Lizzy Ennion-Smith Dame Ivy Compton Burnett Prize for Creative Writing

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.

His tattered shirt flaps across a wind-polished back, bleached and hardened by sun and the mountain’s dry freeze, scapulas still articulate. Wind sweeps a body clean seventy years here. Nothing hides. He lies face down, thinning hair tousled and frozen. Half-bare arms reach up to grasp the slope. Kneeling beside the body, the climber takes off his gloves, eases the man’s collar back, his hands already so numb the sweater’s frayed yarn feels large and vague in his fingers. Cold hair pricks his knuckles as he finds a hand-lettered label stitched to the wool: G. Mallory. He’s followed this man so long in his mind that now he’s caught up to him, Mallory seems so nearly alive he wants to set the broken bone and help him down to the tents. He fumbles with the frozen jacket–snow goggles stuffed in a pocket: it was dusk when he fell, the glare fading off the ice as he pushed back to camp. He covers Mallory’s bare arms with the unravelling sweater his wife knitted back in Surrey. He can still feel the strength of the dead man’s triceps. When he finds the altimeter, frozen in a trouser pocket, it’s cracked. He can’t retrieve any record of how high Mallory climbed. If he holds it any longer, his fingers will freeze to the steel.

He seals it in a Ziploc bag and puts his gloves back on. The rest of his team arrives and they cover Mallory, as gently as they can, with scree so souvenir hunters won’t find him.

NORTH POLE I. The cold’s less piercing than he’d expected. No wind, a quiet so thick he feels almost protected. Banks of blown snow unreel as far as he can see: nothing unearthly, no strange blue light calcified to stillness, no spectral ice arches. The snow is rough and bare as pastures. II.

At home, skunk cabbage fluted by the rusted water pump. He’d lie in bed too long, watch dry grass stubble old snow and think of climbing: roping himself to the cusped tip of the Matterhorn, leaning back into air. Summits. Places he’d almost tricked death, then come back. III. He walks a wide circle, stepping back from now to last night as time zones splay beneath him: a calculated pivot could keep him forever in a dazed pause, tracking a single hour through longitudes gathered like strings of a marionette.

When the plane roars south, he watches latitudes flash neon in the cockpit. There’s nowhere to go except south from here, and the plane is speeding. Blurred snow becomes hypnotic as blue, corrugated lines of sea ice trawl beneath them.

PERSEPHONE RETURNING When thrushes call along the thawing marsh I look for you. Sometimes I’ve almost seen that place where you wait and slipped my fumbling hands between its doors that open, close, a sound I hear in sleep, in water, in trees. Everything stirs with rumours of you until the sound is your breath. I bring you the ruddy fringe of maple flowers, downy fronds of fiddlehead ferns uncurling by vernal pools, a soft, sundered rabbit’s tail I found in the marsh grass.

NOONMARK MOUNTAIN After the forest fire had stripped the mountain shoulder bare, birches were the first trees to come back. They greened the burned patch, shading it pale and soft against dark, orderly pines. When I climbed the mountain, birches branched around me, speckled as eggs, white bark beginning to spread up thin, new trunks that, in winter, would bend hunched with snow, too pliant to rise again, even when the thaw came, out of the low bow ice had forced. The next year, canopies of leaves ramified along the ground and greened, still bound to roots that broke bare ash and turned cinder into earth.

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