2011 Judges' Commentary
Vicki Feaver
Four Sisters: Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward D. Boit
Poems about paintings are often disappointing: merely descriptions, or versions of art criticism. When they work, as this one does, they use the painting as a springboard for the poet's imagination.
Here the poet uses Sargent's multiple portrait to conjure its contained and comfortable Edwardian world and then moves from surface to interior, from paint to psychology: conjuring the thoughts of the girls, and particularly of a girl who doesn't belong in that world – who has dreams and ambitions that move beyond it.
Leper Window, St Mary the Virgin
I think it was Coleridge who defined poetry as 'the best words in the best order'. This short and beautifully constructed poem follows that definition perfectly. Each stanza leads the reader a little further on a vivid sensual and historical journey from a world where leprosy is no longer a scourge to a world where its sufferers went on pilgrimages in search of healing. It's a poem about touch – one of the most difficult senses to write about: the untouchable lepers, the God who 'did not touch', and the touch of the lepers on the ledge of the church window 'the lip of sandstone...purled (wonderful word!) with fissures'. We see and feel the fissures made by the pressure of their fingers as we see and feel their rash and breath. The poem brings us literally in touch with their suffering.
Loving Medusa
This is not the first poem to drawn on the legend of Medusa, the Greek monster with snakes in her hair whose gaze turns the looker to stone. But it's more than just a retelling of the legend. It makes it new and contemporary, bringing it vividly to life in the experience and imagination of the narrator.
Ossuary
This poem takes us on a journey through a series of images to the final extraordinary image of the skeleton a boy has assembled under his bed to replace his missing father. It's a fantastical story, yet written in such precise language and with such a skilful handling of form that it creates a convincing psychic reality.
Remains
This poem, with its epitaph by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, made me want to read it again and again to discover its meaning. Maybe I never quite arrived at the complete meaning; though there are plenty of hints that the narrator is dying. But the language and imagery are so precise and convincing I wanted to go on trying, like the dog at the end of the poem who 'will always be searching'.
Here the poet uses Sargent's multiple portrait to conjure its contained and comfortable Edwardian world and then moves from surface to interior, from paint to psychology: conjuring the thoughts of the girls, and particularly of a girl who doesn't belong in that world – who has dreams and ambitions that move beyond it.
Leper Window, St Mary the Virgin
I think it was Coleridge who defined poetry as 'the best words in the best order'. This short and beautifully constructed poem follows that definition perfectly. Each stanza leads the reader a little further on a vivid sensual and historical journey from a world where leprosy is no longer a scourge to a world where its sufferers went on pilgrimages in search of healing. It's a poem about touch – one of the most difficult senses to write about: the untouchable lepers, the God who 'did not touch', and the touch of the lepers on the ledge of the church window 'the lip of sandstone...purled (wonderful word!) with fissures'. We see and feel the fissures made by the pressure of their fingers as we see and feel their rash and breath. The poem brings us literally in touch with their suffering.
Loving Medusa
This is not the first poem to drawn on the legend of Medusa, the Greek monster with snakes in her hair whose gaze turns the looker to stone. But it's more than just a retelling of the legend. It makes it new and contemporary, bringing it vividly to life in the experience and imagination of the narrator.
Ossuary
This poem takes us on a journey through a series of images to the final extraordinary image of the skeleton a boy has assembled under his bed to replace his missing father. It's a fantastical story, yet written in such precise language and with such a skilful handling of form that it creates a convincing psychic reality.
Remains
This poem, with its epitaph by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, made me want to read it again and again to discover its meaning. Maybe I never quite arrived at the complete meaning; though there are plenty of hints that the narrator is dying. But the language and imagery are so precise and convincing I wanted to go on trying, like the dog at the end of the poem who 'will always be searching'.
Kona Macphee
Four Sisters: Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward D. Boit
I'm often underwhelmed by poems explicitly referring to paintings; all too frequently, they don't add anything to what the picture itself provides, simply re-describing it. This poem was an exception; for me, it worked quite successfully without any foreknowledge of the painting it refers to, evoking not the artwork itself so much as the constrained Victorian childhood it depicts. I particularly enjoyed the way the poem's narrative moved beyond both the frame and the time of the painting, suggesting a strong, sceptical character in one of the daughters and hinting tantalisingly at her eccentric, self-directed future.
