National Poetry Competition 2021 winners anthology by The Poetry Society

National Poetry Competition Winners’ Anthology 2021

Presented by The Poetry Society 2022

National Poetry Competition Winners’ Anthology 2021 The Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX poetrysociety.org.uk ISBN: 978-1-911046-33-2 Cover: Whooli Chen centralillustration.com/illustration/whooli-chen

National Poetry Competition Winners’ Anthology 2021 Judges: Fiona Benson, David Constantine & Rachel Long

“Winning a big competition like this and having your poem scrutinised can be quite daunting for someone new like me, but it’s transformative in the sense that you view your work in a whole new light.” – Eric Yip, First Prize Winner, National Poetry Competition, 2021

The Poetry Society The Poetry Society is the UK’s leading voice for poets and poetry. Founded in 1909 to promote “a more general recognition and appreciation of poetry”, the Society is one of the most dynamic arts organisations, representing poetry nationally and internationally. With innovative education and commissioning programmes, and a packed calendar of performances, readings and competitions, The Poetry Society champions poetry for all ages. To become part of our poetry community, visit poetrysociety.org.uk

The National Poetry Competition Established in 1978, The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition is one of the world’s biggest and most prestigious poetry competitions. The Poetry Society would like to thank the writers from 100 countries who submitted more than 16,700 poems to the 2021 contest. For many poets, whether established or emerging, the prize has proved an important career milestone. Distinguished winners include Sinéad Morrissey, Ruth Padel, James Berry, Carol Ann Duffy, Jo Shapcott and Tony Harrison. Poems are judged anonymously and the top three winners are published in The Poetry Review, one of the world’s leading poetry magazines. Winners are also invited to participate in further Poetry Society events and commissions. All the winning poems are published on The Poetry Society’s website, poetrysociety.org.uk The Poetry Society especially wishes to thank our 2021 competition judges: Fiona Benson, David Constantine and Rachel Long.

FIRST PRIZE

Eric Yip

Fricatives To speak English properly, Mrs. Lee said, you must learn the difference between three and free. Three men escaped from Alcatraz in a rubber raft and drowned on their way to Angel Island. Hear the difference? Try this: you fought your way into existence. Better. Look at this picture. Fresh yellow grains beaten till their seeds spill. That’s threshing. That’s submission. You must learn to submit before you can learn. You must be given a voice before you can speak. Nobody wants to listen to a spectacled boy with a Hong Kong accent. You will have to leave this city, these dark furrows stuffed full with ancestral bones. Know that death is thorough. You will speak of bruised bodies skinnier than yours, force the pen past batons and blood, call it fresh material for writing. Now they’re paying attention. You’re lucky enough to care about how the tongue moves, the seven types of fricatives, the articulatory function of teeth sans survival. You will receive a good education abroad and make your parents proud. You will take a stranger’s cock in your mouth in the piss-slick stall of that dingy Cantonese restaurant you love and taste where you came from, what you were made of all along. Put some work into it, he growls. C’mon, give me some bite. Your mother visits one October, tells you how everyone speaks differently here, more proper. You smile, nod, bring her to your favourite restaurant, order dim sum in English. They’re releasing the students arrested five years ago. Just a tad more soy sauce please, thank you. The television replays yesterday on repeat. The teapots are refilled. You spoon served rice into your mouth, this perfect rice. Steamed, perfect, white. 6

