Edward Thomas Fellowship Poetry Competition – 2024 and Earlier Years Judge’s Reports and Winning PoemsPrevious Years Competition Reports and Winning PoemsThe Edward Thomas Fellowship Poetry Competition 2024, Edward Cawston Thomas Prize: Results and Judge’s ReportWe are pleased to announce the names of the winners of the 2024 Competition, judged by the award- winning poet Jane Draycott. As usual we have a First prize, with two equal Second prizes, followed by six Highly Commended poems. There were just over three hundred poems entered and our thanks to everyone who entered and warm congratulations to the winners.The three winning poems are published below, followed by Jane Draycott’s report and appreciation of those winning poems, with details of those Highly Commended appearing afterwards.Previous years results and winning poems continue on this page after those for 2024—————————————————————————————————-The Winner of First Prize of £150 is Alesha Racine for ‘Rowan.’——————————————————————————————————–Joint Second Prizes of £75 are awarded to Catherine Mehta for ‘Caught’CaughtIt looked so small lying there on the stone seat by the front door and the lemon balm.I thought it would be bigger as I cupped it gently in the palm of my hand and perhaps heavier given its daily toil.I thought it would be black as black as ink but it’s closer to soot with a tinge of brown like an old black cat.But the softness softer than a dandelion clock or the wisps of Old Man’s Beard or the fine down of a gosling not yet three days old.Eyes tight shut long yellow stained teeth like a hardened smoker its tiny nose the palest dog rose pink.‘Finally caught the bugger,’ my Grandpa said as he opened the door ‘no more mole hills for that one, knew you’d like a look.’—————————————————————————————-And to Carson Wolfe for ‘A Quantum Physicist Teaches Me The Observer Effect’ A QUANTUM PHYSICIST TEACHES ME THE OBSERVER EFFECT He sketches a diagram of electrons pinging across the page the act of observing changestheir behaviour he says searching my eyes for shared fascinationMy mother once called a man to fix our washing machine Put me in frontof Pingu with a cup of blackcurrant juice Later I saw her through a crack in the doorbeing kissed so hard her shoulders slumped and her bra straps fell downI throw back another shot of tequila steady myself against his bookshelfdizzied by the Periodic Table framed above the mantle its elementsrearranging The debt between us closing in His midnight rescuethe simmer of NO VACANCY my three year old heavyon my hip she sleeps now shut in the spare roomhe opens the eye of a telescope to show mehow beautiful it is a star imploding__________________________________________________________________ Edward Thomas Fellowship Poetry Competition 2024 – Judge’s ReportIn a year when immediate world events and further longer-term crises figure so prominently in the shared consciousness, it’s perhaps not surprising to discover so many of the entries to the competition trying to find ways to speak about fragility, destruction and loss. Much of Thomas’s own poetry is quietly charged with that same consciousness, as expressed so memorably in his poem ‘The Owl’ – the bird’s cry telling me plain what I escaped/ And others could not. Several excellent poems, including the shortlisted and prize-winning entries, also evoked in their many different ways a strong sense of scene and of human presence in it, simultaneously detailed and associative, as if searching for understanding about how individual and personal experience might relate to what we observe as the non-human universe.The first prize winner ‘Rowan’ brilliantly uses an inventive, sensuous association of mythological narratives to create a richly detailed and wonderfully mysterious account of thrushes which seems to be simultaneously a dramatisation of both folklore and the biblical tale of Eve and of female ‘obedience’ The two second-prize winners this year were both very strong contenders and I was grateful for the competition’s offering of a double second award, which both of these poems richly deserve. ‘A Quantum Physicist Teaches Me the Observer Effect’ very skilfully works a striking sense of chronology and scale into its poignant account of the narrator’s continuing experience of powerlessness – a homeless parent with their child ‘rescued’ by