The 2019 Poetry Readings and Prize-giving took place in the Parish Church of St Peter & St Paul in Shepton Mallet on Saturday 16th 2019.
Below, is the feedback on the judging the competition from the 2019 judge, Professor David Morley, followed by a selection from the 2019 winning and shortlisted poems
Below, is the feedback on the judging the competition from the 2019 judge, Professor David Morley, followed by a selection from the 2019 winning and shortlisted poems
The competition has been judged by poet Professor David Morley who lives in Warwick. http://www.davidmorley.org.uk/
David Morley is an ecologist and writer who won the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems. His many prize-winning poetry collections include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, and Enchantment. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University and the editor of the bestselling Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing. In 2018 he was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. He lives in the Midlands but makes regular trips to Somerset to see family – as well as to observe the bird life at RSPB Ham Wall!
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Judge’s Comments
When I invited poems for this competition I posed the question, ‘what is a snowdrop if not a vision?’ Many poets responded with their own special revelation. Sometimes that vision was written from the precise and even scientific view-point of a snowdrop; sometimes that vision was cosmic, finding a world within a flower-head; and sometimes the vision was interior, making for passionate and powerful self-examination. The snowdrop’s botany was its beauty, a sense for possibility, but it was also an invocation of the dark that surrounds and amplifies its short, astonishing, moment. The poems entered from poets under the age of eleven were a non-stop delight. In verse-forms as frisky as March hares, as brisk as a robin’s song, and as enchanting as charms, I spent happy hours reading and re-reading these entries. The poems in the 12-17 category were as alert but showed a more personal and intense focus, an awareness of ecology, and the dangers to our planet. The poems from 18-plus poets were insightful, sophisticated in imagery, and beautifully wrought (the political poems were a surprise and pleasure). These poems were precise, mindful, and unforgettable. |
It has been a joy to judge the poems entered for this year’s Shepton Mallet Snowdrop Festival Poetry Competition. I have judged many poetry competitions but none have come close for the variety and tonic of these poems. Their alertness to the natural world reminded me of Thomas Hardy’s reminder ‘to notice such things’ however insignificant they may at first appear to be. A snowdrop is not small in variety or number, as James Allen showed us. Millions of them emerge and bloom among the snows of late winter. The snowdrop’s startling toughness, seeming delicacy, and pale beauty, inspired many of these poems – and they in turn inspired me. There was serious jostling for first prize in each of the categories. Two or even three poems by different authors were in the frame, often for different reasons. With that in mind I wish to offer a 'special mention' classification between 'winner' and 'highly commended' so that these poets, who were close-running for the top prize, have some conception about the quality and immediacy of their poems. Thank you to everyone who entered. I hope that in 2019 you will return, along with the snowdrops, with poems for the next judge to enjoy. David Morley |
The copyright in these works rests with their authors
Winners
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City, Sleet & Snow
LucyWatt, 18 & Over The root-meaning of galanthus–snowdrop–is milk-flower. But originally these flowers were called ‘white violets’. They are all we have of snowdrops, these fields of flowering air, chalk on blackboard-black, sleeting into the city’s distance, as moving as short-lived. Each drop’s a perfect bell of stainless slush, as if snow, dissolving through the warmer stratum of its fall, knows what winter’s whitest violets are, holding to their shapes when it should have melted into rain. The ground‘s too wet to gather up these lactic splashes, though they cling round the collar of a homeless man begging by the Tube. His collar’s turned up, as a gesture no doubt: the cold’s too brutal for refinements. The white violets could be medals, emphasising all he’s survived, while their small rosette moistens the balaclava keeping his fingers warm. A little cockade of violets to crown an unfortunate’s head-gear. And why not? What else but clouds could be so free? The waif-thin light slipped away some time ago, as easily as anyone can, leaving the dusk to accentuate what these milk-flowers convey, brushing brollies and workers hurrying home briefly, reassuringly, like a mother, a friend, a lover, whose fingertips have in them the quality of tears, sparking and melting where they touch. The sleet’s flowers will, anyway, die of their make-up, as the vulnerable do. Yet the air keeps up its floristry for hours. Acres of milk flowers from a snow-cloud’s heart. Something, somewhere, it seems, pities us. |