SECOND PRIZE

Jed Myers

I Picture Him Driving My father never said lonely. He’d say Let’s go to Alfredo’s. Soon as he’d collapsed in the living-room chair home from work. We’d see how beat he was. He’d talk through his yawns, then he’d thrust himself forward and push up off the chair’s arms, go wrestle his coat back on, and we’d follow him out the front door to the car. He would drive over the limit, slow down for stop signs or rights on red, and pull a quick left through a brief gap in City Line’s oncoming traffic to land us in Alfredo’s lot. He said hungry at times, never empty. There’d be caprese and Who else’ll have some, come on, don’t make me finish it all by myself. He’d tell us again about Italy, say Next comes the primi, he’d have the risotto or gnocchi, the rest of us whatever, noodles in red sauce, and after, keeping the cloth napkin tucked at his neck, for him the secondi, veal, chicken, lobster... we’d drag our forks through what was left on our plates. And he’d have put in for several contorni, the parmesan-graced asparagus plus a few more to pass around – we’d sample these for his sake in our fullness. He’d never think we’d had enough, though we’d be dazed by the time the tiramisu arrived, one for each. He’d finish his, and at last lifting the bib from his collar, would ask for the check. My father never said what was the matter. He’d take his Alka-Seltzer and Tums through the night, wind up in front of the TV

in the den before dawn, and head out in the dark for work. He never said restless, but I watched his relentless thrashing in his hospice bed – he wanted to get dressed and out to the car, saying Come on let’s go get the soup. What are we waiting for? I wonder if that soup was his mother’s winter borsht, roots grounding us once more in Minsk or Vilnius, but I’m convinced it was a rich minestrone. And evenings I picture him driving alone in those sun-dried hills of his heaven, to dine at the next stucco inn.

THIRD PRIZE

Emma Purshouse

Catherine Eddowes’ tin box as a key witness Please, don’t ask me, sir. I wasn’t the only tin box, sir. The mustard tin she carried her pawn tickets in. Please, sir, don’t ask me to say what I saw, I wasn’t the only tin box there, sir. There was one of tea, another of matches. Please, sir, don’t ask me to say what I saw. Ask the two small bags of bed ticking, they’ll tell you, sir. Yes, one of tea, another of matches. Yes, a mustard tin, and me she kept her sugar in. Ask the two small bags of bed ticking they’ll tell you, sir, or the needles in the red flannel, they saw it too. Yes, a mustard tin. And me she kept her sugar in. So many witnesses, sir. Saw it all with their own eyes, the needles in the red flannel, sir. Yes, they saw it too, sir. Ask the clay pipes, and the small tooth comb. So many witnesses, sir. Saw it all with our own eyes. Ask the metal teaspoon, and the white-handled knife. Yes, two clay pipes, and a small tooth comb. Ask the ball of hemp, the six pieces of soap. Yes, a metal teaspoon, and a white-handled knife. Ask the 12 menstrual rags, the thimble, the button. Yes, a ball of hemp, and six pieces of soap, sir. Or the red mitten, and the broken spectacles, ask them, sir. 12 pieces of menstrual rag, yes. Thimble and button, they were there, sir, with the coarse white linen. Yes, a red mitten, and broken spectacles. Ask them. Or the three-cornered blue and white shirting, 9

yes, they were there, sir, with the coarse white linen and the old apron. The old apron with a repair, sir. There with the three-cornered blue and white shirting. And the cigarette case, made of red leather. Yes, an old apron. Old apron with a repair, sir. Ask the handbill, and Frank Carter’s card. Yes, a cigarette case. Of red leather, sir. We were all of us there, sir. Yes, a handbill, and Frank Carter’s card. Please don’t ask me, sir. Ask one of them. Yes, they were all of them there, sir. Dumbstruck I am. No words to say what I saw.

Catherine Eddowes was born in Graiseley Green, Wolverhampton, 1842, and died in Mitre Square, Whitechapel, London, 1888.

