58 | pembroke college
The Dame Ivy Compton Burnett Prize for Creative Writing 2021 Lizzy Ennion-Smith This year the prize was judged by the distinguished writer, Holly Corfield-Carr, a poet and Research Fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. She said this about the winning entry: ‘This sequence of five poems is so finely balanced, slowly tilting around the “calculated pivot” of the central poem “North Pole” as disappearance turns to return, mountain to marsh, death to life. From the bright flipper bones of a leatherback turtle on the windowsill of “Bone House” to the ash of a forest fire in the final poem “Noonmark Mountain”, these poems glow and grow with each other.’ The author of this year’s winning entry (as in 2018) is Katherine Robinson, who is doing a PhD in English on ‘Reanimated mythic traditions: Celtic influences on Ted Hughes’ mythopoesis and confessional poetry’.
BONE HOUSE When I duck into the shed to find a rake, the wings of a Siberian swan splay above me. White down loosens from brittle skin and catches in my hair as I pull the door closed. It died, caught in a telephone wire, last winter, and you saved the wings and strung them above empty flowerpots and old gardening gloves. Its dry muscles keep Russian summers and arctic winds hanging in our shed. You gather bones and boil them clean. Flipper bones of a leatherback turtle cross on the windowsill. Thousands of miles of sea calcified in those bones. Shapes animals held a long time stay: vertebrae stud the bookshelf, jawbones rattle in the dresser drawer, teeth stubble the soil of your houseplants. When we draw the curtains or reach for books, We are reaching through absence. MALLORY ON EVEREST The climber sees a dull whiteness that doesn’t gleam like snow. A hobnail boot half-emerges from the scree, and an ankle extends bare and brittle. Yellowed shrapnel of bone jags out of torn trousers: an ugly fracture.
