The Strokestown Poetry Prizes 2010 - the shortlist, in alphabetical order
   The prizes will be announced and awarded at Strokestown International Poetry Festival, 30 April ~ 2 May 2010

In the vast mirrored foyer of

that Leningrad hotel, under

the hushed radiance of the

pre-Lenin gilded chandeliers

At a guess eighteen, a fragile

poise, muted gold and ebony,

a touch of crimson rouge,

her anguished ondine eyes

As huge as those of Vrubel’s

swan maiden, tinged dark

with sylphide blue, soft elfin

lashes laden with mascara

Mama in sable furs, robed

like an exiled queen, dusting

a trace of cigar ash from

Papa’s astrakhan greatcoat

As, like a three-mast galleon,

black-sailed, towards the regal

brass-framed doors, they swept

past on their unknown journey

Out of my life, leaving me

in that fleeting first encounter

with a burning compensation

that for one eternal second

She’d held me in her eyes, as

I held hers, with, unmistakably,

a mutual declaration that,

had times been otherwise

We would have moved,

been moved, spellbound, into

a perfect twinned oneness

till the world’s end

Heather Brett was born in Newfoundland, raised in Northern Ireland, and has lived in the South for 25 years.
She has published three collections, of which Abigail Brown won the Brendan Behan Memorial Prize. She has been writer in residence in several counties and has edited over 30 anthologies.

I eat the last of the white peaches from Sedona.

Delicate inlay of texture and taste.

The sun hasn’t quite reached my window yet

but the patio is alive; tiny prehistoric,

long-thin-tailed lizards that jack

and pump themselves on the brickwork;

bees hover and burrow in the lemon rose of the cacti

and stripped agave amid the creosote

push its spikes skyward,

pierce the shadow of a turkey vulture,

wings outstretched, feathers spread,

rifling the sizzling air.

Glint of blue-green-black butterfly flap,

crickets that pulse and trill from the milkweed.

I think of that particular point where one stops

watching, stops listening,

folds back the formed word on the tongue, stops feeling:

and I wonder how long I’ve been sitting here

a study in loss, but breathing.

Paul Cummins is from California, where his poems have been published widely in well known journals and magazines. Other writings include a booklet on poet Richard Wilbur and a biography, Dachau Song: The Twentieth Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper,  which has been translated into Chinese and German.

First you must conflate your initial strategy

into new and highly attractive formulas

and wrap them into an emerging complexity

for successful apportions to be reconfigured

by conveying the package into more intricate systems

via destinations unevident and indistinct

and reassigned through differentiated rearrangements,

then sell positions in these myriad transactions

to buyers thrice removed from fluctuating prices

earlier determined by acknowledged masters of design

who wrap their figures into new complexities

and immediately transfer the derivations

into unique and more attractive formulations

of successful reapportionments to be reconfigured

for new destinations uncharted and distant

through new buyers who repackage the outgrowths

into modified and highly intriguing recalculations

immediately reassigned through diversified systems

for successful and more attractive reformulations

wherein everyone engaged accumulates immense profits.

Charles Evans is a published poet and award-winning playwright. A retired naval officer and college lecturer, he has travelled widely in Russia studying modern Russian drama and poetry. In 2005 he was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship for poetry, and in 2008 took second place in the UK National Poetry Competition.

In the Honey Islands, across the Bogo River, a shy people give guarded

welcome to genuine enquirers into their gentle life-style, lining the bank

and offering flowers, garlands and bracelets of local berries, while never

touching or eating which are private activities among families seen only

by close relatives and never by outside visitors.

Verbal communication is limited to the absolutely necessary, open

gestures preferred to the spoken word, and rituals of thanks, promises

and apologies enacted in small groups which cluster excitedly whenever key events

are heralded by stamping of feet and raised arms, signals which bring

witnesses to the square round which dwellings are grouped. 

Dress is minimal, unnecessary clothing considered aggressive, though

face-masks are de rigueur and visitors are often disconcerted by the freely

displayed genitalia carefully coiffured and emphasised by strokes of

bright pigment indicating  age and family, facilitating easy recognition from

childhood through to old age and infirmity.

