Buzzwords Poetry Competition Results
Main Prize:
Winner: Glimpsed on a Wednesday by Michael W Thomas
Runner up: Deathless Aphrodite by Olga Dermott-Bond
commended:
If you were a house by Rose Lennard
Haibun for The One That Got Away by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana
The Wedding Speech by E K Wall
Dead Oak Leaves by Tom Bryan
The Book of Lessons by Mary Hastilow
Gloucestershire Prize:
Winner: Harvest by Rose Lennard
Runner up: At the Rothko Retrospective – Ardith Brown
Judge’s report, with thanks to Rory Waterman
(scroll down to read winning poems)
GENERAL COMMENTS
It is daunting to receive a big box full of poems, knowing you must decide which of them you think deserve special recognition. I realise this is going to come across as a polite cliché, a covert apology for absences, and of course it is a standard utterance for any competition judge to make – but it also happens to be true. The process was made especially challenging by the fact that so many of the poems in that box were obviously accomplished, or at least wholly plausible, and would require careful reconsideration.
A challenge for any poetry judge is, or should be, to dispense to some extent with one’s own proclivities. In fact, my love of poetry is a love of poetries; but the poems in that box were, overwhelmingly, anecdotal first-person lyrics, clinging tightly to the safety-rail of the left margin. Some were moving, clever, witty – but, many times, the poems that demanded further attention were the ones that meaningfully experimented, formally or thematically, and achieved a kind of transformation in the process.
The commonest themes were the common counterparts of ageing, lament, and elegy. I wonder whether this is because my last collection included a long sequence concerning the grim last year of my father’s life, and some of the people submitting poems on related subjects assumed those would appeal to my empathy – which, of course, they do. Quite a few poems focused on current affairs, largely concerning conflict (specifically in the Middle East – never Ukraine, Sudan, etc), or geopolitical concerns related to that. I have sympathy with most of the perspectives offered in those poems, for what that is worth, but tend to regard a poem with which one can only really agree or disagree as a closed system. I fight shy of absolutes, but the best poems, to my mind, tend to have a knotty tension at their heart. Most of the overtly political poems included in this batch of submissions appeared to have worked out all their answers, even if they presented them ironically.
The winning and shortlisted poems, outlined below, were among those that demanded to be reread and reconsidered, that continued to work their way into my mind when – and sometimes long after – I’d put them down. Some moved me hugely. Others entertained me, or puzzled me a bit until I’d worked them out, and left me glad of the puzzlement. At one point, I had a longlist three times the size of the small batch of poems mentioned below, and could happily have waxed lyrical about those as well.
GLOUCESTERSHIRE PRIZE WINNER:
‘Harvest’
Of the many submitted poems concerning the terrible loss and presence of dementia, this was the one I found most affecting. The images are crisp and sometimes beautifully surprising but apt, such as those hands ‘redundant as oxen, or cracked leather harnesses’. This is a beautifully sad poem, perfectly, without sentimentality, evoking a circumstance terminally unresolvable,.
GLOUCESTERSHIRE PRIZE RUNNER UP:
‘At the Rothko Retrospective’
This is a vivid and surprising poem about connection, difference, and shared identity. The penultimate line, ‘but silence is more accurate’, is fully earned. I wondered only about the notion that ‘The world cannot change who we are’ (surely it often can and does), and the slightly awkward repetition of ‘my daughter’ in the opening stanza; nonetheless, this is an accomplished, emotionally complex poem.
MAIN PRIZE WINNER:
Winner: ‘Glimpsed on a Wednesday’
Apprehension and calm are odd and familiar bedfellows. This is a haunting, masterfully economical portrait of a man in quiet, helpless crisis. We know he has run from his problems for a moment of quiet reflection, if not prayer. We infer he might be haunted by regrets and thwarted opportunities: that memory of a woman crying, and of a son hanging up. We don’t know what the letter says, but to him it obviously means everything. The poem puts him in the centre of a void twice: as a body in an empty church; and as a name at the heart of a table – a name that, for now, obscures his fate, to which it is inextricably connected.
