Eratosphere - Literary Review (LitRev) Comp results August 2011

He's done it again - I mean WON IT again, of course! Many congratulations to our John and also to Iain Colley, our very own Bazza.

Here's the report by Deputy Editor Tom Fleming

The challenge this month was to write a sonnet about a place of your choice. John Whitworth's entry, about Edinburgh, came first, and he wins £300, generously sponsored by the Mail on Sunday; Nick Syrett wins second prize and £150, and the other four poets printed win £10 each.

For next month please write a poem on the subject of adultery. Entries must rhyme, scan, and be no more than twenty-four lines in length; each poet may send a maximum of two poems. Please send them to arrive at 44 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LW by 30 August.

(Email: editorial@literaryreview.co.uk ["if you must"; they prefer us to use snail mail, for some reason.] )

FIRST PRIZE
Dawn in Edinburgh 1965 by John Whitworth

Edinburgh! Your railings and your closes,
Your tenements with dark, piss-stinking stairs
Where cats got rats and medics got their doses,
Your Stevensons and Scotts, your Burkes and Hares,
Your Hearts and Hibs, both usually losing,
Your windy steps, your bikes up endless hills,
Your Sunday faces and your Sunday boozing,
Your factoring, conveyancing and wills,
City of clocks and putting greens and fat
Girls giggling, city of kilts and guns,
Grey stones, grey skies, grey worthies, bird beshat,
Like elongated, white-iced Crawford's buns,
City of students, drunks and potheads, crazy
City, my city, opening like a daisy!

SECOND PRIZE: Roque Santeiro by Nick Syrett

The ghosts of old intentions shrink away,
Of Cuban commissars in olive drab,
And suited, sweating Russians, their dismay
Mere phantom dust between the baobabs
That guard this huge and teeming spread of earth,
This bloated, ulcered behemoth of trades,
Whose myriad exchanges set the worth
Of herds of goats and sacks of hand grenades,
Of crates of vinho verde, soured and warm
Of whores, and wedding dresses marked Dior
Half-flapping at the bloated flies who swarm
Through this great market of the western shore.
Beyond, shifts the Atlantic, flat and grey,
Shuddering in to bear the filth away.

At Pointe Pen-Hir, Finistere by Iain Colley

Here is the heathered edge of Brittany,
the fabled termination of the land,
granitic cliffs that swoop to paint-smooth sand
and wind-swirled breakers marbling the sea.
A huge Cross of Lorraine, a granite tree,
shadows the recreationals who stand
before an adage – typically grand –
dear to de Gaulle: écrasons l'ennemi.
Nearby like gravestones ugly remnants lie
of crazy Adolf's smashed Atlantic Wall.
Their scarred emplacements gauntly testify
to fascism's sick death-wish and its fall –
vestigial proof that as immortal memes
the Nazis haunt our daylight and our dreams.

Naples by D A Prince

Look south, and there's Vesuvius brooding on
the hour of death, the some-day-soon – a date
that might well see this seething city gone,
Baroque and brilliance meeting the same fate
that choked Pompeii. So, a fiercer sun
and deeper darker shadows: every sense
intensified, life taken at the run
and lived, full volume, in the present tense
on crowded buses, broken paving, streets
of litter, laughter, motor-bikes, the shove
of traffic-jams and gossips, the quick heats
of argument and making up, and love,
and lives lived faster, keener, in the mouth
of the volcano's skyline to the south.

Hong Kong by Jane Mann

A barren island once of granite rock,
Now thriving port that's harnessed sea and hill,
Reclaiming land for runway, dam and dock,
Its heartbeat driven by a restless will
To strive and drive the engine of free trade,
To work all hours to make the market strong,
A place where east meets west and money's made
To deafening drill and clatter of mahjong.
No quiet or dark – the nights glow gold with light
From concrete, steel and glass that seek the sky,
That climb each time to ever greater height
To reinvent and gravity defy.
On walkways now of steel, not mud, it creeps,
A dragon that aspires and never sleeps.

School by Paul Griffin

This was a place that thought itself a model
Of the great world we were created for;
Here earnest folk imparted to each noddle
Their own experience but little more.
How much could teachers know of life's illusions,
Of destitution and disease and dope?
Their ignorance encouraged our confusions
And yet their innocence allowed us hope.
School worked; although we boasted we were lazy,
Of youth, and friends and scope, we found no lack;
Much of those years in retrospect seems crazy;
But still we meet, and bring our childhood back.
So, to be happy, and a little mad
Prepares a person to be sane, and sad.