Edward Thomas Fellowship Poetry Competition – 2024 and Earlier Years Judge’s Reports and Winning Poems

The Edward Thomas Fellowship Poetry Competition 2024, Edward Cawston Thomas Prize: Results and Judge’s Report

We 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’

Caught

It 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       changes

their behaviour      he says                            searching
my eyes                                     for shared fascination

My mother once      called a man                     to fix
our washing machine                     Put me in front

of Pingu     with a cup         of blackcurrant juice
Later  I saw her     through a crack in the door

being kissed    so hard               her shoulders
slumped    and her bra straps       fell down

I throw back   another shot       of tequila
steady myself       against his bookshelf

dizzied   by the Periodic Table framed
above the mantle            its elements

rearranging   The debt between us
closing in      His midnight rescue

the simmer of NO VACANCY
my three year old       heavy

on my hip  she sleeps now
shut     in the spare room

he opens the eye of  a
telescope to show me

how beautiful it is
a star imploding

__________________________________________________________________

Edward Thomas Fellowship Poetry Competition 2024 – Judge’s Report

In 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 2024

Highly Commended

Rachel Burns – Swan Upping

Oliver Comins – ‘spring guns and mantraps on these premises’

Zoe Green – Cianalas

Roisin Leggett – Morning

Caroline Maldonado –  Mudlines

Lynda Plater – Dusk at Martham

———————————————————————————————–

Edward Thomas Fellowship Poetry Competition 2023

The 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 writes

such 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 once

again beneath — a rippled self —blurred,
disturbed by the droplets falling from its own soft mouth —
a self

it 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 pelts

standing
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 rim

of a frozen ice floe, then slipping down

into the ocean, rolling and diving, instantly free.

I picture the way I move, released from all constraint,

and deep in my belly coiled intestines, bundles

of 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 dais

in a beam of light. Sliding those slim tweezers

down his throat he pulls out a shimmering strand of gut.

It pools in coils at his feet. He seems at that moment

pharaonic, 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 Gone

We 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 sacramentally

In 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 wood

Or 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 2022

These 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 Driver

He was the bailiff here. This is his map.

Six inches to the statute mile. The names

Are 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 men

Out 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 lived

At 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 in

The famous match where no-one scored a run.

William, too, lived somewhere hereabouts.

They gave that belt of trees – the way they rode

To Sidney Wood – the name Botany Bay,

And told themselves they’d made a jest as fine

As all the captions on the Punch cartoons

They cut out, trimmed and framed and liked to hang

Around the tack room walls. Hung there too was

The harness of the horses used by him

To drag the hewn trunks out on furrowed tracks

Which, once the timber tug had gone, the deer

Took as their own, pushed further on, and jays

Flew through to plant their acorns out while soft

Seeds 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 trees

As true to life as any photograph.

Across that spot he printed “PERFECT WOOD’.

Across the rest he scribbled “shadowland”.

————————————————————-

Joint Second prize poems

This,     by Kathryn Bevis

A fire has been lit in new leaves,

will grow to a green world

in the dark wood. Small whites

rise 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 water

to sunlight, sunlight to water.

Nothing is worth more than this day.

Here, the wind toys with leaves like loose

change 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 Giffard

On a hill above Otsuche

there is a phone box

in a garden

overlooking the building site

that used to be the town

before it was swallowed up

by the sea

The locals come

one by one, or in pairs

shuffling outside

clutching tissues

anxious faces

scarves and thick coats

wrapped up against the cold

Pushing the door open

lifting the receiver

they dial numbers of homes

that are no longer standing

and speak to the missing

to loved ones who are lost

presumed drowned

A teenage son

has walked from the station

his father a lorry driver

last heard of on the coast road

when the wave came

“I miss you dad” he said

“I made the baseball team”

An old woman climbs the path

her back bent like an apple tree

she calls her husband

whose body has never been found

and asks if he is warm enough

there is no reply

just the sound of the wind

The 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.