Marriage is carefully managed through monthly Ambulations, when

concentric circles of the young are rotated simultaneously in opposite

directions according to gender to the sound of flute-like wind instruments,

while families sit observing to one side, indicating  with smiles and nods

as choices become apparent and couples detach from the ceremony.

Fidelity is paramount, the Unified Ones moving to new huts and maintaining

life-long mutual commitment through feasting and procreation, though the care

and education of offspring  are shared by the wider family and young couples

play a leading part in dance, celebrations and hunts while taking their turn with any

necessary supervision of the young and old.

The language is simple and not difficult to learn based on simple statements round

common objects, the question-form possible but regarded as hostile, 

the imperative never heard, the subjunctive non-existent, words in general considered

dangerous and even destructive, abstract  nouns such as beauty and love existing in

grammatical form  but never spoken.

Religious practice is uniform, the central figure of Ugar dominant

but never mentioned except as a quiet utterance in difficult times or as a

cry of joy when babies arrive or enemies sheath their swords, illness, accidents

or natural disasters met by quiet smiles or on occasion a mysterious and

beautiful circling gesture linking earth and sky.

Death is a joyous event, celebrated by the entire family of the

Transcended One as they are called who greet the Atoners (those who

have offended him during his life) ceremoniously accepting their symbolic offerings of

honey-smeared knives which are then used to decorate in

ornate patterns the faces of surviving relatives or friends.

I returned home after three months in the Honey Islands, bearing the characteristic

marks, laden with gifts of honey wine in ornate oval pots

fashioned from dried bark, but without my research assistant Albert who

on the last day left the hut in jeans eating peanuts, kissed our young host goodbye,

asked the nature of Ugar, and whose throat they cut.

Sue Hubbard
Due to an unlucky oversight Sue Hubbard's poem was published subsequent to its submission to the competition, and so, unfortunately, has had to be withdrawn from the shortlist.

In Campania, at her grandfather’s farm
fieldstone house secure as a castle
she sleeps beneath the high eaves, underhung
with swallows’ nests like pots of clay.

She walks the vineyards with him, too small
to see over the vines, her eyes full of leaves,
fat grapes and, overhead, the bellies
and wings of birds about their business.

She longs to see the birds, to be the birds.
He lifts her high to look into their nests
at perfect oval eggs, at hatchlings
scrawny, pink and vulnerable.

When he arises to work the fields, barking
dogs wake her. She listens to the newborn
swallows just outside her shutters crying
for their breakfast with the dawn.

From her bed, she stares up at the vaulted
ceiling, at the painted angel flying around
the light fixture, naked save the loincloth
rippling across his muscular thighs.

His wings are white as a swallow’s belly
and from a basket on his arm he strews
flowers across a faux sky, each growing
brighter as the sun outside rises higher.

Finally, she throws off the covers
pulls the shutters open. Sunlight
like a hundred chandeliers bathes
the angel in glory and herself in joy.

The Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography
A rare map created in 1602, showing China at the centre of the known world, goes on display in the US

Your fifth century – how do we imagine that?

Easier to contemplate

Your journey to America, wrapped in the dark,

Flying over your distorted self,

As a swan soars over its own shadow on a lake,

Your mountains and rivers rising and falling

Like a tide rippling your face,

Names and Nations that tremble and collapse

As time is telescoped into

The few short hours it takes to bring you

Up to the minute, in Washington, at

The Library of Congress and on the internet.

Here we find you, thin as breath,

Your yellowed paper, made of rice,

Dissolvable, unfolded, shrouded in glass,

Even the rain might eat you – how have you survived

This cold chamber of air, this shuddering earth,

Being man-handled into our lives?

We confront your six-panelled permanence,

Bow to your centuries of self-belief,

As China, the centre of your universe,

Harvests all wealth, repossesses the West,

From Kanata to the Land of Flowers,

Your cartographer become a prophet.