COMMENDED

Jo Haslam

A lyke wake for auntie By Asda, Tesco, Boggart Hole, its river path and bowling green; by midweek cold and dank October, by the Co-op funeral parlour, by paramedic, ambulance, by CT scan and mammogram by all night on the floor alone, by fire that burns to the bare bone no one kept her company till she from hence away had passed, nobody stayed for the ae neet and no one lit a candle in the dark. No one stayed by fire or fleet and no one stayed her soul to keep; but some came early, some were late, some took the wrong exit on the motorway. And nobody remembered much of anything she’d said or done. No one wept. Some didn’t come. Nobody knew what job she’d done, name of the caff where every day she ate her lunch; no one followed her on foot,

no one took the river path, but someone chucked the pee stained mat, cleared the wardrobe packed her clothes, gave what they’d take to Oxfam, Hospice, Age UK. And someone tucked her wedding ring and glasses case inside the box, someone touched her freezing hands and someone prayed, by Asda, Tesco, Boggart Hole, by fire that burns to the bare bone by Lethe, Styx and Irwell, Christ receive her saule.

COMMENDED

Lindsey Holland

A Riddle of Hamsters I didn’t mean to buy It was her fur that colour apricot eyes black as rivets alert and flickerful feet like bonsai leaves haunches ripe with muscle throbbing with spirit unbridled sparky in a way that gave me what? affirmation? Perhaps it’s always this way with pets we find what we lack in ourselves I named her Abbey from an undeveloped lust for history gothic ghosts Now it seems prescient I called her a ruin I loved the evenings cleaning her bedding a smell of wet sawdust sprung from the cage as she rattled around in an exercise ball and later how she’d slip along my forearm off into my lap then make a break for it sprint for the door The week with a friend’s hamster Bernhard with balls like acorns I was foolish to lower him into her cage shocked that they mated but couldn’t look away from her hunched-up shape his hands yes tiny hands clutching her ribs the two of them rippling sleek with health and this then was life unfolding this easily I kept the secret like a locket until one night past bedtime she shrieked fists pelting the cage then toppling such yowls and whimpers her tail erect and under it something like the tip of my thumb magenta glistening On the phone

the vet said Pull the pup out despite the grinding of muscle little lungs and she bit me then the only time to the bone and I couldn’t pull couldn’t it was slippery I had no purchase on her Then the quiet as she seemed to sleep her body ebbing then not ebbing I didn’t see her leave I carry many things this weightily.

COMMENDED

Martin Reed

Durleigh He lived on the edge of the council estate, schooled himself to wake at first light and listen to an empty road, final Wednesday of September, for hooves on the tarmac like the patter of rain, a protesting bleat, a human mumble, signals of the approaching flock. He went through the wood that’s not there now, to fall in wordlessly behind the beasts, a moving, rolling wave of fleece, bulging backs like humps of sea creatures, their morning breath a cloud he walked through that smelt of damp straw and the end of summer. The old man raised a hand to mark his acceptance and he helped where he could, on the flanks, to bring in wanderers and loiterers and felt again a part of a life he wanted more than anything, more than rugby or rock ’n roll. He moved with the tricky turn into Fair Field and on to the pens where others came and talk was exchanged but not with him. Now grass was sparkling he had to leave the fair to its tweedy, barking business of bowler-hatted auctioneers, and study equations that made him feel ill in the dreary, chalkboard drone of his day. The shepherd raised his hand once more, a farewell wave, perhaps even thanks

from the cold Quantock journey begun in darkness through fog and dew and a grey, woolly dawn. His moment of droving lived in his mind to speak of a world beyond the town, enfolded mystery of near, distant hills. As autumn sun burnt off the mist, he knew all this was only a remnant, like a tune passed down from an unknown time.

COMMENDED

J. C. Todd

Old Friends, Here and Gone Hey, kinky, he says, checking me out at our friend’s memorial, cause of death a cancer in the folds of brain inside the bony structure that gave her face such beauty. During chemo her grace grew equal to reversals – her scalp bared and the muscles of her left hand too weak to hold a watercolor brush. He had soothed her in the hospital, the hospice, spooning ice chips, vegan broth. When her speech meandered beyond understanding, he had listened to the streams of sound as if to a jazz too wild for human sense – Sonny Rollins breaking loose on sax or Johnny Hodges yowling through his golden flugelhorn. I’m beggin’, Johnny moaned one clammy night, blue handkerchief mopping the crown of his head through a white crochet cap, beggin’ for mercy. That’s what I’d needed back then, my sadness set free by restraints and rough sex, the clarity of sudden more essential than its pain. Still kinky, he asks. In the hand I can’t forget, a dram of scotch, its surface undisturbed, held in perfect tension by the rim. His eyes, calm, returning my face to me, calmed, as his gaze had done in our turbulent year and again this spring for our friend who, I have heard, rallied at his touch, eyelids blinking open, although the optic nerve was bruised by the tumor’s mounting pressure, and sudden light hurt her eyes.