MAIN PRIZE RUNNER UP:
‘Deathless Aphrodite’
I hugely admire poems that tackle inherently emotive subjects without any hint of sentimentality, and move us for their simple honesty. This poem’s images are, in every case, ones I have to weigh up carefully in the court of my mind, ultimately moving on with a nod of recognition. The dash at the end, intimating what is left at once unresolved and febrile but in the past – is perfect. I’m less convinced by the two italicised words floating to the side of their parent lines: the latter needs a full stop, which would dampen the effect. Otherwise, this is superb: perfectly chilling and quotidian all at once.
FIVE COMMENDED POEMS:
‘If You were a House’
‘Chimney’d’ is misspelt, and the comma after ‘eyes’ is ungrammatical, but those minor and easily fixed flaws don’t prevent this from being an irresistible feast of vivid images.
‘The Wedding Speech’
What a wantonly outrageous depiction of what nobody should say or feel! My toes got closer to dislocation with every stanza. The author evidently enjoyed entering this man’s head.
‘Dead Oak Leaves’
The oak leaves are a fitting symbol, vividly reimagined. The first line of the final stanza should end with a comma, not a full stop, and there should probably also be a comma after ‘blackbird’, but otherwise the wistful final stanza is a perfect ending and tribute, sad and comforting, implying lives well lived.
‘The Book of Lessons’
This poem looks at once – and effortlessly, without hectoring – outwards at the world and inwards at the heart. The last line is reminiscent of R.S. Thomas at his finest.
‘Haibun for The One that Got Away’
This is a novel in a page. I admire the way the three poetic interludes each do very different things, how imagistic they are, and how the last of them leaves us with the tension of longing, of loss-in-presence. This is gutsy writing.
Poems
Main prize winner
Glimpsed on a Wednesday
Michael W Thomas
On a
weekday of uncaring weather,
in the
middle of the longest pew, a man sits.
A
spread of newbuilds beyond the lych-gate
are
busy with lost spanners by wheelie bins,
forgotten
lights, basketball hoops lopsiding.
Bits of
their juts and corners float
in the
man’s mind. But mainly he thinks
of the
letter which lies unopened on a table
in what
suddenly doesn’t feel like home.
The
future waits two-faced beneath the stamp.
Yes, it
will say, or no. He never thought
his
life would come to this, a revolving door
that
either whirls him through
or jams
him against glass cold to burning.
Around
him the church ticks and whispers
like
someone who warms themself
at the
words of made-up tales
to
prick the endlessness. Piece by piece
the
man’s years come melting in.
A
loofah bumps the side of a bath
the
morning he set off to stop being little.
Furls
of paper are lodged in his hand
saying
welcome aboard or leave your face
in the
box by the mat at the exit. Down the far
side
of
half-memory, a woman is crying. Here’s
the
luxuriant purr of a phone the last time
a son
hung up on him. It fills him now
as he
rises, as his eyes find the honesty box,
the
porch notice-board with its leaflets
of
dogged enterprise, hands across the sea.
Beyond
is the car with that offside tyre
he
really must change, the newbuilds,
the
dissolve of miles, the clothless fact
of the
table with his name in the middle
as
though the envelope were one of those bullets
they
talk of, that is made to come for you
however
long you’ve hidden,
however
much time and delirium
you’ve
heaped between it and your newborn skin.
Main prize runner up
Deathless Aphrodite
Olga Dermott-Bond
You
were the first, no, the only mother of my friends
to
leave. No one really talked about it, but the word affair
had
been spilt, so everyone had to pretend it wasn’t
there,
like the unease of a coffee-stain on pale carpet.
Deathless
Aphrodite, you ran away with your boss
from
the plastic factory, waited for days, weeks,
years
for your children to talk to you, the piggy bank
of
their hearts smashed open, the rubber stopper
that
had kept pennies and promises safe, rolled away,
lost,
maybe forever.
