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Mary MacRae’s second collection
published Aug 10 by Second Light Publications. See order form (pdf file) for discount offers
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Round 10, Month 11: the competition was judged this month by Anne Stewart. Her winning poem (an extract from Zones of Avoidance) is by Maggie Sawkins. The four commended poems are by Ruth Hanchett, Kaye Lee, Susan Jane Sims and Elizabeth Soule.
(a short extract)
I’m reading ‘The Confessions of an English Opium Eater’ –
I want to understand what drove my daughter out in the snow
with no coat or socks, in search of a fix.
I want to understand what divinity led her
to set up camp in the derelict ‘pigeon house’
after running out of sofas to surf.
*
I was a Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds girl myself.
I liked the way it made inanimate objects move,
until that day in Balham when my guy sang Rock n Roll Suicide
from a third floor window, and an Alsatian leapt
from the wood grain of the station door, and policemen
were penguins in disguise.
*
Tough Love. The mantra of the support group for those
beaten by their loved one’s addiction.
When I was busted at nineteen and the bedsit landlord
tipped my belongings onto the street, the last person
I would’ve turned to was my mother.
You’ve made your bed. Lie on it. Lie on it. Lie on it.
Poem published in Zones of Avoidance, 2013
Judge’s comment:
It would have been a tough call to beat Maggie Sawkins this month (though some came close), given that her poem is an extract from a work which won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and which I think should be offered to audiences in every city in the West… The work is faultless and the topic so important to address.
Endgame, by Ruth Hanchett
Hand in Hand, by Kaye Lee
Bearing Gifts, by Susan Jane Sims
December 2011, a Memory of August 1968, by Elizabeth Soule