ii. It’s been six months almost since the policeman with the short pencil and the long clipboard said you’ll either come home on your own or they’ll find your body in a dumpster. In this dream, I stare at the back of your head. Your long silky fragrant hair. How many hours I spent unbraiding, untangling, once, un-nitting it – one nit at a time. I stood behind you all that while. You slunked in a small, blue chair quarantined in the backyard. How did we get from baby chairs to a holy lake in Tibet? How easy it is to underestimate the power of what is behind us. I follow the long lithe back of you. A cabinet of curiosities stretch out along your spine, sleep there, keep there. There there.

i. I’m having weird dreams again. This time, you’re out in front, walking the rim of bone white sand. We circle the perimeter another time. It reminds me of the path we mapped around the mother lake at the foot of Mount Kailash. We were believing pilgrims then – kissing hands to lips to feet, to earth to sky repeat – stalking yatra for power, to remove the illusion separating us. Sand dissolves like powdered sugar heaped in small cascading hills moving, slowing, sinking. I’m afraid to close my eyes. Afraid to sleep.

‘Wind eye’ from the Old Norse vindr (wind) auga (eye) means window and relates to the eye being the window of the soul.

We Were Learning To Not Look Away But To Look Through It Like A Wind Eye

Kizziah Burton

COMMENDED

iv. Months, a year later, I still dream it. I watch from a high lonely place – the long view across the lake. Then I see. You. Pushing. Pushing back. The tide – the kind of tide that can carve a girl, a woman, down to nothing. You see me seeing you. And lay knowings on my mind, layering one knowing after another like fine onion skins around a center that isn’t there – when all the skins are peeled away. The center exists because of what nests around it – like the center that exists between us: I can’t find it by going there. The closest I can get to you is to dream slowly, slowly. To sense what can’t be seen, can’t be said. Preverbal knowings, archived in bone, sifted loose because we journeyed for years, our whole lives, around the shifting perimeter until what looked like sugar tasted like salt. While our ancestors slept on our ancestors’ graves dreaming – we were learning the most difficult work there is – to not look away – but to look long enough – so we can look through it – like a window – like a wind eye.

iii. Sometimes I give up, let myself feel the world without you in it. How quiet without-you is. Like the match-lit cave we found inside Mount Kailash, a forgotten womb. When I lifted the match, crystals appeared, blackened with soot from fires sparked with sticks. Handless vessels shaped like yonis stood in rows across a stone altar, waiting centuries for milk. Where – bent over squatting, your back to me – you were busy doing something shamanic. Delicate loops kissed the air, invoked the Beings there, to rise before you. Brown-eyed girl. Distressed Levi’s. Your hair, your lips, your fingertips furred in powder like in the kitchen when you were little, standing on the blue chair, sifting powdered sugar, pollinating the air.

shame from which a woman can never recover – but I had to be brave and meet my girlfriends, none of whom had had the painters in yet, and I really wanted to

fearful of my redness making visible brown blots on the frills of my white ruffled ra-ra-tutu-sexy-princess skirt – the totally embarrassing, unforgiveable social

but no, the sky was dull and my belly felt heavy even though it was emptying itself into my wadded knickers, and my sister’s Cosmopolitan magazine had made me

were simply lunar-induced and not caused by trauma or poverty or abuse or excessive worrying or head injuries or bad genes or being too good)

then we would have had a neat explanation for my disordered moods (it would’ve been cool to be able to say – with truth – that my madnesses

with black and white velvet ears atop my eleven-year-old head, one ear folded just so, but if only it had been a full moon that night

between my legs it was Hallowe’en and I was dressed as a Playboy bunny

When I First Bled

HLR

COMMENDED

of me, the bunny who had pulled a hottie and, most importantly, kept her skirt clean.