a physicist, the poem’s narrowing arrangement on the page accelerating our reading as the moment for repayment closes in. In rather similar ways, the journey from the opening line to the poem’s moment of arrival in ‘Caught’ – describing the narrator’s recollected first close-up encounter with a dead mole – is paved with brilliant and immediate observational detail whilst at the same time conjuring a subtle sense of the scene’s crucial moment in a longer narrative of growing understanding.In all three winning pieces, coincidentally, a second figure beyond the ‘I’ of the narration hovers significantly at the edge of the scene – in every case, a powerful evocation of the centrality of human relationship to individual experience. Reading all these poems, hearing the voices in them, has reinforced that understanding in me even though sadly as always only a few can make it to the final selection.JD Feb 2024Highly Commended Rachel Burns – Swan UppingOliver Comins – ‘spring guns and mantraps on these premises’Zoe Green – CianalasRoisin Leggett – MorningCaroline Maldonado – MudlinesLynda Plater – Dusk at Martham———————————————————————————————–Edward Thomas Fellowship Poetry Competition 2023The 2023 Competition attracted over three hundred poems. The judge, Jane Draycott, wrote that she found the sifting and final choices very difficult, with poems of powerful quality, strong and strongly-felt. Jane’s full report is available here.The First Prize was for ‘Marsh Angels’ by Jane Burn.Joint Second prizes were for ‘Seal’ by Joanna Lowry and ‘We will be out until the Light has Gone’ by David Thomas.Highly recommended poems were by, Kathryn Bevis, Harriet Truscott, Shirley Nicholson, Glen Wilson, Alex McDonald and Laura Jenner. Marsh Angels Horses, pale as bone, pale as snow, wick and wild, who would think such bodies could live on waves? Live where the water writessuch a faint line between its cool length and bleached pages of sky, where water makes the horses seem to come alive twice — once above, cannon deep and onceagain beneath — a rippled self —blurred, disturbed by the droplets falling from its own soft mouth — a selfit seems to kiss, whenever it stoops its milky cobble of a head to drink.Horse has found its own way to never be alone. The water holds so many mirrored friends so gently asking nothing more than to be beloved to another.There is no cost but standing here, or running here— no price for peace but moon, reflected moon, reflected clouds, stars, ribbons of hardy delta grass.The water dries upon them like second skin. Salt skin, silver skin. They are not afraid to live as ghosts— babies born in fading peltsstanding at their dam’s side like a beautiful stain.The Camargue’s Cradle holds them safe, holds their tails like spray against the wind— holds their speed, their love.their resting weight. The sand keeps the echoes of their feet. ——————————————————- Seal Seeking the freedom of sleep I conjure myself as a seal,sleek and swollen, edging clumsily towards the rimof a frozen ice floe, then slipping downinto the ocean, rolling and diving, instantly free.I picture the way I move, released from all constraint,and deep in my belly coiled intestines, bundlesof transparent lace, floating in their own black sea. I saw a seal’s intestines once in a museum.I was tired from lack of sleep, and stepped out of a dark corridor.It was flash-lit: that luminous cloak sewn from seal gut,stretched, brittle and tissue-paper thin.Torn from deep inside the seal’s body,it was magical, and proof against all weather,blizzards, ice, the arctic wind. At night my dead husband appears on a daisin a beam of light. Sliding those slim tweezersdown his throat he pulls out a shimmering strand of gut.It pools in coils at his feet. He seems at that momentpharaonic, at the mouth of a shining delta,or at the centre of a circle of wavelets on hard black water –where a seal has just plunged out of sight.————————————————————–We Will Be Out until the Light Has GoneWe will be out until the light has gone –Guns broken open,Cold and hard across crooked arms.I am a child, but I wish to be a man. So.I roll silently into his footprints,And hope to kill something;To dip hands sacramentallyIn blood and leaf litter,The ring of the metal report still in my ears.I do not understand why I want these things.Sometimes, as we work the woodOr carefully crab-step the quarry bank,I think it is the broad, blind,Damp, bullying back of him I’ll bring down.An accident, they would surely say.And perhaps it would have been.