The Strokestown Poetry Prizes 2011 - the shortlist, in alphabetical order
   The prizes will be announced and awarded at Strokestown International Poetry Festival, 29 April ~ 1 May 2011

Mack’s from an island no one lives on anymore.

        The ocean that offered them

        saithe, pollack, lobster, cod,

        now offers only the sound

        of itself on a bad landline

        and heartache – slight but persistent

        like a draught beneath a byre door.

Mack’s a new man on a downtown island now.

        The roar of traffic’s louder than the sea.

        He lives on a street full of islanders like him

        in and out of one another’s houses,

        old words keeping the old world true

        while without their knowing it

        another language changes them.

Mack’s a creel of memories.

        He hauls them to the surface if you ask

        but first he picks about. There’s no

        helping yourself. It’s his catch, his call.

        Sometimes he sorts a bad one out

        then throws it back before you’ve time

        for a glimpse of the truth it hides.

Mack’s the future, Mack’s the past.

        He takes things as he finds them, finds himself

        with no need for a compass, reading

        the sea of faces, the swell of voices

        fighting in his ears the way he’d read

        the spumey waves to bring the boat home,

        the way he reckoned the turning tide.

Nothing fazes Mack

        He drives a car with a fancy numberplate.

        His children swear allegiance to perpetual youth,

        his son enlisting for its war, his daughter

        off to college. Neither know the words their parents

        call out in their sleep, nor the creeping melancholy

        fog brings from the sea.

Mack’s at home a long long way from home.

        You can see it in the way he speaks two tongues,

        takes words from one to complement the other.

        You can see it in the way he leans

        into any wind, a forward stoop to keep his boots

        at a pushing angle to the ground.

        It’s the way you tell an islander apart.

Matthew Barton has published two full-length collections, the latest being Vessel (Brodie Poets 2009). He has won many awards including second prize in the National Poetry Competition and an Art’s Council Writer’s Award. He teaches creative writing at Bristol University, Oxford University (summer school), and in many secondary schools.

Old acquaintances, we had guarded
a certain considerate boundary. At the most

a farewell kiss on the cheek
(and she my mother’s age but childless,

 somehow virginally good):                    
suddenly we were intimate - a bee

 then another (or one
multiplying itself like a god)

in my hair, climbing
over the lip of her rollneck shirt

and about to crawl down into
the unknown but now instantly vivid

wrinkled pale skin of her breasts…
she was ruffling through my hair to find it, I

picked it or flicked it free of her shirt.
We went in quickly, shut the glass doors

against which its several selves
tocked and ticked for a bit.

But one was still there in my hair,
my scalp crawling strangely 

like a physical thought. She said
as one with much experience:

You must whack it, you have to…
so I hit my own head

hard with the flat of my hand
and it dropped dead. 

But after that, though too polite
to say it, I could see 

she wanted me to get
out of there fast and not come back.  

(Or more or less the same:
to stay and never leave again.)

We blame the parents for these ash-pale mongrels

hurtling their bones from room to empty room.

Not their fault they’re a bag of hide and bollock,

whale-bulb head and cankered knee, buckling

as they belt towards another dark dead-end.

Their cueball eyes, their soft bland brains;

each one alone in his own panic

smelling for a golden thread

suckling anything that might be mother.

It’s all you can expect.

At night we hear them bellowing their terror

through the long blank corridors.

Isobel Dixon grew up in South Africa, and now lives in Cambridge, England. Her collection A Fold in the Map is published by Salt.  Her next collection, The Tempest Prognosticator comes out from Salt in the UK in July 2011 and Random’s Umuzi imprint in South Africa later in the year.  www.isobeldixon.com

Another drought and my mother gone away

to where they could take better care

of her; though it seemed to me she’d fled

her horde of daughters and the rage we bred

in her. The thrill of leaving the house

so late. Warm night: a dark-glass stoppered jar,

its glittering suspension stippled in the sky’s

liquidity. Daddy starting up the car

in the silent street; gliding like a boat

through the tree-lined channels broad enough

to turn an ox-cart in, to the limits of the town,

the hill beyond the lamps’ familiar light.

Ever-vigilant against the risk of chill,

he had donned – he’d like the word – his opera cloak

with its silvered clasp, a swirl of jet black wool

transforming him to impresario

of the wide Karoo, of the dam wall shored

against its field of creviced mud. The old cliché,

though he didn’t say it, whispers in my ears:

Daughter, look, all of this is yours –

But his focus then wasn’t terrestrial,

his sweeping gesture gave a swathe of sky –

an overture of pizzicato stars,

and aslant above, the glorious rippling fall

of meteors. No doubt his explanation

passed me by, so much I never really learned,

but the yearly showers remain, sure precipitations

heralded in my memory  by a wave

of Handel’s violins. Mostly, I miss

the sightings, but still sieve through this

inheritance: my mother’s lonely tinctured night,

my father’s bright cascade of dust.

At first it was an outcrop of flat rocks,

hazy, a long way off,

but something alien to rocks, an instability,

detained and switched the eye,

and then the outcrop bloomed

into a huddle of cigar-shaped bodies,

a pod of basking seals.

