The Wigtown Poetry Competition

Judge’s Report

What startled me about this year’s competition entries, was not that many of the poems were about the loss of a loved one, but that so many of those poems about grief were brilliant poems. I’ve judged competitions before and been struck by the sheer volume of poems on bereavement. Usually whilst I’ve sympathised with the content, I’ve not been impressed with the structure or the language or the form. Yet here are a group of poems, all very different, and many linked through the theme, that I think are very strong poems. They are memorable, moving, comforting. They remind me that poems are guiding lights, beacons that show us the way through difficult or disturbing times. Poetry, it seems, more than any other art form, can tackle grief and loss head on. A brilliant poem will find some sort of echo in our own lives. Poetry holds up a mirror to the bad times and the good ones.

It is because these poems are highly structured that they have the freedom to explore the mess and destruction that grief or loss creates in a life. It seemed to me that these poems are fitting memorials to many different people. Reading them is like being in the same room as the poet and also the dead or the lost, so that the room becomes more and more peopled. Poetry, then, I think is probably the best company for the dead, or for the living to remember the dead. All of the commended poems stuck a chord, and made me think that a memorable poem is a gift.

This year the standard of the entries was particularly high. I got down to about thirty poems that I really loved. It then became very difficult to lose seventeen of them. It was also difficult to choose which poem should come first, second and third. Because of course that is an arbitrary business.

I hugely admired Odysseus and the Sou’Wester. I loved the memorable descriptions of the wild sea in wild weather, ‘ mad as milk.’ I liked how it conjured up the weather in a place perhaps ruled by bad weather like Shetland. I was fascinated to find out (when the veil was lifted) that the writer of this poem, Jen Hadfield, lives in Shetland. I admired the mixture of myth and rain; the way the language works in this poem. The musical oompa-pa oompa-pa and the lovely odd phrases ‘supper of winds.’ I particularly loved the final image of the furious swan. Last lines in a poem often can achieve lift-off. This one certainly does.

Poems make you look at old known things anew. I was really stuck by the journey of love in Pride –from lust to loss. The final image in this poem took my breath away. I loved the knowing humour in this poem, the humanity, the intelligence. Taking the idea of a pride of lions and applying it to the conceited, wild and heady rush of the beginning of a love affair was a brilliant idea. Somehow you believe it and you can see it working all the time both ways. It is the job of the poem to get the reader to make even surreal realities real, and this one pulls that off with panache and style. But it also reminded me of how short the heady passionate period is in relationships. The poem seems very good- humoured about this. They know it. Up can go down as well as up.

My Darling, My Cliché is also a witty poem. It is the job of poetry to take the cliché and breathe new life into it. I loved the twists and turns of this clever sonnet, the way it takes dead language and reactivates it, reactivates the static. I love the way the poem mixes clichés and maxims up, and the many different directions it takes us in before getting to the fabulous and funny ending. It is a stylish poem. I was drawn not just to this single poem though but to a body of work from the same writer. I began to get a real sense of how that writer might develop reading my way through six or so entries. It seems important to me too that poetry competitions should find a way of recognising a talented poet by a body of work and not necessarily simply by a single poem.

Jackie Kay

In association with the Scottish Poetry Library
and the Sunday Herald