and then all of the girls were talking about me – not because I was bleeding – because they were jealous

(the older girl who bought me cigarettes before school) said it would be, his tongue going round and round my mouth like a washing machine, all salivary

so I went to the party feeling wise and unsanitary and pretty and grown-up and silly and I kissed a boy who was in the year above me and it was exactly like Nikki

tell them that I’d bled because I couldn’t tell my mother or my sister or anyone except the security guard who had caught me earlier that day stealing pads in the pharmacy,

COMMENDED

M.R. Peacocke

Out of School The hen boy: he must have had a name. I discovered the yard where he worked, the strange dry smell of it, the bald ground. In those days, Sesame was hidden under my tongue for the opening of secret fiefdoms, treasure-pages, but the hen boy seldom needed words. His tools and resources were other. He could have been twelve, and I was nine. Years and years of school lay before me. His were over, but what he needed he knew already: how to select the right brown bird among so many. The right one would arrive in his hand as though there were a recognition, like the perfect word finding its place. Next, a grasp of the scaled yellow legs – no violence in it. A soft brushing of feather to find the neck that curved squat to the comfortable body. An elongation – legerdemain – a twist too quick to note, and the hen, though she seemed not yet to know it, dead. Some mornings he would give me a glance,

and then came something like performance: the dangling head tucked under a wing, body placed and balanced, and the bird jolting suddenly into nightmare, a veering diagonal scurry towards the stripping of her jacket under a strong thumb and being found pinkish and kitcheny. That was it. Then one day he took me by the hand. Come on, I’ll show you the barn. It loomed, lofty with shadow, smelling of grain. In the corner, a squat brown barrel. The hen boy’s bending at the spigot with a chipped enamel mug, pouring golden scrumpy, handing it to me. We’re sitting and sipping, going shares.

JUDGES

Fiona Benson Fiona Benson was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and then St Andrews University, where she completed the MLitt and a PhD in early modern drama. Her pamphlet was ‘Faber New Poets 1’ in the Faber New Poets series, and her full-length collection Bright Travellers (Cape, 2014) received the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second book, Vertigo & Ghost (Cape, 2019), won the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her third collection Ephemeron was published by Cape in February 2022. She lives in mid-Devon with her husband and their two daughters.

David Constantine David Constantine has published a dozen volumes of poetry (most recently Belongings, 2020); also two novels and five collections of short stories, the most recent of these being The Dressing-up Box, 2019. His Tea at the Midland (2012) won the Frank O’ Connor International Short Story Award. He is an editor and translator of Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht. In 2020 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Rachel Long Rachel Long is the founder of Octavia, Poetry Collective for Women of Colour. Her debut poetry collection, My Darling from the Lions (2020), is published by Picador and was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, and the Jhalak Prize. Photo: Amaal Said.

WINNERS

Eric Yip, First Prize Eric Yip was born and raised in Hong Kong. His poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Varsity, Notes and BAIT magazine. He is currently a first-year undergraduate studying economics at the University of Cambridge.