I
realise now you wouldn’t have been old at all,
and
that leave and run are far too simple to describe
transfiguration.
Some other life was over the fence,
far
away from football, the end terrace, the concrete
backyard
with an enormous dog in it, the marriage
narrow
as a cracked mirror. I am breathless, now,
with
admiration, and sadness and fear how you vanished
I can’t
remember the dog’s name, but I imagine him
the
night you fled, guarding the underworld, howling
to the
empty washing line –
Commended
If you
were a house
Rose
Lennard
you’d
be a small safe home
with
stormlight bathing
one
chimney’d gable.
You’d
grow from a land
made of
angles thrown
upon
each other, and rising
through
the dark lines of whin,
and
leaning, wind-whipped
grass,
a clear gold path
would
lead me to stand before you.
You’d
look at the morning
through
kind eyes, your squared gaze
would
not waver. When I say
you are
kind, I mean—
a tiny
window stands open
and
quaking in gales; you are respite
for the
returning swallows
ushering
African sunlight
like
benediction as they tuck their flight
at dusk
under your eaves,
dark
wings taut as bowstrings,
their
small heartbeats
fletched
beneath your roof
all
summer long.
Commended
The
Wedding Speech
E K
Wall
Standing
there, flushed with the wine
that he
had paid for, he began to speak
of the
baby girl laid in darkness, like a
quiet
sparrow, twenty-three years before;
of the
way her curls, flattened by birth,
tried
to stand, magnificently up, in her
lemon
crib, how she was longed for, how
he and
Mum had slid readily apart in
Love’s
trim nest in order to make room
for her
small wings to fit between them.
He
spoke movingly of the toddler years, of
sticky
fingertips pressed, insistently, across
their
home furnishings, their finances, their sleep,
their,
at times, argued-over babysitting rosters.
Slowly,
he told of how nothing was immune from
the
gradual grubbying of all that they had loved.
How,
apparently, arriving home
from
stressful days in the suited
office,
he was regularly met with
fissures
across his tended lawns; wide
enough
to fit a forearm, a spindly
rib-cage,
a traumatised heart.
Inside,
it was no better; with cracks
across
the sanitised work surfaces,
fractures
in the ‘family room’,
disturbances
in their fastidious bedroom.
He said
that if he could return her, reverse
her
quietly back up the birth canal, one
sunny
afternoon, ensure that she made it
safely
into to the still womb, slip half of her
along
the hopeful Fallopian tubes, swim the
other
part willingly home, then he would.
Come
the end, he was sobbing into
his
warm Proscecco, as he tried
to
describe the ingratitude, the cynical
insolence,
the higher priorities,
the
reneged-on-promises.
Finally,
he thanked the horrified
groom
for taking her far away from them,
for
freeing him and her mother, for giving
them
the chance to book the builders, begin
the
restorations, start the repairs and
overwrite
the massive damage done.
How
they would rise, jubilantly,
a
unified Phoenix
from
their grey ashes.
Commended
Dead
Oak Leaves
Tom
Bryan
You
have been dead one month
and I walk on oak leaves.
An ochre path that knew
your wheelchair.
You once remarked,
those fallen leaves look like those
Neanderthal cave handprints
made forty thousand years ago.
My walking cane finds gaps,
whilst hopping blackbirds suck
at drowned earthworms
looking like white string
in the rain.
Living blackbird living man,
dead leaf dead earthworm,
but this limping caveman
wants only your living hand.
Commended
The
Book of Lessons
Mary
Hastilow
Last night we almost lost the moon
behind a veil of smoke blown over from wildfires
in Canada. There’s medieval terror
in the old part of my brain. These days
I need my church timeless with history,
empty, clear of priests and congregation,
naked to its origins in innocence, intimate
and free. There is one such in Munsley
where beside the altar lies a book
that tempted me. Its soft brown skin
felt strong, settled by two hundred years
to a firm and lasting hold of all that is inside;
the pages flexible, the script evoking Coptic life
with something of the fire and hidden mystery
of graffiti - mostly black, its capitals embossed
in blood-red and fresh gold. I could weep
at how it tore at me yet seemed to love, the way
a bramble seeks to love a stranger with its
blackberries.
