From more than 3,000 poems entered for this year’s competition, the judges –
Mick Imlah, the Poetry editor of the TLS, and Alice Quinn, Executive
Director of the Poetry Society of America and formerly Poetry editor of the
New Yorker – have chosen a shortlist of twelve pieces, printed in random
sequence below, from which readers are invited to select the winning poems.
Those wishing to take part in the judging process should vote by December 5.
Readers may vote for their favourite poem, identifying it by the letter
affixed to its title; they may also offer a second choice, which will gain
half marks in the adjudication. They may not vote more than once. The
results of the poll will be published in the issue of December 19 & 26.
The most popular poem will win £2,000; runners-up will receive a total of
£1,500.
Enter
your vote by clicking here and writing the letter of your chosen
poems.
A) Alaska
was won for the Union in a game of brag –
between Theodore Roosevelt and Count Oblimov:
it against Louisiana – on the turn of a card;
that bear-rich territory or French speaking North America
– where the alligators’ camouflage is so good.
How that czarregal ambassador would have explained bayous
to the Autocrat of All The Russias is for historians to conjecture;
but it might have brought some southern warmth
to the Cuban missile crisis.
Sovereignty settled, the great hurdle for the federal authorities
was getting there; more of a struggle for them – apparently –
than for the Japanese, who arrived in numbers in 1942.
That war over: there were a lot of soldiers and radar antennae
looking west to east, east to west; and a lot of ice.
Ice was a problem: the Intuits would cross it –
there was more than one Young Pioneer ringer
in Western Counties Hockey League; and more than one
American smile in photographs of eastern Siberian youth teams;
and soldiers would get lost on it, in an incident – now declassified –
a Soviet weather station was built on the ice in spring
only to sink into the sea that summer;
there are stories – not declassified – of a CCCP missile base
built on US territory; and of a US early-warning station
operating deep within Siberia; trucks driving out from Anchorage
with supplies of Coca-Cola and Playboy magazine.
Now the ice is leaving: the sea will properly makes two nations –
they say in fifty years Siberia will be another Ukraine,
and that Alaska will resemble Maine.
B) To an Innocent Prisoner
In sleep, we are united with an earth
whose falling people are always caught.
Now like a stream, shocking in its brightness
emerging from a hill to meet the valley,
may you and I meet when this night has fallen
upon us, and talk of the woods we left behind,
the promise of our talented children, the shape
of our wives, the noises they make in their sleep.
C) Cape Cottage in Winter
In Sagamore center
off Main Street
down a long lane lies
a vacant house cedar concealed
sitting in a saucer
scooped by glaciers,
peering over the edge
with its one-eyed gable,
nudging mansions aside
to spy the sea.
With paint peeling
shutters aslant
and downspouts drifting
this humble bungalow
invites a peek that reveals
tiny white-washed space
crammed to the eaves with books
chipped dishes shelved
wobbly chairs at a scarred table
mother seated with spaniel penning a poem.
D) Powder Hollow Archaeology
Below the sandstone abutment
where a bridge collapsed a hundred
years ago, a kid sifts the rapids
with a net. I call out to ask
if he’s after shiners. No response;
but at my feet the fossils
of skeletal fish wriggle
like calligraphy in shale exposed
by low water. Leaving the child
to his errand, I stalk upriver
to visit the great rusty pipe
that used to drizzle a waterfall
from one end. Collapsed now,
this pipe suggests the carcass
of the fish that coughed up Jonah.
What has survived my childhood
other than the river itself,
pouring over slabs of bedrock?
Only the car we stole and shoved
over the bluff to crash eighty
feet to the bank below. Half-buried
in silt, the black old wreck smiles
with nickel grill, a half-moon
of deflated balloon tire rising.
E) Different Places to Pray
Everywhere, everywhere she wrote; something is falling –
a ring of keys slips out of her pocket into the ravine below;
nickels and dimes and to do lists; duck feathers from a gold pillow.
Everywhere someone is losing a favorite sock or a clock stops
circling the day; everywhere she goes she follows the
ghost of her heart; jettisons everything but the shepherd moon, the hopeless
cause.
This is the way a life unfolds: decoding messages from profiteroles,
the weight of mature plums in late autumn. She’d prefer a compass
rose, a star chart, text support messages delivered from the net,
even the local pet shop – as long as some god rolls away the gloss
and grime of our gutted days, our global positioning crimes.
Tell me, where do you go to pray – a river valley, a pastry tray?
F) The Catalogue of Ships
the tide is sizzling with rain
the sails are counted and gone
the town is razed in the dunes
cranes take the war to the land
the clips go round and round
the surf is silvery-tongued
recorders sleepless are counting
Pygmies torn by the cranes
satellites cross the empyrean
endless the battle begun
cranes in a wedge are screaming
the souls are counted and gone
the wintering cranes above
the winter of battle below
the news goes round and round
the cost of a wind has soared
endless the desert Ocean
carcasses countless as grass
the world has heard the word
the crane is not a bird
G) Late Travel
Ghostly galleon of outer suburbia,
lit up and fairly going: coming back
in the Austin Eight from Aunt Heather’s
late on a dreich and drizzly Sunday,
we’d pass it under the dripping oaks on
the long dank road through Buckhurst Hill,
its destination-box burning the mist,
a snogging couple in the top back pew,
seated conductress counting her treasure,
blindcabined driver fullsailing to garage.