Jed Myers, Second Prize Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and four chapbooks, including Dark’s Channels (Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Award) and Love’s Test (winner, Grayson Books Chapbook Contest). His poems can be found in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Magma, RHINO, The Greensboro Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Seattle and is Poetry Editor for Bracken. Photo: Alina Rios

Emma Purshouse, Third Prize Emma Purshouse is a freelance writer, performance poet and slam champion. She was the first Poet Laureate for the City of Wolverhampton. Emma writes for both children and adults. Her children’s collection, I Once Knew a Poem Who Wore a Hat (Fair Acre Press), won the poetry section of the Rubery Book Award in 2016. Her recent poetry collection, Close (Offa’s Press), was shortlisted for the same award in 2019. Emma’s first novel Dogged (Ignite Books) was published in 2021. She has performed her work at spoken word nights and festivals across the UK. Photo: Nicole Lovell

COMMENDATIONS

Kizziah Burton Kizziah Burton won second prize in the Ledbury Poetry Festival Poetry Competition 2020, judged by Liz Berry, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in Poetry, San Miguel de Allende’s Literary Festival in Mexico. Her poems have previously been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition, the Poetry Book Society/Mslexia Women’s Poetry Prize, judged by Dame Carol Ann Duffy, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Art History/Religion. Burton is a Graduate Fellow of The University of Southern California, LA, with Honors from The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Foundation.

Jo Haslam Jo Haslam’s last collection Fetch was published by Templar press. Her work has appeared in a number of poetry magazines including the Rialto and PN Review. She has been placed in numerous competitions, for example joint second prize in the 2010 National Poetry Competition, first prize in the Mslexia 2012 poetry competiton and second prize in the Charles Causley Competition 2016. More recently she won first prize in the 2020 Teignmouth Poetry Competition and third prize in the 2021 Teignmouth Competition. She is currently working on her new collection.

Lindsey Holland Lindsey Holland has won a Northern Writers Award for poetry, been commended in the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize, and won third place in the Troubadour Prize. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Magma, Mslexia, Agenda and BODY among others. Her pamphlets are The Lanterns (Eyewear, 2016) and Particle Soup (KFS, 2012). In 2021, she was awarded an Arts Council grant to write a book of creative non-fiction. She is also currently finalising her first full collection of poetry.

M.R. Peacocke M.R. Peacocke was born in 1930 and grew up in a musical family in South Devon. She started writing at four years old, and learned about modern poetry through surreptitious reading in an Exeter bookshop. She read English at Oxford. Always a country person and solitary walker, she became teacher, wife, mother and general factotum, then trained as a counsellor. In her fifties she left for a smallholding in the high Pennines, where her writing flourished. She has published collections with Peterloo, Shoestring and Happenstance, most recently Broken Ground (2018) and The Long Habit of Living (2021). She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2005.

Martin Reed Martin Reed was born and brought up in Somerset but has lived in Worcestershire for many years. He won the National Poetry Competition in 1988. He has been widely published in magazines such as The Poetry Review, Acumen, London Magazine, Magma, Poetry Salzburg and Stand. His collection The Two-Coat Man is published by HappenStance and he hopes to publish a new collection soon. He has recently jointly edited Farewell Performance (Smokestack Books), the collected later poems of Vernon Scannell who was his friend and mentor for thirty years. Photo: Maggie Reed

HLR HLR (she/her) is a prize-winning poet, working-class writer, and professional editor from North London. Her writing, which focuses on her experiences of living with chronic mental illnesses, has been widely published since 2012. She won the Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Competition 2021. HLR is the author of autobiographical prosetry collection History of Present Complaint (Close to the Bone), and microchapbook Portrait of the Poet as a Hot Mess (Ghost City Press). She is currently writing her second full-length collection, Anatomy of a Disordered Personality.

COMMENDATIONS

J. C. Todd J. C. Todd is author of the award-winning books, Beyond Repair (Able Muse Press) and The Damages of Morning (Moonstone Press), as well as collaborative artist books. Winner of the 2016 Rita Dove Poetry Prize, longlisted in the 2015 National Poetry Competition, and twice a finalist in Poetry Society of America contests, she holds fellowship awards from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Mezzo Cammin, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

Visit the National Poetry Competition archive

To enjoy recordings of this year’s National Poetry Competition winners, to read the names of the 108 longlisted poets, and to explore our archive of poems from across the four decades of the competition, visit poetrysociety.org.uk/npc