Commended
Haibun
for the One That Got Away
Alexandra
Corrin-Tachibana
Standing behind me, you’re the handsomest lad in the matriculation photo. Floppy haired and mischievous. I’m middle seat of the front row: slim, awkward. Unlearning my shyness. But you, you understood me. From the first time I split with my boyfriend. And got my hair cropped like a young Astrid Kirchherr. Walking towards me in the corridor, you told me I looked like a model. To hold my head high. And at the barn dance, you held me close, refusing to swap partners — feel free to use me to make him jealous.
punishment
on a motorway layby —
two black eyes
Thirty years later, in London, we discover both had a crazy-maker parent. Your dad, entirely self-absorbed, has passed on now. Mum still downplays my achievements — of course, it’s brilliant, isn’t it? she says after an hour, then returns to her soliloquy of ailments. How might it have been if I’d learned love in a different way? Would I have picked a kinder first lover? Instead of the abuser who wrenched the alarm clock socket from the wall. Asked to watch me take a shit in a bowl. To make love on the chapel altar.
shredded
into little pieces —
barn dance dress
And when I was leaving Oxford to teach, do you remember the ice creams at Wellington Square? Limbs stretched over summer grass. And a decade later, picnicking with our babies in Pitshanger Park. Me a struggling single mum. Koun na guzen of you sitting opposite me that day on the Tube to St. Paul’s, when I quit the Japanese firm. Telling me I deserved more. And after fifteen years of not seeing you, here we are again at Marble Arch. I’m plumper, menopausal. At times, feel invisible. You’re lean, well turned out.
kissing my cheek —
soft grey
of your cropped beard
Koun na guzen: Japanese for ‘happy chance’.
Gloucestershire Prize
Winner
Harvest
Rose
Lennard
As the
shadows slowly lengthen, I wonder why
I’ve
come. He doesn’t know me, doesn’t care,
just
sits staring over lawns as other patients,
bent
double, wobble past the roses, or doze
in
wheelchairs, swaddled in knotted bathrobes.
He has
on his best plaid shirt, buttoned
tight
beneath his jutting Adam’s apple;
clean
pressed denim jeans, leather boots,
like he
always insisted on. I’m glad the nurses
still
dress him this way, even now.
His
wide hands rest slack on his knees,
redundant
as oxen or cracked leather harnesses.
He has
his big-sky, far-horizon look, and I reckon
he’s
back at the old tin-roofed grain store,
endless
acres of wheat all around, and the air-con
breeze
on his lined cheek is the wind forever
breathing
prayer into every ear of grain, bowing them
beneath
the vast heavens and faraway thunderclouds,
the way
he too bowed to his helplessness
in the
face of drought, storms, locust—all he could do
was
fumble off his hat, humble in the sun’s omnipotence
and
wait for ripeness to come in its good time.
I
remember how he’d grate the old John Deere into gear,
and
rattle pass-by-pass over the cracked ground,
a dusty
halo of chaff in his wake, shaving the dirt
to a
hard stubble; and sometimes I’d ride beside him,
tasting
the grit of the land while the ripe gold kernels
gathered
in the hopper. Too young to recognise
his
plea, one man asking the prairie in its mercy
to
yield the grace of grain for him to heap each summer
in the
barn raised with his father and his brothers
when he
was green and they were still alive.
I want
to take him far from these tended lawns,
drive
across plains, over mountains folded in shadow,
until
we get to that place of forgiveness, or atonement.
I
wonder if the old barn is still standing. I get up,
reach
out and touch his shoulder. He does not turn.
Gloucestershire runner up
At the
Rothko Retrospective
Ardith
Brown
my
daughter knows.
She
sees exactly
what
she is looking at:
an
exhibition of skies and wombs.