Or, in torrid Sussex summers, restive
in my hypnagogic bolstered bunk,
Monarch of the Glen glaring from above the
shrimpnets, schooner-bottles, ewers, chests,
I’d drowsily hear the ten-thirty-four
braking outside the Admiral Benbow,
the hearties yo-ho-hoing as they kilted
about the brewers’ bus, last of the day;
then the Southdown’s cutthroat roar.
Or, in Granny’s back bed at Turnpike Lane,
watching the chintz flickflacker violet
as a lonely tube hurtled flintily north,
wake-dreaming of a bright empty carriage,
having the run of the paper strew, fag-stumps,
gum-pieces, lingerie ads, careening straps,
buccaneering out beyond Cockfosters and the
depot, beyond Luton and Leicester, voyaging
all night up the charted island with cutlass,
dirk, pirate patch, parrot, docking at dawn
at Lammermuir, Ballantrae, Selkirk, Rum,
Long John o’Groats.
Aren’t you asleep yet?
she’d say, head round the door, and I’d
nestle down into sparks and molten glass,
ceilidhs of kindly stoplights, foglamps,
pibrochs of points and dead-man’s handles,
dodging about the tartan torn banquettes,
the salted slatted sonorous decking,
all the handrails skirling,
my sporran stuffed with aquamarine and buff,
maroon, lime and silver tickets.
H) The Hug
A graveyard landslip to the road below
exposed a row of coffins. Most were half-
rotten, a grisly undertow
belying every noble epitaph;
and at one end the crumbling earth disclosed
proof of a double burial years ago:
two corpses, partially exposed,
one pinioned to the other. The slow
decomposition of the wood between,
promoted by the dampness of the soil,
had resurrected what had been –
a man clasping his wife. Death could not spoil
their durable attraction. His crushed face
was pressed to hers, the filthy shifts displayed
not nullifying their embrace:
a love which, even now, seemed undecayed.
Workmen came to take, in masks and gloves
– as if the scene were choleroid or malarial,
the caskets from their alcoves
for unfeeling and immediate reburial.
I) The Baptism of the Bull
There we were, pool-side in trunks and goggles
when, just out of sight, a dark shadow closed.
Then we heard hooves hitting hot cobbles,
clattering closer. We turned and froze.
A hillside of beef with a ring through its nose,
the bull, not built for the run, blowing hard,
was honing in on us yard by heavy yard.
The fine china of our afternoon swim
was shattered, its semblances gored through,
suddenly filled with cries warning
of the danger that we already knew:
It’s not as if a two tonne bull in the mews,
phantom horns in full tilt, clearly distressed,
could tip-toe up on us unnoticed.
The merciful act during his running jump
was a trick of the light made physical,
the waiting water beneath his looming rump
premeditating the gravitational pull
to burst upwards, cushioning his fall,
a thousand white arms welcoming in
the bull to bless in a bovine baptism,
his reborn body becoming cetacean
in another world, where tonnes meet gallons,
the great coffin of an ocean sliding open,
bubbling up from imponderable fathoms
million-mile water racing to the heavens,
raining down minutes later as confetti
on a surfacing hide of beaded chamois.
Where once a raging Minotaur had been,
the reforming pool coughed up a father
of cows; a tame, rosetted limousin,
rinsed clean of his lustral demeanour
destined to stay in our minds forever.
The pool has no memory, has no need;
it merely absorbs the weight of spirits freed.
J) Salt Lake
Woke at five and could not see the world.
I drove down through snow-pocked terrain.
Brown bog sedge indistinguishable from hemlock.
Sheet of quiet.
A moose stepped into the road the other night.
They used a crane to scoop him into his grave.
Mountains shallowed to hills.
Not white of the snow fox. Not chestnut of the mustang.
In a corridor of the museum where I live
a woolly mammoth stands tusk-heavy, ten feet tall
Wandering musk oxen chew the painted ground behind
him.
K) Masculine Happiness
John Wayne is warm, tired and had
just the right number of drinks. Fire light
and the stars of Arizona surround his bed:
a saddle blanket rolled out in the desert night.
News headlines of a foreign war: the reporter’s
hair and blue eyes match her checked scarf;
and a voice behind me starts: who’s having her
– insulted when I won’t laugh as he starts to laugh.
On another channel Bob Mitchum’s an old sea Captain:
safe on land while his son’s submarine is overdue;
drinking cognac from a dark bottle, he finishes it all,
and floats into the sleep of drunk and drowned men.
Sick the next morning, his steps slow and unsure,
like a ship-wrecked sailor exploring a new shore.
L) Chester
This is where, last winter, they carried
the neighbor girl from her one-story house –
thin, her hair smelling like flax and root beer.
Autumn was, for her, her father’s body
still perched over the wheel of the Buick sedan
in which they’d buried him – or not buried: let slide
through the dark cattails
near the mill pond, a briefcase of peonies
on the leather seat beside him.
The only racket I hear now
is coyotes in the low field, my brothers
moving on ahead of me,
packing and repacking their Hondas
for fatherhood, July, the coast.
I could marry, let this farmhouse fall –
not to say capitulate, not to say
break down – bind my life to the manager’s
daughter, or the other, less fortunate
cellist, ex-chef, triathlete, gardener.
I could wait and let the house fall in me.
By the chokecherry, a red-tailed hawk
– or sharp-shinned, jade eyed –
is riding a milksnake it’s taloned
across the wet gravel road – beak open, wings furled,
kicking its tail up and preening the rouge,
tawny wing- and chest-feathers
as it waits, working and amusing itself,
calling out in last winter’s
practiced register, carrying itself again
in a hunger so sure it looks like patience.
