Literary Review (LitRev) Comp results
My ghost of Oscar Wilde, entertaining me when I was stuck in an elevator all day, didn't chime with the judges, but below are the ones that did.
Deputy Editor Tom Fleming's report:
This month's poems, on the subject of 'ghosts' were really quite good; haunting, even. Michael Spilberg wins first prize and £300, kindly sponsored by the Mail on Sunday; J Garth Taylor wins second prize and £150; and everyone else printed receives £10. Several other poems, notably by Vincent L Smith and Robert Etty, narrowly failed to get in.
Next month's subject is 'private joy'; the deadline is 28 July. Poems must rhyme and scan, and be 24 lines or fewer. Poets may submit two poems at the most. Send your entries to 44 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LW.
(The email address is:editorial@literaryreview.co.uk)
First Prize
At Night In The Living Room by Michael Spilberg
A spectro-sceptic previously untroubled
by apparitions found himself one night
late middle-aged awake, with pulse-rate doubled
and pounding heart, deep in a state of fright.
Unaccustomed, as it were, to public spooking,
he thought at first there must be an intruder.
Trembling, arose, and crept down, weaponed, looking -
saw silent, seated shades - a shock far ruder
than expected. At his intake of breath
hooded faces turned towards him. It was cold.
I know, he thought, this is to do with Death.
Timor mortis - now that I grow old.
The wraiths all stood as one glided round
him, fingers pointing; the room seemed thronged.
Death comes just once, he said. What have I found?
We are your past, said one. I'm whom you've wronged.
And I, another hissed, am your regrets.
And I, a third, someone you never kissed.
And I, a fourth, am all your unpaid debts
to Life - the golden chances that you missed.
So each by each laid all his mistakes bare,
in spitting sibilants, foretold his Fate,
then left. Two vowed return, the grimmest pair,
at death, Our names? If Only, and Too Late.
Second Prize
About Those Ghosts by J Garth Taylor
Appearance varies ghost to ghost,
But, on the whole, it looks like most
Are anxious to be seen at night
And so wear white.
When they are roaming, ghosts have not
The heavy tread that we have got
And, probably because of it,
They mainly flit.
Their verbal skills are rather weak.
Some younger ghosts refuse to speak,
And even those who finally do
Say mostly, 'Boo!'
A lot of horror writers get
Their ghost lore on the Internet,
But I'm reporting what I've seen
On Halloween.
Urban Ghosts by Iain Colley
Each city hosts its ghosts, a secret seam
of eerie buried energy. Past lives
persist, as in a memorable dream.
Stone crumbles; humans die; ethos survives.
Soothing the hyper-frenzy of New York,
the bones and spirits of the Delaware
(murmurs of wampum, wigwam, tomahawk)
infuse the talkative Manhattan air.
In Paris - Haussmannised for good or ill -
the Marais, so bon-chic-bon-genre, hides
a medieval no-go zone where still
a phantom Court of Miracles presides.
Easter Week wraiths prowl Dublin's Georgian rows,
eternally part-tragedy, part-farce,
while London's spectral mob of ruffians flows,
grog-sodden, towards the sound of breaking glass.
The casual tourist and his camera see
the recommended sites, consumed by rote,
but cameras are blind to history.
The genius loci adds the piquant note.
Collodion by J R Gillie
Dimbola Lodge: the house is oddly made
From others at Freshwater, Isle of Wight,
Where Tennyson and all his circle stayed
And wore big hats and argued in the lanes.
The photographs, enriched with spectral light
By Cameron, show bald heads packed with brains,
Appalling beards and haloes of white hair.
They bored me. You went round in your slow way,
Studying Trollope, Herschel, Watts. You care
For images and relics of the dead.
I looked out longingly at the bright bay,
And dreamed of steak and chips, and beer and bed.
Do you not see me? When I heard the sound
I thought it must be you, outside the room.
But then it came again and I swung round
And saw in negative, framed on the wall,
A girl's full lips, small teeth, a wild costume,
Supplicant hands. I felt my own flesh crawl.
Ellen? I said. The glass-plate glinted wet,
Collodion - a whiff of nitric gas.
I moved, and then the thing I can't forget -
I saw the image move and liquid flow
Or drip. Your face showed in the glass.
Close to me now you spoke, 'Darling, let's go.'
Ghosts by D A Prince
Never at night, never along that road
where hawthorn blurs the bend, the hedge too white
and overblown; it's worse than snow, that load
and cliff of blossom. Don't go there at night
where crumpled faces stare out from the leaves,
they say, stick-thin, their piercings torn, young eyes
like pools of blood. Don't go where the beech grieves
for its shattered trunk, where a chill wind sighs
through scraps of cellophane, the flowers long dead.
The road where treachery's a well-worn tale.
But they didn't know know it, know what was said
of its slippery twist, how a car can sail
clear into flight, for a minute, as cold
as a hawk, till its journey is ended;
how it makes ghosts of the young and the old,
how the prints of their faces hang suspended
through every season, aghast and afraid,
glimpsed in the moonlight, pinned in their boasts.
Don't go there at night, don't walk in their shade;
the young haunt the corner that turned them to ghosts.
The Ghost by Nick Syrett
I glimpse him, the child, these wakeful mornings,
In pictures where he never stood before,
In my old albums, soft-eyed and yawning,
Gilded by that sepia'd time, as sure
Of his right to it as the subaltern
Who passed me in the lane, his old MG
Friend-laden, speeding, set for Kensington
And girls and beer and starched depravity;
I saw him from a taxi in Pepys Street,
And in Cornhill, walking, I thought, to lunch,
To sketch a profit, courteous and discreet,
Dressed to detachment, savouring a hunch,
Then in St James's, later that same day,
Peering out through the window of his club,
Most battles won, an uncontentious grey;
He smiled at me, a winter smile, a snub,
Knowing himself the ghost of all that I
Half-hoped to be, but never quite became;
This cold room is not for him, this dark sky,
The passing cars, the gas fire's wretched flame.
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