National Poetry Competition winners 2021 Eric Yip 2020 Marvin Thompson

‘Fricatives’ ‘The Fruit of the Spirit is Love (Galatians 5:22)’ 2019 Susannah Hart ‘Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy’ 2018 Wayne Holloway-Smith ‘The posh mums are boxing in the square’ 2017 Dom Bury ‘The Opened Field’ 2016 Stephen Sexton ‘The Curfew’ 2015 Eric Berlin ‘Night Errand’ 2014 Roger Philip Dennis ‘Corkscrew Hill Photo’ 2013 Linda France ‘Bernard and Cerinthe’ 2012 Patricia McCarthy ‘Clothes that escaped the Great War’ 2011 Allison McVety ‘To the Lighthouse’ 2010 Paul Adrian ‘Robin in Flight’ 2009 Helen Dunmore ‘The Malarkey’ 2008 Christopher James ‘Farewell to the Earth’ 2007 Sinéad Morrissey ‘Through the Square Window’ 2006 Mike Barlow ‘The Third Wife’ 2005 Melanie Drane ‘The Year the Rice-Crop Failed’ 2004 Jon Sait ‘Homeland’ 2003 Colette Bryce ‘The Full Indian Rope Trick’ 2002 Julia Copus ‘Breaking the Rule’ 2001 Beatrice Garland ‘undressing’

NATIONAL POETRY COMPETITION WINNERS

2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 1985

Ian Duhig Simon Rae Caroline Carver Neil Rollinson Ruth Padel James Harpur David Hart Sam Gardiner Stephen Knight Jo Shapcott John Levett Nicky Rice William Scammell Martin Reed Ian Duhig Carole Satyamurti Jo Shapcott

1984 Tony Curtis 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 1978

Carol Ann Duffy Philip Gross James Berry Tony Harrison Medbh McGuckian Michael Hulse

‘The Lammas Hireling’ ‘Believed’ ‘horse underwater’ ‘Constellations’ ‘Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire’ ‘The Frame of Furnace Light’ ‘The Silkies’ ‘Protestant Windows’ ‘The Mermaid Tank’ ‘Phrase Book’ ‘A Shrunken Head’ ‘Room Service’ ‘A World Elsewhere’ ‘The Widow’s Dream’ ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ ‘Between the Lines’ ‘The Surrealists’ Summer Convention Came to Our City’ ‘The Death of Richard Beattie-Seaman in Belgian Grand Prix, 1939’ ‘Whoever She Was’ ‘The Ice Factory’ ‘Fantasy of an African Boy’ ‘Timer’ ‘The Flitting’ ‘Dole Queue’

The Peggy Poole Award Congratulations to Lauren Garland, selected by the poet and editor Paul Farley as the winner of the Peggy Poole Award 2021. Lauren will receive mentoring from Paul as her prize, culminating in a celebratory reading in the North West in spring/summer 2023.

Lauren Garland Lauren Garland grew up in Leeds. In 2019 she graduated from the Manchester Writing School with an MA in Creative Writing. Her pamphlet, Darling, was published in 2020 by Broken Sleep Books. She works at a mental health charity and lives in the North West of England. Run alongside the National Poetry Competition, the Peggy Poole Award is a talent development scheme for poets based in the North West of England. The past recipients are: Yvonne Reddick, the 2017 winner, mentored by Deryn Rees-Jones; Mark Pajak (2018), mentored by Michael Symmons Roberts; Saiqa Khushnood (2019), mentored by Malika Booker; and Maria Isakova-Bennett (2020), mentored by Vona Groarke. The Award is in memory of the poet and broadcaster Peggy Poole and made possible thanks to the generosity of her extended family and many friends.

The National Poetry Competition is one of the world’s biggest and most prestigious poetry competitions, and an important career milestone for both established and emerging poets. The 2022 competition launches in May, closing date 31 October 2022. For more information and to sign up to receive updates, visit poetrysociety.org.uk/npc