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Mary MacRae's first collection
published Oct 07 by Second Light Publications is now available from the site administrator. £7.95, cheque payable to Second Light, order from Anne Stewart, 20 Clovelly Way, Orpington, Kent, BR6 0WD. Tel 01689 811394. e-mail
May 09
Listen to Lotte Kramer reading Bilingual
1st Prize: Snow Hare, Eleanor Livingstone
Poem of the Month
Congratulations to this month’s winner, Elizabeth Rapp, for her poem Ice Garden. Our commended poets this month are Kate Rhodes (4th time in a row!), Denise McSheehy, Clare Crossman and Frances Green (2nd time).
I begged him for a garden,
hollyhocks and delphiniums.
He gave me grottoes of ice.
No birds sing here: only the sound
of moonlight dreaming snow at midnight.
I have become bone carved from ice.
I spin on a needle’s point,
watched by an angel huddled
in snow with icebound wings;
his stricken face as I twirl and twirl.
Those dark and subtle hands
have locked me in this kingdom,
this palace of death-white ice.
Floors are as slippery as his lies.
I wander through cubes of refracted light
where indigo and jade dance on my silver dress,
turn into birds of paradise.
But today a small brown bird
perched on my wrist, then
gave me a pomegranate seed
from his beak.
Poem: Winner of the A.A. Sanders poetry prize, 2000
Judge’s comment: I was told recently that the (competition) winner ‘leaps out at you̵. This is certainly the case here, the shiver up the spine, further inspection confirming a well-wrought and fully accomplished poem, no slip-ups. The form is well-managed and suits the message and delivery. You can feel the cold in this poem, and the movement, the trap and the anxiety, the release in an explosion of light and colour that takes your breath away, finishing with promise, strong and clear; the pomegranate seed and the intimacy of beak-to-lip bringing a whoosh of wider meaning and possibilities. What a great poem.
The following commended poems will be submitted again to next month’s competition:
The Winter Crown, by Clare Crossman
December 1952, by Frances Green
Salt, by Denise McSheehy
Wells-next-the-Sea, by Kate Rhodes
Lotte Kramer reads Bilingual, the overall winner of the first Poem of the Month competition. Listen here!