I painted in the detail,

the scars and speckles on their pelts,

the rakish whiskers;

made them balance on their sides

like ancient Romans lounging at a banquet,

and wave their flippers like transvestite dames

toward the cliff from where I watched.

And deeper into watching I saw

an animal set off to belly-flop

across the sand

until a breaking wave

freed it to weightless elegance;

and suddenly the shallows teemed:

the pod on land was only half the pod.

I saw them dive and glide,

spin on long axes at the flick of a fin,

curl round each other.  One lumbered back

to rest among the baskers,

then a second and a third –

each half pod replenishing the other,

like seeing and imagining.

“Some time in the early morning, Michael Smith, a twenty year old factory worker jumped, fell or was pushed from the overpass onto The John C. Lodge. He died shortly after being taken to Mercy General Hospital. ”

                 --The Detroit Free Press

Fishtown kid, always wiping his nose.

eating two-for-a-dollar burgers at White Castle,

unloading bumpers from frozen boxcars.

He was already sitting in with some serious players.

We teased him about his baby face,

how he looked like Chet Baker, and still didn’t shave,

Little Honey Head, too young to legally drink.

I know what I’m doing, he’d smile--, I’m just chippin,’  

like the song goes--“ain’t nobody’s business but my own.”

He would come home, change, have a taste, then

practice in his room for hours, playing along

with Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young,

the elders, he used to call them.

All their moves, I need to know all their moves.

Woodshedding and paying my dues--just chippin’.

He had an old bootleg tape of the 1957 date—

Lester’s solo to Billy Holiday when she sings--

           He wears high draped pants, stripes are really yellow,

and when he starts in to love me he’s so fine and mellow.

When Lester played, you could hear the words,

when Holiday sang, she phrased like a horn player.

Prez and Lady Day-- they renamed each other.

No romance to the high life, Little Mike, Billy would tell you.

Using is like living in an iron lung.

Prez was living on sips of buttermilk and Cracker Jack,

gin and a sherry chaser, just fired from Birdland.

The only one who had to sit for the whole session,

but he jumped up to easy hand a thirty nine second solo

that had the sound men in tears.

He was behind Billy, holding his saxophone almost horizontal,

rocking the lover he never made love to in the lap of memories

that went back twenty years to when they first did the song,

pouring the honey of those old used to be’s into Billy’s waiting ears.

 “What A Little Moonlight Can Do,” “Ain’t misbehavin,”

“I Get a Kick Out if You.”

She swayed a barely visible descant of counterpoint,

gestures, on top of his lines, phrasing

behind the beat, and pausing in the curves between the notes.

She nodded the pleasure of inevitable yes’s

with little shakes of her head: it doesn’t get any better than this,

but more will never be enough.

Then she sipped a breath, wet her lips slowly, and took her turn.

Three years since they’d seen each other.

No romance to the high life.

Lester would be gone and Billy would die two months later.

Mike played the solo until he could turn it inside out,

until he could find it in the dark,

hear the catch in its breath, its syncopated heartbeat,

as it shifted, arched, and coasted to its finish,

The unconsumated finality of things.

if I could have been there when they found him

 fingers barely twitching and his eyes still open,

before the sirens, and strangers’ voices,

maybe I could have hummed Lester’s solo in his ears.

Little Honey Head, he wanted it all, when more was not enough,

He was like a woman:

He fell in love through his ears.

Caveat '75

With me all genned-up on her Radcliffe friend

about to come to Tunis, Lisa had

to prune the bolting shoots of my new fad–

‘You dare fall for her, that’ll be the end!’

She said ‘I’ll kill you if you marry her’

as if passion should be a barrier

to everlasting love, invoking clown

suitors whose bloom had perished, pounded down.

In glinting spring, Cap Bon seemed empty but

for us. The strained cool of the seedy hut,

the unrooted breeze of middle-earth’s sea,

the sharp scent of goat-browsed wild rosemary

cast us, free, to flourish beyond reason

in a haywire cycle of the seasons.

Jane Routh won the Poetry Business Competition 2001 with Circumnavigation, which was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. Her collection Teach Yourself Mapmaking (Smith/Doorstop 2006) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The title poem of her new book The Gift of Boats won the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Prize in 2009.

When you’ve lived all your adult life in one place,
you fell trees. You planted them too close
or blocked the view or some sickened. Like us  

they go for height till they’re twenty, then thicken. That’s true
of the ash and the birch, but not oak: they’re
stunted. You never know how an oak will shape up. 

You drop logs in the stove without regret, though
they’re recognisable still – that birch by the kitchen,
and what’s this? even a length of eucalypt from the garden.

I’m still planting trees, though I know I’ll not see
how they’ll grow and can’t even imagine
the shapes they might make against a winter sky.

                                     –––––––––

Downspouts are busy, full of short vowels.
We’re burying my neighbour tomorrow, my birthday.
Ice is forecast, then snow. We’ll see.

