue Kindon), Family (Jim Wilson), Josef (Derrick Buttress), Kayak (Caroline Price), Letting Go (Edward Storey), Michelangelo (Chris Considine), Mustapha loves her (Roger Elkin), Nail (David Duncombe), Nine-Ten (Lesley Burt), Paradise Street (Barbara Daniels), Roses (Sonia Jarema), Shadowed (Dorothy Pope), Skin (J.J. Vuglar), Suibhne considers Ronan's curse (Terence Brick), The Secret Life of H.M. Bark Endeavour (John Godfrey) and Weeping Woman (Isabella Strachan).

And so to the three winners!
Third prize: Judith Hope McFarlane for Aunt Ida. A black Jamaican lady, it seems, winningly eludes her husband and daughter to go on some kind of jaunt. Why is it so entrancing? I think the writing is so unblemishingly musical and magical that we share her freedom with her, sensing too the love she bears her family even as in quiet glee she temporarily escapes them. After that last line anything can happen.
Second prize: Michael Tolkien for Elegy at Pantasaph. Elegies rarely depend for their depth of feeling on the weight of detail they give us. Normally we might expect that to clutter the picture. But here the writer's sense of bereavement is bound in with the intensity of his thoughts and perceptions; nearby local traffic, chiselled gravestones, his parents' courage, and that other graveyard visitor who appears so vividly in stanza five. The writer is intrigued enough to follow her away, but this adds to his elegiac sense rather than otherwise. A deeply worked poem of some profundity.
First prize: Ann Alexander for On the importance of locks. This was for me the most original poem of them all. The vulnerable people and items assembled vary not only as to their nature and position in wider society but also in the subtle differences of length, phrasing, laid-back rhyming, and emphasis in their expression. It thereby gradually dawns on the reader that what at first seemed just a list of examples turns out both rich and strangely fertile. We feel touched, warned and awakened by how much in human life, thus presented, is prey to fate's changes and chances. The final stanza clinches the impact wonderfully, for by its shift of perspective, along with the poem's characters we too enter a previously locked-in region of truth, as to privacy's ambivalent value in a security-obsessed world.
Judging this competition has been a most rewarding experience and I am grateful indeed to have had this opportunity.
John Powell Ward