Patterns
of sad angels
blurred
shapes and lines–
oil,
acrylic, both mediums hurt
the
same. But my daughter finds
pink
clouds forming for night,
and
oranges for morning sun.
“This
one should be in the bible,” she says,
and
this one reminds her
of
charred wood. She could
transcribe
colors, horizons
for all
the mute paintings.
Red,
Brown, and Black (1958)
stacks
three color fields
like
sedimentary rock.
I take
a photo of her palm
in
front to show the rich
shades
incorporate our being-
ness
and how her tone
and
mine become one
in the
glowing light
of a
million ways
he
thought about brown.
The
world cannot change
who we
are.
Might
and sorrow
won’t
separate us.
Our
blood intersects
on
purpose like a falcon
stoops
towards the field.
Give me
your hand, little girl
your
fear of bees
your dandelion smile
while the rose petals
part outside and Paris
bustles with integrated charm.
If she
asks, I will tell her
life’s baser stratigraphies–
the colors of her dark skin
my fragile fair face,
the longing for inclusion
in the human family
but silence is more accurate.
I listen to her voice.
Please note: Deadline extended to September 30th!
Sole Judge: Rory Waterman
who will read all entries
Closing date for entries. Midnight, 30th August 2025.
1st prize-£600. Runner-up- £300. 5 x commended-£50 each.
The Gloucestershire Prize- £200. (for Gloucestershire residents only).
Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, grew up in Lincolnshire, and lives in Nottingham. He has published four collections with Carcanet Press: Tonight the Summer's Over (2013), which was a PBS Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize; Sarajevo Roses (2017), shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize; Sweet Nothings (2020); and Come Here to This Gate (2024). He also co-edits New Walk Editions and writes regularly for the TLS, PN Review, and elsewhere. He is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Nottingham Trent University. Website: www.rorywaterman.com.
Entry fees: Postal entries; £4 per poem or 3 poems for £10.
Email entries will carry a surcharge for admin & printing costs. For postal entries, go to https://tinyurl.com/buzzwordspostalentry to download the entry form and instructions. Please download or print the form, do not type into it or it changes for everyone!
Proceeds of the competition will be used to fund ‘Buzzwords’, which is the longest running and most respected regular poetry gathering in Cheltenham.
Rules of Entry.
1. Poems should be no longer than 70 lines, not counting title or blank spaces.
2. No translations are accepted.
3. Poems must not have been previously published in print or on the internet.
4. Entries must be clearly typed on single side(s) of A4 paper in a clear font e.g. Arial 12 point. No curly or obscure fonts please. One poem per page.
5. Please leave a reasonable margin on the paper so that it is legible when printed and filed.
6. Handwritten entries will not be considered.
7. Entrants’ names should not appear on the poems. An entry form or email should accompany all entries and contain name, phone number, address, email address and titles of poems entered.
8. Entries must be received by midnight on 30th September
9. Entries for the Gloucestershire prize should mark their poems with ‘GL’ in the top right hand corner.
10. Gloucestershire, for the purposes of the competition, includes South Gloucestershire
11. Results will also be published on the Buzzwords Competition Website.
12. Prize winners will be contacted in October 2025; winners will be welcome to read their poems at the next ‘Buzzwords’
13. The judge’s decision will be final and we regret that no correspondence will be entered into.
14. Copyright will remain with the competitor, but Buzzwords reserves the right to publish the winning poems on the website, or to use them in publicity, for 12 months after the results are announced.
16. Poems may not be altered after entry.
Email entry instructions
Pay for the appropriate number of poems through the paypal button below. Please note, you do not have to have a paypal account and can use a debit card through paypal.
Send the poems, one per page, as an attachment to buzzwords.poetry@gmail.com . No name or identifying marks on the poems, except for ‘GL’ on the top right-hand corner if you are a Gloucestershire entrant.
In the body of the email, include the paypal receipt or transaction number, name, phone number, address, email address and titles of poems entered.
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