We are delighted to publish the three winning winning poems from our 2023 competition judged by Philip Gross.
First Prize: Laura Theis (poem and video below)
Joint Second: Sara-Jane Arbury (poem and video below)
Joint Second: Steve Pottinger (poem and video below)
Also, many congratulations to the five poets whose poems Philip Gross has singled out for commendation (in alphabetical order):
Ken Evans
Naoise Gale
Vlad Pasca
Thea Smiley
Christian Ward
The Winners
Laura Theis (1st Prize)
in my mother tongue the name for grand piano is wing
in my mother tongue
words can be feathered
which turns them into
old jokes or proverbs
owning a bird
in my mother tongue
is sign of great madness:
you can accuse someone
with an outrageous opinion
of cheeping and chirping
if you want to convey
that you are flabbergasted or awed
in my mother tongue
you might say: my dear swan
which is what I think
when I first hear you play
as your fingers move over
the keys I wonder
what gets lost
in translation
between music
and birdsong
whether both soar above
our need to shift between words
then I remember
in my mother tongue
the name for grand piano
is wing
What judge Philip Gross said about the poem:
‘in my mother tongue the name for grand piano is wing’
Among several differently compelling poems, this one came through as a winner for its bold but subtle simplicity. Its small stanzas shorn of punctuation read like an agreement to walk naked in the hinterland simultaneously between spoken languages, between words and music, between the speaker’s past and present, between the familiar and the strange. This is a poem that both loves and relishes language, and points beyond it, letting the visible silence of its white space speak.
Writing in her second language, Laura Theis received a Distinction from Oxford University’s MSt in Creative Writing. Her work appears in venues such as Poetry, Mslexia, Magma, Rattle, and Strange Horizons, and anthologies by Candlestick Press, Broken Sleep Books, Pan Macmillan, and Aesthetica, amongst many others. Her Elgin-Award-nominated debut ‘how to extricate yourself’, an Oxford Poetry Library Book-of-the-Month, won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize. She was the recipient of the Society of Authors’ Arthur Welton Award, the AM Heath Prize, EAL Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, Mogford Prize, Hammond House International Literary Award, and a Forward Prize nomination.
A runner-up for the Mairtin Crawford Award, she was shortlisted for the Women Poets’ Prize, the Bridport Prize, the Margaret Reid Poetry Prize, the Hippocrates Prize, the Alpine Fellowship, and a finalist for numerous other literary awards including the National Poetry Competition and the BBC Short Story Award. Her forthcoming book ‘A Spotter’s Guide for Invisible Things’ has won the 2022 Live Canon Collection Prize.
She lives in Oxford with her partner (a neuroscientist) and her dog (a lunatic).
Sara-Jane Arbury (Joint 2nd Prize)
Octopus
Gobbet of God’s phlegm made flesh,
O oktō, O pous, globular mind-boggle
sucker-punching the concept of curious.
You’re crawling stone, you’re passing cloud,
you’re spiky coral reef. You’re a gobstopper.
Ocean’s soft vowel, locomoting with jet
propulsion, trailing streamers of arms.
Or are you the nearest myth to a gorgon?
You fondle rocks like endless lovers, press
bulbous mass down the ossified mouths
of holes. Taste what you touch.
O, moans Hokusai’s fisherman’s wife,
with a throat full of tentacle, and you
suctioned to the sweet salt of her. O,
boneless lover, erotic comet, you’re
too overwhelming for this world.
An alien equation maybe, with your nine
brains, eight arms, three hearts, blue blood –
No? OK, then squeeze through the chink in science,
octopod. Slop into another aquarium. Writhe
amongst yourself. Write mesmerism.
Or simply unscrew the lid off intelligence,
belief-beggar, and shake this little globe.
We are snow drowning around you. Ogle us.
What judge Philip Gross said about the poem:
‘Octopus’
This is a glorious brain teaser of a poem, both witty and serious, grounded in up-to-the-minute scientific knowledge and alert to the gaps in human understanding. Mimicking its subject, it reaches in many directions at the same time, with an exuberant delight in exploring the whole register, from the uncanny to the erotic, always keeping one step ahead of the reader. This is word and image pushing itself to the limits of the intelligence on which we pride ourselves, just to find the octopus (is it watching us?) still its unknowable self, just out of reach.
Sara-Jane Arbury is a writer, poet, performer and tutor. She has collaborated with many organisations including Oxford University Press, the National Literacy Trust, Ledbury Poetry Festival and Writing West Midlands, and is a former Director of the Voices Off programme at Cheltenham Literature Festival. Sara-Jane was a finalist in the 2021 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition and longlisted for The Plough International Poetry Prize. Her poems appear in anthologies, most recently Tools Of The Trade: Poems For New Doctors published by The Scottish Poetry Library. Sara-Jane is Writer-in-Residence for Herefordshire’s site-specific theatre company Feral Productions.
Steve Pottinger (Joint 2nd Prize)
7.19 in the evening, and the boy outside
New Street station is singing
a lament for us all, he sings
for the puffa jacket kids clothed
and camouflaged in swagger, he sings
for the electric bike takeaway riders
who criss-cross the city, silent
and determined, their two-wheel
spinning gig economy, he sings
for the husk of a lad who totters
tram tracks like a ballerina, trailing
a sleeping bag, who is going nowhere
good in his own slow time and is lost
to us, he sings
for the young couples, still
in love, touching hands
and clasping ready meals
heading back to city apartments
to share each other’s dreams, he sings
for football fans and figures folded
in the shadow of doorways, he sings
for shift workers, their aching backs
their fallen arches, he sings
for the quiet conversation of women
on their way to clean offices, he sings
for the is this isn’t this
flirtation of friends, he sings
for our mistakes, our wrong turnings
our missed opportunities, the bright future
that slipped through our fingers, the better
world that disappeared, he sings
and his voice, pure and soft, a gift
spirals out to join satellites and stars
seeking nothing but the joy of its being
an offering to god, if god is listening
and I think, we should all be crying
here, we should all of us be crying
it is 7.19 in the evening and
the boy outside New Street station sings.
What judge Philip Gross said about the poem:
‘7.19 in the evening, and the boy outside’
Sometimes a poem seems to take a deep breath and unfurl from stanza by stanza by the sheer momentum of its vision. Without a full stop in sight, it flows rippling over its commas and finely judged line breaks, through shifts and modulations but with no loss of momentum, right up to the humbling climax of its ending. This is a state of the nation address with no pomposity, teetering on the edge of metaphysics, all the stronger for its grounding in the utterly mundane.
Steve Pottinger is a founding member of Wolverhampton arts collective Poets, Prattlers, and Pandemonialists. He’s an engaging and accomplished performer who has performed the length and breadth of the country, and his work regularly appears online in CultureMatters and the Morning Star. His sixth volume of poems, ‘thirty-one small acts of love and resistance’ published by Ignite Books, is out now. His website is at https://stevepottinger.co.uk/
Judge: Philip Gross
Photo credit: Stephen Morris
Poets & Players 