Leper Window, St Mary the Virgin
This poem revels in the musicality of language with lovely phrases like "passed into the lace/of shadows in the yard" and "the lip of sandstone / is purled with fissures". It's magnificently concise, evoking a whole lost world in a dozen elegantly-understated lines. It demonstrates perfectly how one or two judiciously-chosen words can direct the emotional tone of a poem and create emergence: "crouched", for example, with its undertone of subservience and avoidance of blows, and the "fissures" in the "lip" of sandstone with their evocation of parchedness, which itself draws our thoughts onward to the Lepers' thirst for the withheld sacraments (Christ as the "Living Water" of which they may not drink), the withheld human contact. Finally, it's wholly unsentimental, yet full of compassion for human suffering, for those who found little compassion in a God, a religious institution, a society that "looked / but did not touch."
Loving Medusa
Has mythology been done to death in poetry? I often think so, and then a poem comes along and proves me wrong. The mythological notion of being turned to stone by glimpsing Medusa is such a black-and-white, all-or-nothing idea; I really enjoyed this poem's originality in depicting it as a chronic condition, progressing gradually and as a side-effect of love rather than violence.
Ossuary
The psychological premise of this poem - a wounded boy's doomed quest to recapture an absent father - I found intriguing, and I particularly appreciated the way his loss was conveyed understatedly, through his actions. Musical phrases stood out ("the easy slip", "sleek tendons", "the lolling head, plucked back / to black-eyed fledgling", "he portioned up a steer", "bony keepsake"). Imagery conveyed extended meaning - the self-harm implicit in testing the knife on his "thumb pad" to draw "the finest wire of blood", the "wishbones" (with their wishful associations) as stand-in for things "too hard/ to find" (absence reinforcing the father's absence). I also enjoyed the rueful touch of humour of the ox-tail's dripping "dinosaur", a description so apt for a schoolboy's-eye view of the world.
Remains
I enjoyed this poem's delicate blending of tenderness, vulnerability and futility, and its subtle mystery: the gradually-developing conviction, over successive readings, that the poem's speaker is actually dead, and the new layers of meaning that this understanding reveals.
Leper Window, St Mary the Virgin
This poem revels in the musicality of language with lovely phrases like "passed into the lace/of shadows in the yard" and "the lip of sandstone / is purled with fissures". It's magnificently concise, evoking a whole lost world in a dozen elegantly-understated lines. It demonstrates perfectly how one or two judiciously-chosen words can direct the emotional tone of a poem and create emergence: "crouched", for example, with its undertone of subservience and avoidance of blows, and the "fissures" in the "lip" of sandstone with their evocation of parchedness, which itself draws our thoughts onward to the Lepers' thirst for the withheld sacraments (Christ as the "Living Water" of which they may not drink), the withheld human contact. Finally, it's wholly unsentimental, yet full of compassion for human suffering, for those who found little compassion in a God, a religious institution, a society that "looked / but did not touch."
Loving Medusa
Has mythology been done to death in poetry? I often think so, and then a poem comes along and proves me wrong. The mythological notion of being turned to stone by glimpsing Medusa is such a black-and-white, all-or-nothing idea; I really enjoyed this poem's originality in depicting it as a chronic condition, progressing gradually and as a side-effect of love rather than violence.
Ossuary
The psychological premise of this poem - a wounded boy's doomed quest to recapture an absent father - I found intriguing, and I particularly appreciated the way his loss was conveyed understatedly, through his actions. Musical phrases stood out ("the easy slip", "sleek tendons", "the lolling head, plucked back / to black-eyed fledgling", "he portioned up a steer", "bony keepsake"). Imagery conveyed extended meaning - the self-harm implicit in testing the knife on his "thumb pad" to draw "the finest wire of blood", the "wishbones" (with their wishful associations) as stand-in for things "too hard/ to find" (absence reinforcing the father's absence). I also enjoyed the rueful touch of humour of the ox-tail's dripping "dinosaur", a description so apt for a schoolboy's-eye view of the world.
Remains
I enjoyed this poem's delicate blending of tenderness, vulnerability and futility, and its subtle mystery: the gradually-developing conviction, over successive readings, that the poem's speaker is actually dead, and the new layers of meaning that this understanding reveals.
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