FINEARTS
Winners Announced in Major Poetry Competition Norwich based Café Writers announce the winners in national poetry competition
T
he results are in for the prestigious Café Writers poetry competition. Once again this important event has attracted work from all over the country. The winner of the £1000 prize for 2014 has been announced as Coventry poet Jonathan Davidson, for his poem ‘Brickwork’. Jonathan’s most recent collection is Early Train (Smith/ Doorstop, 2011). His pamphlet Humfrey Coningsby: Poems, Complaints, Explanations and Demands for Satisfaction is due from Valley Press in 2015. Seven of his radio plays have been produced by BBC Radio, with an eighth due for broadcast on BBC Radio Four in April 2015. He is also a theatre/ poetry performance producer working with Midland Creative Projects, most recently on The Hundred Years’ War – Verdun to Afghanistan. Sole judge for this year’s competition was award winning poet, critic and anthologist David Morley, whose best-selling textbook The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing has been translated into many languages. His major poetry collections include Scientific Papers, The Invisible Kings, Enchantment and The Gypsy and the Poet. Speaking about the competition he said, ‘An open poetry competition such as this attracts as much innocence as it does experience in terms of 50 | March 2015
quality. There were 2047 entries. I tried to read as a reader, not as a writer; to approach the reading with few pre-conceptions of what a poem might perform…’ The second prize was won by Jo Bell, the UK’s Canal Laureate for the Poetry Society and a well-known advocate for poetry, for her poem, ‘A nightingale for Gilbert White April 5, 1768’ Cumbria based poet Polly Atkin took third prize. In other categories prolific and much published poet Geraldine Clarkson won Funniest Poem for ‘O Machynlleth’, and the Norfolk Prize went to Diane Jackman. Poets who were commended include Martyn Crucefix, Ailsa Holland, Zelda Chappel, Keri Finlayson, Lindsey Holland and Di Slaney. Martin Figura, of Café Writers said this week, ‘We’ve been amazed, as we always are, at the standard and quantity of entries from all over the world, underlining Norwich’s and Cafe Writers’ place on the literary map.’ ❏ All of the poems can be read on the Café Writers website at www.cafewriters.co.uk Café Writers presents monthly readings of poetry and prose of extremely high quality. ‘Open mic’ slots are a regular feature at the meetings which take place at Take 5, 17 Tombland, Norwich. Full details are also available on the website.
1st Prize Brickwork They use a Flemish bond, but set in it Sufficient blue-flared headers To make the lozenges Of language for an eye To read with ease a hundred years ahead. A brick arch frames a window for the light To be let in, and for a door, A lintel. All are laid Like script declaimed on Sundays At faces plain as chimneys on a roof. The building of a cottage, house or grange, That finds its height and stands Against the day, is song For hands that speak in courses, That harden as they weary of the work. And they are dumb or gone away or dead Who cut the sweet, pale clay Of sentences and fired them In common kilns to make The narratives that keep us home and dry. What we read now when walking through a place Is all that’s left of those Who squared the quiet day With chisel, hawk and bolster, Who held their tongues but spoke vernacular. Jonathan Davidson
2nd Prize A nightingale for Gilbert White April 5, 1768 Buds and shadows fatten, but the garden’s lean. A London smoke crawls west, and cucumbers are tortoising across the sweat-sweet dung. A nuthatch jars and clatters in the oak; rooks get cocky in the Selborne copse. At last the air is quick with bee-flies, kites and larks and April falls across the parish like stained glass, like rest for the broken-backed. The diarist dashes off one word to stand for spring – Luscinia! Colour blurs from every quickened hedge into the woodsmoke hours. The nightingale loops speechless syllables on every thorn. Attention, after all, is prayer. Nothing goes unseen. Jo Bell www.finecity.co.uk