Wigtown Poetry Competition

The Wigtown Poetry Competition is Scotland’s most prestigious poetry prize. The 2010-2011 competition will be launched at this year's book festival on Friday 1st October, in an event with last year’s winner, Alan Buckley. Entry forms and online entries will be available from that date, with the winner announced in May 2011. For updates, please keep an eye on this website. Last year's winning and commended poems, judged by Liz Lochhead and Meg Bateman (Gaelic section) are published here:

First Prize: Alan Buckley

Voicemail

For Kate

Although your mobile must be lying still
and unblinking on a bedside table,

or stuffed in a bag with a pointless diary,
tonight I ring it one last time, and hear

your voice, clear, unwavering, as you ask me
to please leave a message after the tone,

and then I try to pretend you’re busy,
writing songs on your scuffed acoustic, or down

in the lush, quiet county you were born in,
hands on the steering wheel’s leopard-print cover,

casually speeding south through a warren
of hedge-bound lanes, stone bridges, up over

Eggardon Hill, to the place you’d go to stare
at the waves, and breathe the incoming air.

Runner-up: Richard Lambert

Scenes from the Late Hotel

Kitchens

The fans have stopped. Each silver hood
is a pyramid, its top
shoved through the ceiling. Blades

slot in wood, ladles, spoons,
hang from hooks. Blue light crackles
with a gnat, resumes its Zen-like meditation.

The night porter

A Robinson Crusoe in his island of lamplight,
his Friday a radio playing endless pop.
But even he has gone, to take an American

to the seventh floor, to dust the plants.
See, here is his novel, its white fan spreading,
losing the page he was on.

The corridor

To walk down its centre is to walk
down something potentially dangerous,
like a track in a first. Behind each door

at the heart of the night
is a darkness. The rabbits tremble
in their hutches. You tread very quietly.

Gaelic Prize-winner: Rody Gorman

Bàn

Bha mi nam chromadh
Air a’ cheàird agam fad an latha
San dorchadas, an tòir air na faclan
Air an Lìon
Air an annalair-uchd
Mar gun robh e nam dhàn ‘s nam dhual a-riamh.

Agus gun fhiosta,
Siud e Pangur Bàn e fhèin
A’ nochdadh mun a’ bhòrd
Agus, dìreach mar sin,
A’ leum
Air an luchaig agam.

Commended: Noelle Janaczewska

Salt Lemon

The creek. The salt. The salt rising through
the soil. The creek the channels and the land
and the citrus trees growing on the land
despoiled. The salt. The sorrow pips growing
inside the locals. The bitterness. The creek. The dust
in the bed. The salt. The locals. The sorrow
squeezing them dry. The creek. The channels.
The dust in the bed. The dearth. The salt
rising. The lemons already. The creek. The locals.
The leaving. The dust the dearth and the bitterness
and the leaving. The lemons already half way to
margaritas. The trees. The whiteness
that rimes on your skin, that chokes the stars,
and the dust in the bed of the creek on the land
where the salt is the earth
and the lemons
are full of it. 

Commended: Ruth Thompson

Botanic Gardens on the Morning of the Twelfth

Terriers chase tennis balls across the grass,
the Palm House and the Tropical Ravine are shut,
and in their beds beside the empty bandstand,
roses bend full-blooming heavy heads.

Midnight rain has washed a leafy debris
into blackbird-plundered streams and gullies.
In the distance, a growing sound of flutes
and drums; closer to, the piping of a wren.

Where Dunluce Avenue meets the Lisburn Road
there was a wall where I was lifted as
a child to watch the bands. Today, a sweating
boy from Saltcoats stamps a pole-dance out

beneath a hoarding that urges, ‘Go on, you know
you want to’. There is nothing so cool and pale
as rose petals after rain, and here are roses
for sashes – Orangeade, Masquerade, Shot Silk.

Commended: Sue Rose

Guided Tour

This was probably the kitchen. A lot of metal
was found here—solidified rivers of it, winding
round stone, brick and granite, a battery
of utensils and machines heated to dissolution;
long lines glistening in the floor and wall,
no doubt pipes. Tiles too, earth colours
and vivid pigments still bright in their reds and blues.
Notice the notches there, on the door jamb, carved
into the wood, rising in height at intervals,
whether for measurement or ritual, we can’t be sure.

This we call the music room: that slump of wood
in the corner was a primitive instrument, no power
or synths, just wood, ivory and wire, the percussion
of human fingers. There is an image screen
in the site museum. Most of the keys were lost
in the fire storms or crushed, but a few ivories
survive in the museum; strange to think
the material absorbed oil and sweat, that traces
of this human inhabitant might have fused
with them as they yellowed in the falling heat.

Finally, on the left, we have the remains
of what was the living room, known as the lounge
or front room in some sections of society.
The buckled metal struts against the wall
are from contraptions which we now know
were for relaxation or sleeping. Note the hearth—
it seems they made fires, although quite advanced.
The museum has a tile patterned with flowers,
and, interestingly, still intact, pressed beneath
collapsed firebricks, pages of charred paper,
odd words legible—love, bike, harpsichord.

