This long-running, prestigious competition was introduced to the sphere only last month; no winners among us (yet) but, as is often the case with
The Oldie and
The Spectator, there are just four prizes this month. (Big ones for 1st and 2nd placed poems.)
We'll keep it to one thread each month, so post your entries here for the next comp, which must be about, in some way or another, '
Intelligence.' Entries should rhyme and scan, in 24 lines or fewer, and the deadline is 30th June.
Send them to:
editorial@literaryreview.co.uk
Here is the Competition Report by the magazine's Deputy Editor, Tom Fleming:
THIS MONTH'S POEMS were a mixed bunch, but J R Gillie deservedly takes first prize and Noel Petty comes second with what was the most original take on the subject of 'hangover' that we received. Gillie wins £300, kindly sponsored by the
Mail on Sunday, and Petty wins £100; all others printed receive £10. The use of controlled half-rhyme is still acceptable, by the way; I have always liked Ted Hughes's 'October Dawn' for its mix of half and full rhymes
First Prize
The Hangover by J R Gillie
Your face was like a battlefield, and bore
in ruddy fissures and redoubts the signs
of last night, and of eighty years and more
in which you sometimes took your own advice:
Sip claret; swill champagne. 'Forget the wines,'
sighed Lady Astor, 'spirits are his vice.'
I, your physician, tip-toeing forward saw
your dragon robe, abandoned on the floor.
Could it but speak! Your own throat was too raw
with last night's smoke to raise a croak,
still less to awe me with the lion's roar.
I wondered if you'd had another stroke.
'Soup is a sad affair!' You rumbled out,
a mountainous landscape quaking in the bed.
Your lower lip relaxed its bulldog pout;
your tongue shaped sibilants and vowels as though
slurping the fatty broth which you'd been fed
last night. 'Moran,' you growled. 'Go.'
Up Hyde Park Gate, to modern times I strode,
and left you to your late-Victorian dream,
of Omdurman, who knows. In the main road
I broke out: 'Man is Spirit!' Quite absurd.
The brain is just a pudding with no theme.
And yet - a splendid hangover, my word!
Second Prize
Coelacanth by Noel Petty
Apparently I ought not to be here,
some hundred million years beyond my prime.
But must I feel obliged to disappear
because the paleontologists call 'Time'?
I've had my chances: see these curious fins?
They move, some say, just like a walking horse.
I could be celebrating Derby wins
if I had shown a little more resource.
I tried it once: crawled up a muddy strand,
choked on the air, blinked in the painful light,
found that I didn't like the look of land,
and shuffled back to ocean's grateful night.
As to the rest, there isn't much to say:
feeding and breeding out of Darwin's view
until some trawler had a lucky day
and fed the world's strange lust for something new.
That was a nasty shock, but soon the fright
wore off. We were no use for oil or food
and thus resumed our life, so tuned, so right
that Evolution couldn't well intrude.
Sometimes in idle hours I muse upon
the great conundrum: what does it all mean?
But that's one for the world, while we sleep on
blessed with our lack-of-curiosity gene.
Hangover by D A Prince
I do not want to think. It hurts. Each thought's
too loud. The barbed wire rusting in my brain
is some mistake. I am not me. All sorts
of vermin have conspired to burrow pain
into my skull. So. One word at a time.
Ahhh. Slowly. Slower. Stop. There might be light
beyond my eyelids. Inside there's just grime.
I don't think I am strong enough for sight.
That moving ceiling isn't funny: it's
a trick to make me throw up in my shoes.
I blame the Government - their nanny fits
to turn the nation's poets off their booze.
They might be right. But no. That would be Hell.
I'll keep my eyes tight shut. All may be well.
An Old-Fashioned Rambler by Alanna Blake
He pointed. 'She's a hangover that one,
A crimson hangover. Been happy there
Well over eighty years. She gets the sun
And shelter from the wind. That wall is where
the garden ended: it's a carpark now,
But my old beauty still survives somehow.
She blooms through litter, petrol fumes and dust
With barely space for earth around her roots;
Still healthy, no black spot or mould or rust,
And every spring I come to watch the shoots
Burst green along the wrinkled greying bark,
Defying the pollution of the park.
Each autumn as the shrinking petals fall
And leaves go yellow, then I feel afraid
That I won't see her overhang the wall
Another year. I will be first to fade.'
He smiled. Inhaled. 'A great old-fashioned smell.'
Then limped away. The exit-barrier fell.