Wheeler Light for 'Life Jacket'.
The runner-up is: Daniel Duffy - 'President Returns To New York For Brief First Visit'
Wheeler Light currently lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Life Jacket
summer camp shirts I
couldn’t fit in then
are half my size now I
wanted to wear
smaller and smaller articles
of clothing
I shrunk to the size that
disappeared
of an afterthought in
a sinking ship body
too buoyant to sink too
waterlogged for land
I became a dot of sand
silent as dusk becoming
night
my first time sailing I capsized
and almost drowning in
oversized clothing
I sat the captain’s seat I
couldn’t fit into
till I sunburned my
entire body
lobster body kids
called me
with claws showing more
names
than I can recall the skin
and the cells
the burning only have
themselves
beach bodies are naked
and brave
to be sought after I
told myself
instead find treasure to
look in the mirror
inside the self until
I saw the sea
Judge Rosanna Hildyard's commentary:
Many of the poems this fortnight experimented successfully with innovative form. For example, the ‘transition poem’ as used by PC Vandall is a difficult feat to pull off. Using the same form and words as Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Night Dances’, Vandall reworks the word order to subvert the original’s meaning. Vandall picks up Plath’s particular, concise description in this poem, and carries on with the intriguing ambiguity of the poem in this response. With lines like ‘the white space of your eyes, / the drenched smell of calla lilies’, Vandall’s response is more suggestive of romantic obsession than parental tenderness.
Anne Walsh Donnelly’s simple
list of instructions ‘Your Guide To Becoming A Writer’ is a blackly funny
example of a comfortablly familiar form, while Daniel Duffy’s series of poems inspired
by landscape paintings work together as various forms which make a coherent poetic
narrative. His poem ‘President Returns To New York...’ is a parody of the social
column or political circular – with a crafted rhyme scheme, it works as both
poem and prose.
The winning poem, Wheeler
Light’s ‘Life Jacket’, shows what a good poem should be: a balance of matter
and form. It is a poem about the humiliation of having an ill-fitting body,
about the modern alienation from physical being, a universal preoccupation. In
a world where our lives and work are largely based in the intellectual realm, our
bodies are both us and not-us, and this poem shows exactly how that confusion
feels:
I capsized
in oversized clothing
The poem is an immaculate image itself: ten squares of four lines on the page. But the poem is equally instantly effective aloud, with its clipped lines, lack of punctuation and subtle consonance refusing an emotional reading. It is terse: not a word is wasted, for example in the uncomfortable comparison of the speaker’s ‘sunburned / lobster body’ with ‘beach bodies’, a few lines later. The resentful comparison is all inferred through apposition: this is the epitome of the maxim show, don’t tell. Language is restrained in amount and stylistically, accurately reflecting the speaker’s internalised pain. It is beautifully controlled.
Here was the shortlist of 14 poems:
1.
Anne
Walsh Donnelly – 'Your Guide To Becoming A Writer'
2.
Beth
Brooke - 'I Miss You Today'
3.
Bill
Garten – 'Recover'
4.
Carol
Stewart - 'The Eleventh Hour'
5.
Carrie
Magness Radna – 'Resentment'
6.
Daniel
Duffy - 'President Returns To New York For Brief First Visit'
7.
Emily
Sage - 'Arabesque #1 Debussy'
8.
Kerry
O’Shea – 'Artwork By Hillel'
9.
Lou
Heron- 'The Eternal Spring',
10.
Maria
Castro Domiguez – 'A Better You'
11.
Nazariy
Telyuk - 'Smoking A Cigarette'
12.
PC
Vandall – 'After A Poem By Sylvia Plath'
13.
Simon
Lewis – 'Searching For Peter Shirtliff'
14.
Wheeler Light - 'Life Jacket'
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