When you’ve lived in one place so long, there’s someone
you know in every row. The way it’s worked out,
my friends are at the far side, by the wall. 

The hearse has to go the long way, over the moor.
It’s nearer on foot, though it still feels removed from the world,
the church in its hollow, the stone walls.

                                     –––––––––

When you’ve lived your life in one parish
and gather with neighbours for a burial,
you think the same thoughts as everyone else:
is that Tom? – still handsome, though his hair’s
grey and receding. That coat’s
tight on the shoulders. We polish our glasses,
hold hymn sheets out at arms length.
George is completely white now. Ruby is too.
One of us will be the next: what someone remembers
we said one time passed round and repeated.
Then all of us will be stories. Then stories, no names.

                                     –––––––––

A perfect fan preserved in the snow
where a pheasant pressed down its spread tail
for take-off. The grave’s right next to the footpath. 

When you’ve lived most of your life with the same people
sharing your weather and power cuts and floods,
they start to pass on their tales that keep mortality at bay.
You’re supposed to remember the names
though even the teller forgets: who was it had the top field
above the graveyard in those days, Billy Morphet?
or his brother? anyway, he and the gravedigger
were having a smoke, the two of them up by the wall,
when Jimmy Read comes along. He doesn’t let on:
he gets in the hole and lies down and keeps quiet
– just think on it, laid there, listening out –
the gravedigger nearly falls in on top with the shock.

Mind you, he said after, six foot… it’s a long way down.

                                     –––––––––

When you know a place lifelong, you’ve no need of maps;
every name has its shapes and its feel underfoot:
Helks, Jacksons Pasture, Perry Moor – even the fields
have names: Robins Close, Parrocks Meadow. 

But who was Jackson? who was Robin? – you know nothing
of them, the datestones they set over their doorways
outlasting them as they knew they would –
but not calling them up. Just the year, just initials.  

The one great oak at the top of the Old Wood
above the river – who planted that? Or was it a jay?
Since Ken laid the roadside hedge for me last year,
passers-by can see the trees I planted twenty years ago

as if they’re new and sudden. I’ve heard it called Ken’s Wood
– not Jane’s. They look lovely from the road,
strong trunks and straight and more beyond on rising ground.
I scattered foxglove seeds among them, and ramsons too.

It’s not only flesh and blood we inherit –

obsessions too may be passed down

like tricks of speech:

the hoopoe was an ornithological icon

for my late parents, and I twitched for

a sight of its motley.

Once I saw a might-have-been hoopoe flash

across a hairpin bend in Tuscany.

It joined the ranks

of might-have-been otters, dolphins and sea eagles,

but at last on a torpid afternoon safari

in the Camargue

when every self-respecting bird should have been

taking a siesta, a pair materialised

as close as you are.

I was scanning the wetland for the White Horses,

those famed poster beasts cantering

through girlish fantasies

all snorting nostrils, flying manes, and hooves

kicking up spray: but two hoopoes

flirting on a fence

were more glorious by far, their black and pink

striped livery, their jaunty crests,

their swooping flight

their simple presence in their proper element

transported me. I was reminded how

in mediaeval bestuaries

the hoopoe returns to care for its ageing parents;

and imagining that fabled paradise

where my father and mother

might be dwelling among creatures beautiful

and rare, I invoked them with a gentle

‘Hoop hoop hoop.’

Pat Winslow worked for twelve years as an actor and left the theatre in 1987 to take up writing. Her poetry collections include Unpredictable Geometry and Dreaming of Walls Repeating Themselves. Pat is currently working as a writer in residence at a prison. www.patwinslow.co.uk

It could almost be a Jack Vettriano painting,

you three on a Sussex beach casting slanting

shadows in the corrugated sand, the shallow

channels of water like platen glass, a blue

sky, fawn jackets, grey and cream trousers

reflecting in them, but for your step-father’s

sudden astonished gasp because a breeze

has come to lift the brim of his hat and seize

it, sending it scuttling and cart-wheeling

before him. He staggers around, flailing

his arms trying to catch it. He gets a touch

but it’s off again. He makes a sudden lurch

and grabs it, dusts it off and looks up at you.

You notice the sea water has wet his shoe.

Later, there will be a white line of brine on it.

 But now he’s putting his new straw hat

back squarely on his head and the sun is

winking like peppermints off his lenses

so you can’t see his eyes and your mother

says your sister would have found it rather

funny just now, wouldn’t she, in fact I can

just hear her beery laugh, can’t you? No, in

fact, you can’t. What you hear is radio

interference, bubbling voices just below

the surface, too many stations jammed

together in a high frequency waveband

and once again, the silence, that absolute

core you crave so much, is cancelled out.

The tide has turned, you want to say. Look

how far the sea is. Let’s stop and rest, take

some time to measure what’s been left,

the strange shapes a leaving makes, the gift

of grief which is not an obedient dog or child

or something to beat to a corner and scold.

Look. The ashes are refusing to disappear. 

They keep blowing back in your face and hair.

They’re in the crosshatched years of your skin.

They’re in the ocean. They’re in the wind.