• Archive of all Poetry Space showcases
Guest editor: Lizzie Ballagher
Lizzie Ballagher
Lizzie Ballagher’s poetry was showcased recently at the 2017 Houston (Texas) Poetry Festival, the oldest poetry festival in the US. Having spent all her professional life in teaching, writing and editorial work, she now enjoys more time to write. She is a member of the Society of Authors and of the Poetry Society, organisations which, along with Poetry Space, have afforded her much encouragement over the years. She lives and works in southern England, and writes a blog .
Editor’s overview
Thank you, Poetry Space and all the entrants’ whose poems brought me such delight as I read and reread them! What I looked for was insight; I also hoped for (and found) clarity of imagery and honest emotion. In the end, the poems that made it into the final ten were those that stuck in my memory after initial readings, perhaps because of their economy of expression, or perhaps because their creators found a convincing, sometimes delicious way to match structure and sense.
I enjoyed, too, the way many of the more than one hundred poems submitted employed rhythm and other sonic devices to underpin meaning. Reading the final ten aloud only confirmed my choices, although (as seems always to be true) filtering out other wonderful poems was in fact rather painful.
Please scroll down below the poems for Lizzie comments on each selected poem.
Chris Sims
A Poetry Itch
I’ve got a poetry itch,
a buzz in my ribs,
a smell in my brain,
a sigh in my chest,
a question in my feet.
I need to light it up,
answer it, dance it,
scratch it till it bleeds,
shake it till it ferments,
open it like a flower,
tend it like a green seed,
bleed it like a geranium,
stir it like a paint pot;
address it like a lord mayor,
embrace it like a lost child,
till the colours swirl and fight,
the nectar fizzes,
the child shrieks with joy,
the seed bursts its name,
the tower touches the cloud,
and the itch grows
into a castle or mansion,
a shower that thunders the sky,
brass bell that clangs at midnight,
balloon that soars to heaven;
thank you itch, for your gifts
of unreason, bubbling effusion,
dysfunction, misfit, despair,
effervescence, discordance,
wonderful wilderness that blooms.
Judy Dinnen (UK)
You Have Two Ideas for a Poem, and You Riskily Combine Them to Demonstrate the Writing Process
there are records over there, squat in the corner
opposite my bed
they sit and wait, itching to
be scratched.
There are two ideas here.
one as raw as–as unscratched records over there, squat
opposite my bed
Tell me you remember how to be young.
a record lifts its hind leg to scratch behind the ear and
If not, I’ll show you.
my thoughts tend to scamper and–and we’ll
run across fields and pick strawberries and eat Snow Cones till our tongues turn blue
if I think hard enough I feel your fingers.
I promise there’s a method to my madness
and then I will kiss you.
hypnotizing second-nature trains of thought follow the needle around and around and around
as—as
I’ve always wanted to taste the color blue.
Mary Kate Morris (USA)
We come downstairs to
listen
we listen to the birds’
incessant questions
They have not forgotten
to come; their songs are
delicate, you say
They do not vanish
like words
a name
like encrypted sleep
they wipe the world clean
Jeff Skinner (UK)
Every day being the last day
Nothing new
but the memory
of you, my dreamscape
mellifluous as seasons melding
Beaches we inhabited
in all weathers
seashells like ghost-houses
having given up their dead
I covet the detritus
of a worn green sweater
the shirt with mad flowers
a painting half-hung
At 3 a.m. there is
broken sky
the heart’s stumble
a haunting of clocks.
Eileen Carney Hulme (UK)
Great Crested Newt
In the wood’s stippled light
a deadened pond full of mud
and last year’s decaying leaves;
a little-stegosaurus prowls
in the stench of primeval slime.
A basilisk in his own world,
gorging on newly-hatched tadpoles;
his orange belly and warty skin
warn of a foul taste –
a choke-skin suit of armour.
Night-prowler, he hides by day
from the terrible fire-stab-beak
whose shadow makes him shoot
beneath waterlily pads
into hornwort jungles.
Creature of two elements,
he waves his dinosaur tail
at his chosen one, beguiling
her with cologne
in his brightest spring suit.
Water-drake, in my hand
he is a slippery grenade –
he lies so still,
but like a thunderbolt
he’s here … gone.
Annest Gwilym (UK)
Solitude
Look out, as the water streams down
and no-one can see inside, there
are lawns, banks of trees, roses
encircled by undergrowth, picture
the life played out the other side
of the orchard, vault the walls, imagine
but there’s that silence, that space
between the chimes, your mind so easily
turns within, limbs heavy with the unsaid
the undone, the non-doing, you
wait for the night to fall, to say it’s evening,
the day is done, close the shutters, at last.
Patrick Williamson (France)
The edges of winter
Her mittens, though warming, are wet at the edges.
The snow, like flaking white paint, falls to the ground.
Paper thin, it rests one second, then is swiftly swallowed by slush.
Standing still, she thinks of childhood, sledging down the hill.
Her body is weightless, her cheeks red from the cutting wind.
Sue Wallace- Shaddad (UK)
In Bronze September
days ring like deep bells
hilltop echoes hilltop
fields are licked clean
rolled in butterscotch
gold shavings fill the valleys
orchards drip fruit
vines stagger down slopes
stained purple with juice
swallows crotchet power lines
spiders tie seedhead to seedhead
mornings are crisp as apples
air smells of spice
my arms are nut brown
berry-bruised and weary
a glut, a ripening
that cannot last.
Jenna Plewes (UK)
On the move
She is at it again,
moving house
living in two places
lunging with trunks and cases,
little time for her man
just his legs, a kiss. ‘Very nice,’ he says.
She is at it again,
bulging bags, screwed up poems,
too heavy to drag.
As moon and dawn mingle
Memories like a danse macabre
slide deeply into the walls.
Maureen Weldon (UK)
Lost Between
one who wanders
with her head
in a notebook
capturing damselflies
on the tip
of her pen
only putting on shoes
in case someone
knocks on the door.
And another who stands
in a kitchen,
chopping shallots,
listening to rain
as she stirs lost words
into a pan
while a washing machine
circles
the family colours.
Valerie Morton (UK)
Editor’s comments
One theme that emerged clearly was poetry itself, a subject handled deftly in at least four of the poems here. Judy Dinnen (A Poetry Itch)and Mary Kate Morris (You Have Two Ideas for a Poem…) warm to this theme with light-hearted humour, while Maureen Weldon (On The Move) and Valerie Morton (Lost Between) demonstrate that it is not always easy to balance the creative and practical worlds we necessarily inhabit.
Jeff Skinner, Sue Wallace-Shaddad and Annest Gwilym have in common with several writers in this collection a tender sense of wonder: that we can listen to and be refreshed by birdsong (We come downstairs), or that we can spend time observing minute detail in nature or other wildlife (The Edges of Winter”, “Great Crested Newt).
Sorrow rears its head in Every day being the last day (Eileen Carney Hulme). Delicately conveyed is the sudden lurch of loss: “At 3 a.m. there is / broken sky / the heart’s stumble / a haunting of clocks.” Meanwhile, somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of human emotion is the heavy, confusing mix of regret and relief so well described in Solitude (Patrick Williamson) while “In Bronze September” Jenna Plewes catches a rare moment of luminous joy (along with the awareness that, as Robert Frost once wrote, “Nothing gold can stay”).
There is much to celebrate here, both in the content and in the technical skill; I am indebted to Sue Sims to have had the opportunity to read all the poems submitted.
(Please note names have been added after anonymous selection by Lizzie)