Commended: Richard W Halperin

Dear Leo

Dear Leo, you haven’t written in a while,
but honestly, I wasn’t expecting you to.
I hope you are well. Sometimes I hope you don’t
remember me, because there was pain attached to that.
I think pain may well outlive love, so best to forget
the whole package. What do I hope for you, Leo?
I hope you are the same kind of happy you were
When you were playing cribbage, when you were playing
golf, when you were listening to Brahms. I hope you don’t
have to get up in the morning to go someplace
you don’t want to go to. I hop you don’t feel like
my father any more, Leo, or anyone’s.
The wise leave no writing behind, and then it is
up to us to read what they have not written.

Commended: Polly Atkin

Kindling

It was the winter of fires that would not take;
of ash everywhere; never enough heat.
The winter of ice: opaque waves
creeping closer over the roads at night,
shutting you off from time and the outside.
Everything stopped. Your watch, your heater.
You piled all you could on your bed but still
the cold woke you at least twice an hour.
You dozed all morning. Afternoons you prepared
for evening, spent all your daylight kindling,
willing the flames to live; lost hours
crouched in the hearth, giving mouth to mouth
to the spluttering coal, praying for breath.
You knew you were just treating symptoms. The problem
lay farther than you could reach, no matter
how you contorted yourself. The chimney
was stuffed with the stubs of years condensed
into soft black snow that swallowed your stretching
arms when you went to clear it. It needed
more than you had; somebody trained
in removing the past. But this was the winter
you forgot how to use the phone; forgot
how to write a letter, construct a sentence.
You failed in the cold alone, speechless,
convinced it was something you’d done or not done.
By dark the room would be fully ablaze,
lit by laughing flames, denying
there’d ever been a struggle. Meanwhile
months passed, scrunched up like scrap on the grate,
and all that dead weight you ignored built up
like the frost as it kept getting colder.

Commended: Christopher Simons

Magpie

You fumble through each morning’s mysteries
of rings and chains and misplaced keys—

all your accessories that give no access
while I fasten my diamond tongue-stud
clear as a drop of Satan’s blood
and at the twitch of your sprinkler’s denials, thrice
gargle and spritz to clear my voice
before my stand-up routine

on the One True Cross.
You accuse me of ‘ill deeds’—
look again.  These are spats, not widow-weeds.
I was mascot of the bacchanal
when you were doing your worst at school.

You should try giving in to nature:
the gardener knows to tip his hat
and puts up with my sharper’s chat,
wise to the difference between bet and better.

Don’t look to birds to square your sums,
unearth a coin, a wedding ring, a tiding—
you count for nothing.

While you give me all your traits and qualms,
I take them, and give you nothing in return.

I will remain.  I like your lawn.

Commended: Chloe Morrish

Adam, there are animals

There is a small fox
slipping through the fabric of dawn,
still coated in a layer of grey dusk

and carefully placing his paws
between what’s left of night
in the garden.

There is a monkey,
a stained toy, in your hand
when you arrive at the hospital,

which none of the fussing people
had noticed and you
had clung to.

There are wild-eyed soldiers’ horses,
charging at us from the jigsaw pieces
in the waiting room

where we try to sleep
on the table and chairs
and pretend we’re not waiting.

There are several pigeons
on the window ledge, shuffling about
before the steel chimneys and pinking sky.

There is a seagull’s bark,
in the deflated quiet
just after you die.

There is the silhouette of an eagle
in flight on your green t-shirted chest
when we leave you.

There is an overfed cat
in the arms of a nurse who smokes
by the automatic doors.

There is a black cat
near the exit, smudged
in the car headlights.

There is our dog
at the door, confused
when we get home without you.

And on the kitchen table we sit at,
holding on to cups of tea like they were anchors,
there is a small plastic horse.

Commended: Caroline Price

Chez ma tante

The aunts of the Marais have never seen
Such visitors! Doctors, journalists,
executive directors – they saunter through
the dark arcades insouciantly, as if
the clock, the violin beneath their coats
does not belong to them, while on their heels,
down on their luck, and keeping even closer
to the walls slope the nervy blue bloods
of the seizième, gold bracelets, true
to the old saying, hiding threadbare cuffs.

The Marais aunts don’t turn a hair. Their doors
are open to all: and before all, they’ve been
surprised before: behind discreet facades
haven’t they all welcomed Rodin bearing a hand
from one of his own sculptures, Hugo’s mistress
on her knees, pleading on his behalf?
They have watched the destitute of the city
leave their very mattresses on these floors
for sous to buy and sell potatoes, then creep
stiffly back at dusk to buy them back...

Over the years, only the details have changed;
and the aunts adapt. Upright in their booths,
Behind their desks, their practised eyes assess
designer dresses, Rolex watches, furs
dispassionately, as publicly unmoved
by swollen lids, a flush of anger or shame
as by the wordless pleasure, moments later,
of the widow scuttling off beneath the weight
of her recaptured painting, the laid-off worker
fumbling his chain again around his neck.

The aunts aren’t there to judge. And they are not
inflexible; they’ve just removed their ban
on taking alcohol. Their visitors’ books
have filled with clandestine collectors of
grands crus, and desperate lords, and this young man
bequethed a single bottle by his uncle
and smuggling it inside wrapped in brown paper.
This is his first time; anyone who looked
Would see him stumble out in minutes, dazed
and wondering what he’s going to tell his mother.

“chez ma tante”: old euphemism, after a C19 adventurer who pawned his watch but told his mother he’d left it at his aunt’s.

 

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