Snowdrops
Lucy Thynne, 12 to 17 Like women’s heads bent in prayer, they begin to mourn December in thin wrists of cream. Look away only to miss them – breaking away & up from their sleep, each petal clasping itself into its veiled case. Each leaning back, as if not expecting to find their own stem: rib-thick with green, shouldering their skin, like rice-paper, cut by the light. At night they sleep alone, hollow the dark with no sound. Draw their bodies outwards, soft, lean in to kiss the frozen ground. |
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I am the promise of spring
Emmeline Phillipson, 11 & Under In the biting frost, despite the cold and damp, I, Galanthus, wake up and stretch to make me stronger. My limbs have grown. I am a dancer ready for rehearsal to begin. I sway in the breeze and hear music – adagio. Time to begin the show. The audience of grass and beetles rustle and click excitedly. I rehearse my dance in my mind as I wait in thewings. The birds of the orchestra sing. As the mist rises, a glimpse of petals in preparation for port de bras. The musical sound of wind rushing through leaves and petals. The wind pushes me. Balancé, balancé, fondu to attitude, I feel the refreshing breeze. Tendu derrière into arabesque plié, I see the audience. Droplets rain upon me. I pirouette with joy – pirouette, pirouette à la seconde, pirouette, pirouette. I can feel the storm building around me but I continue the show. My roots grip the soil in a strong firstposition. The music takes on an allegro pace and I hear the volume intensifying. Tilting from side to side, I stop and stand, rond de bras then I rise, arms en couronne. Peace is on the way. With the end of the storm, sunshine and stillness return to the stage. I offer a grande révérence. A snowdrop is a dancer. I am the promise of spring. |
Special Mention
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For I Am a Snowdrop
Harry Hellier, 11 & Under Schools Commendation - Wells Cathedral School I am hushed, Hushed as a rush in a river, I am quiet, Quiet as a snake going for a slither, I make nonoise, For I am a snowman and a lonely one too. I sway in the breeze as the cold winter draws near, Still as a statue just waiting to hear, The noise of snow pit-patting on me and my land, Just waiting for something warm, to lend me a helping hand, For I am a snowdrop, and a lonely one too. My pack’s a lonely one, They’ve nearly all gone, I’m the youngest one, I am, Like a snow white baby sheep would be a lamb, For I am a snowdrop, and a lonely one too. Winters over now, I really don’t know how, But I’ve been re-planted, And as one we all chanted, We are all snowdrops, and very happy ones too! |
Pioneer
Hannah Farrugia, 12 to 17, Australia Pure-white heads hang from stems of green, Shining in the moonlight, And dancing with the sun. A child’s fingers stroke their petals, And his eyes explore their beauty, Before returning to the grey stone house As the tired buds retire. They watch the windmill as it turns, Grinding ears of corn, And spy the boy with gentle fingers Heaving a bucketful of grain. Soon the boy becomes a man, And fights break out in town. Men come seeking trouble, Trampling their stems – Because bread prices were soaring – And no one can afford to pay. But the man met them in the field, And there he struck a deal, And so they left the grey-stone house With promises of grain. Soon, the man departed, But carried upon the wind, Were whispers of his garden, Where he tended to pure-white heads, Hanging from stems of green. But some of the stems were longer, And swayed in the slightest breeze. While, some of the heads were different… Beautiful inventions - made of a pure heart. |
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Elegy for a podsnezhnik*
Estelle Price, 18 & Over She comes from Tadjikistan, thin girl in a purple hat hair threaded with ice-jewels, someone’s princess alone in a frigid city where snow is winter’s harvest. The Kremlin’s cupolas swell into the pallid sky, gold above her downturned head. Lost in a white metropolis, she’s a bomzhi looking for a place to sleep, hounded from benches to doorways, chased by an officer with a horse-head through a sullen park where trees bend pregnant with cold. When the last of her wishes drops from a pocket she’s led to a forgotten wood secreted between factories, climbs into a dark palace beside bruised men, concrete cellar laced by hot pipes. They say she caught pneumonia, left her pink boots for the rats. They say Peter the Great exiled the homeless to Siberia. They say last summer Moscow’s streets were mopped for the tournament. Perhaps she flew away on a carpet says Dascha, purple veins rich with lacquer. Perhaps she’s a podsnezhnik says toothless Tanya. A snowdrop. Just another black spot on a municipal map crystal-bones exposed like the see-through spathe of a galanthus by spring’s sudden melt. Who was she? Glacial-girl with blistered eyes, angel-kiss birthmark on her neck, who dissolved into night’s intense embrace murmuring, ‘Always so cold, always so hungry.’ *in Russia the name given to bodies that are exposed by the spring thaw. |