___________________________________________________________________________Edward Thomas Fellowship Poetry Competition 2022These are the 2022 Poetry Competition winning poems, judged by Jamie McKendrick.We were delighted by the quality and number of entries – over 480 – this year, and warmly thank everyone who entered.The winning poem of the Competition is ‘Shadowland’ by James Driver. Joint second are ‘This’ by Kathryn Bevis and ‘Kaze no Denwa (The Wind Phone)’ by Theresa Giffard. Highly commended were Derek Sellen (for two poems), Bill Dodd, Lawrence Wray, James Driver (for a second poem.)Jamie’s report may be read here but before reading it you may like to read these wonderful poems and join us in congratulating the winners.Shadowland By James DriverHe was the bailiff here. This is his map.Six inches to the statute mile. The namesAre still the same – Frome Copse and White Beech Lane –But all the trees it shows went long ago,Clear felled one winter, 1921.Work for the unemployed, two hundred menOut in the rain with tools they couldn’t name.He gave them sacks to keep their shoulders dry.They left no tales to tell, no photographs;Their stories, like the paths his old map shows,Are lost and yet, just like he said it would,All that was slight and aimless still survives:A stretch of woodland runs by High Street Green –Replanted, felled, replanted once again –The Sadler brothers owned it. Thomas livedAt Pockford. His favourite horse was Plantain.Ajax and Dewdrop, Bosphorus, his hounds.James, on the Petworth Road, kept Cherfold House.August the thirteenth, 1855,He took his ball and bat to Shillinglee, played inThe famous match where no-one scored a run.William, too, lived somewhere hereabouts.They gave that belt of trees – the way they rodeTo Sidney Wood – the name Botany Bay,And told themselves they’d made a jest as fineAs all the captions on the Punch cartoonsThey cut out, trimmed and framed and liked to hangAround the tack room walls. Hung there too wasThe harness of the horses used by himTo drag the hewn trunks out on furrowed tracksWhich, once the timber tug had gone, the deerTook as their own, pushed further on, and jaysFlew through to plant their acorns out while softSeeds floated in and ash keys tumbled down.When I was young he drew a map for me,Named all the places that he walked and worked,And painted pictures of his favourite treesAs true to life as any photograph.Across that spot he printed “PERFECT WOOD’.Across the rest he scribbled “shadowland”.————————————————————-Joint Second prize poemsThis, by Kathryn BevisA fire has been lit in new leaves,will grow to a green worldin the dark wood. Small whitesrise in drifts to the swish of our boots.Nothing is worth more than this day. A pair of grey wagtails fly low,gold-bellied, over the rushing river.Their bodies translate waterto sunlight, sunlight to water.Nothing is worth more than this day. Here, the wind toys with leaves like loosechange in the pockets of the sky.High above, a wood pigeon calls to us,wild and true, Who are you, who who?Nothing is worth more than this day.———————————————————————Kaze no Denwa (The Wind Phone) by Theresa GiffardOn a hill above Otsuchethere is a phone boxin a gardenoverlooking the building sitethat used to be the townbefore it was swallowed upby the sea The locals comeone by one, or in pairsshuffling outsideclutching tissuesanxious facesscarves and thick coatswrapped up against the cold Pushing the door openlifting the receiverthey dial numbers of homesthat are no longer standingand speak to the missingto loved ones who are lostpresumed drowned A teenage sonhas walked from the stationhis father a lorry driverlast heard of on the coast roadwhen the wave came“I miss you dad” he said“I made the baseball team” An old woman climbs the pathher back bent like an apple treeshe calls her husbandwhose body has never been foundand asks if he is warm enoughthere is no replyjust the sound of the windThe report of Jane Draycott (competition judge 2021) may be read here. That year’s winning poem can be read here, and the runners up here and here respectively.Details of winning poems and the judge’s report from earlier years are available here.