Julian Stannard teaches English at the University of Winchester, UK. His poems and critical work have appeared in The Oxford Poets Anthology (Carcanet, 2004) as well as Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland, Stand, Ambit, TLS, and the Guardian. His two poetry collections are published by Peterloo Poets, Rina’s War (2001) and The Red Zone (2007).

Soup will keep us afloat:

soup is our mainstay of hope.

That winter we washed in it

as well as ate it, great pots

of soup with beans and bones.

Mother, the farmer’s daughter,

knew hearts were whittled

knew feet were cold.

Mother, the colonel’s wife,

knew the wood-stove needed logs

that soup would shrive.

Soup is God’s younger brother.

Soup is Corinthians.

Soup is patient, soup is kind:

it does not envy, it does not boast.

.

My mother gave me a pot of soup

made of beans and bones

that needed two strong arms

and a crack of the back

and I carried it to my sister

whose dogs think they are

wolves and although crows

cawed and deer peeked

and the storm did that

storm cometh number

we supped on soup so that

our chins were wet with it

and when the dead came by

and I can tell you there’s

been no shortage in our house

they were buoyed by the soup

and there was no stinting.

Oh soup, keep us afloat.

Oh God’s little brother

abide with me

in the kitchen of mother.

Often, these nights, I dream of haddock, British haddock.

Something caused by the long, grey Euston Road

And sleeping on my back?

A grimy impasto of salt, rocks and waste.

They are undersea, flat,

Dark drifting creatures. They cover themselves over in a sweep,

They swing back and then, from undersea

Some playful, some intent on death, push themselves,

Fire themselves as on a bowstring

Out from the sea, the clogged contra-bass sea.

I had tea with Walter Sickert – from Munich – on Tuesday.

He said he liked Op. 192

And I admired his shabby, phosphorescent glimmerings.

He made a joke about a gutted fish, its bar-lines. I forget.

There was a Malevich painting in Punch.

Quadrat or something. A square next to another square.

I prefer haddock: its whiteness and softness souring.

It stinks out the modernists and their safe little right-angles,

Or lines shivering like carriages on the Finchley Road.

Ignore me. Sometimes I mishear, especially my neighbour -

The one with the wax cylinders who’s always calling round.

Upstairs with his kitchen dotted-rhythm putting knives and forks away.

The waltz quickens and becomes a headfirst march.

Or the march eases its braces, becomes a child’s doodle.

A trill rings on like a recurring decimal.

This madman buttonholes his way into my quietest chamber.

Forgive me if I’ve said the same thing too many times.

I want to tell you precisely what something’s like

That I myself see vaguely and cannot outline …

Like water boiling over and then flooding the whole block

Or swimming underwater and desperate for breath

The sun travelling up just north of Attersee.

The red-head roses in place of wheat.

Gravestones are the feet of the dead walking back to air.

This is a beautiful foreign fish whose white bones almost choke me.

My long age is here like a moored ship.

The flack-flack of waters is here keeping time.

I’m shouting and saying no to you and yet you love me.

Pam Zinneman-Hope

I entered a deep cave

in a sandstone cliff;

bowed my head

where the roof was low;

huddled in the centre

of a narrow passage

with its twists and turns

of rough, bare rock.  

I learned

of the palettes found,

and the crayon sticks;

the iron oxide, ground:

pigment, mixed with water,

juices, urine, blood;    

how it was poured

into hollow bones,

the reds, ochres, browns

and charcoal black,

to be air-brushed 

onto the rock.

So as not to destroy

the images from the past

the guide lit them, briefly,

with her infra red light.

There was once a flickering,

tallow torch. It burned

the precious animal fats.

Someone held it for him:

a man who painted a bison,

the bison that follows you

with its eyes, as you move;

and he spoke to me,

across fifteen millenia,

with a gesture of the hand,

‘Hello. Look, here!’

It’s in the rock, a vision,        

bulked out of the contours

and shaded.

And I’m here, trying

to paint pictures with words,

using black ink on paper.

By the time you have these

they’ll be figured on a screen,

and printed:

this conversation with someone

who painted animals

in mined hematite;

hema, meaning blood.