NEO•GRIOT

Red Shed Poetry Competition

The second Red Red Shed Readings Open Poetry Competition has now been launched. Don't miss out! Our judge this year is Gerard Benson and entry forms are downloadable from the top menu bar. Give it a shot and good luck.    

Download the competition entry form here

 

Over two hundred poems were entered for the 2009 Red Shed Poetry Competition. Below are the summarising notes of Michael Yates, the competition judge.

 

A big thank you is extended to Michael and to all of the poets who took the time and effort to enter the competition. The details of the 2010 competition have now been released, please have another bash at achieving poetic immortality by entering this year.

 

 

Dear Poet,

 

Thank you for entering the Red Shed Competition. The results are enclosed.

 

Red Shed Open Poetry Competition Results

 

£100 first prize – Nest by Margaret Eddershaw,

£50 second prize – Beehive by Julie Mellor

£25 third prize – Consolations of the Geriatrics’ Porter by Noel Williams

 

I found the selection of poems broad, the mix idiosyncratic, the individual verses enjoyable.

 

But judges are human; they are not Poetry Appreciation Machines. And reading poems, like writing them, is first of all an instinctive thing. Do we like this, are we thrilled by that? Only later do we rationalise the choices.

 

It seems to me a good poem has to be accessible, though not simple-minded; and have its feet on the well-trod ground of reality even if its head wanders skywards now and again to get a loftier view.

 

A poem may be a clever parody of the form, but it should also have some moral weight; it may tease a lesson out of life but it should not sermonise; it may be meticulous in its description but it also has to sing.

 

Nest by Margaret Eddershaw begins with discovery and detailed observation (a wagtails’ nest with its tiny skeletons) then proceeds to a revelation about the nature of love and loss, inferred from the swooping return of the fledglings’ parents. But the human observer is always fallible (she only recognises the wagtails by Googling) and her conclusions are framed as questions rather than confident insights. Finally, the image of a woman in Saigon searching for her children (“during the American War/ as the Vietnamese call it”) makes a general point from a surprisingly specific image. The conversational style provides an unforced, rueful tone; and the ending is satisfying without being glib. I wouldn’t change a word.

 

Beehive by Julie Mellor also begins with detailed observation but mixes it with the surreal and the humorous (“There are spiders in her head….you might think she had encouraged them/ back-combing her hair, setting it with sugar water”). Its constant sense of discomfort (“The point of a pencil is handy to scratch/ between the hardened strands”) is ably communicated. Finally, the image of the heroine, who every six months “shampoos it, rinses it with beer/ leaves a web of silk in the plug hole” is sad, but also redolent of that universal humour which is a necessary part of being resigned to life.

 

Finally, Consolations of the Geriatrics’ Porter by Noel Williams is a sharp little tale of living among the dead, of getting on with things, of staying sane. It is full of original phrases like “a midnight scratched by torches” and the inescapable voyeurism of the porter’s job is captured in “the eloquent locks of nurses’ homes/ as I test them.” Creepy but nice.

 

Michael Yates

Competition Judge