Writers Forum #99 January 2010

Writers
’
FORUM
poetrycompetition
Each month our ﬁ rst prize poem
£100 winner
wins £100 and three runners-up win
a Chambers Concise Dictionary,
worth £19.99 (www.chambers.co.uk).
All entries with an sae receive a short critique
This month’s winner is a small poem with a big
back story. Avoiding the exposition and scene-
setting that mars many potentially good poems,
it cuts straight to the chase with its irresistible
opening lines, The day they took/ our TV away. Who
TV Dinners
wouldn’t be intrigued by that, and want to read
Claire Buckland, Hereford
on? What follows is both funny and sad, painting
a vivid picture in a very few words of a family so
The day they took
focused on their TV that, in its absence, they can
our TV away,
we sat around,
think of nothing better to do than to watch the
armchairs angled in
spot where it used to be. Witty, concise, original as though it were still there
and deceptively simple – what more could one ask
of a poem?
someone suggested
we move the vase of daffs
The New Development tackles a similar theme – the sterility
onto the empty stand;
of modern urban life – but from a wider angle of view. This is a something to look at,
desolate scene, with nothing but a small splash of newly planted
instead
ﬂ owers and young trees to soften the overwhelming hardness
and so
of concrete, steel and glass – and even they have been chosen we sat till bedtime,
for their tidiness and uniformity: this is a place where artiﬁ ciality
eating TV dinners off our laps
rules and life is barely tolerated. It’s a much looser poem than
watching the petals,
not moving.
TV Dinners, building slowly, with broad brush strokes, towards
that strong last line. Perhaps it could be tightened a little, but the
idea is good and the imagery vivid.
Christina Withyman’s Ingathering is the antidote to all that
bleakness. It’s a richly sensuous piece, full of the imagery of the
natural world and evoking all the scents and ﬂ avours of late
The New Development
summer and early autumn. There’s nothing quite like the quiet
Henry Little, Headington
pleasure of gathering in a harvest that will see you through the
long winter ahead, and here the calm, measured pace of the Over William Lucy Way the new development stares,
poem suggests a thankful prayer. The ﬁ nal stanza could be a little
a crushing bore in red brick, grey steel and green glass,
Something never here, never there.
stronger, perhaps, but overall a mouth-watering read.
Christmas poems and villanelles must both be strong Built over an old ironworks, the new gates bear its mark,
candidates for the top ten of ‘poems that often fail’ – but
hoping to credence with some sturdy ferric strength, perhaps,
amazingly, Alexander Blustin has taken this very unpromising
novelty which, like a ﬂ at-pack chair, age will never mask.
combination and produced a successful poem. It works because
Now, viewers of apartments up for sale or for rent
he’s focused on the darker side of Christmas, which, despite its cast their eyes to balconies where professionals often sit
Christian signiﬁ cance and the ubiquitous tinsel and glitter, does
and regret the weakening ﬁ ttings in their weakening investment
also mark an ending: ‘the death of yet another year’. Here the
while in the courtyard concrete blocks are not quite softened
repetitive form echoes the relentless cycle of the years, with the
by the naïve pushing of ﬂ owers, a stainless steel fountain,
inevitability of death inching ever closer. Somewhat contrarily,
cartoon trees yielding nothing so untidy as blossom or fruit,
given the subject matter, it cheered me up no end to ﬁ nd a
and the shriek of a girl down there seems a confession:
villanelle in which theme and form were so well matched.
that even with all its newly imported life
Poetry Editor Sarah Willans this place will never be more real than the artist’s impression.
56 Writers
’
FORUM #99
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