Ouse Washes Poetry Competition
In 2016 we ran a Fenland photography themed poetry competition in collaboration with the Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership. The prize-winning and commended poets are listed below, along with the names of the photographs which inspired their poems (and which you can view online here). The prizewinning poems were published in issue 3 of The Fenland Reed and you can also read them online here.
1st prize: Rachel Plummer – Spouse
Photograph: 'Sedge Warbler at WWT Welney' by Trevor Goodfellow
2nd prize: Elisabeth Sennitt Clough - Anguilla Anguilla
Photograph: 'New Bedford River' by Kelvin Brown
3rd prize: Emma Danes - Silhouettes
Photograph: 'Godwit’s silhouette' by Helen Calver
Highly Commended
Matt Barnard - Skating at Earith
Photograph: 'RSPB Ouse Washes' by Paul Constable
Josephine L. Martin - Girl, Lost
Photograph: 'Godwit’s silhouette' by Helen Calver
Commended
Jane Boxall - Exit Polls
Photograph: 'New Bedford River' by Kelvin Brown
Pat Borthwick - Out in the Fens
Photograph: 'New Bedford River' by Kelvin Brown
Anna Kisby - When the Earth was Flat
Photograph: 'Whooper Swan at WWT Welney' by Allan Dean
Alan Parkinson - Six Inches to the Fenland Mile
Photograph: 'New Bedford River' by Kelvin Brown
Robin Muers - In Parallel
Photograph: 'New Bedford River' by Kelvin Brown
Precious Makazha - Hello, Whooper Swan
Photograph: 'Whooper Swan at WWT Welney' by Allan Dean
Thank you to the photographers shortlisted in this year’s ‘Snap the Ouse’ competition, whose winning entries provided such inspiration for the poets.
Thank you to our judge, Clare Best, whose report you can read below. Thank you also to the Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership for sponsoring the competition through a Community Heritage Grant. Finally, thank you to all those who entered the competition - we had 126 entries from both local writers as well as writers from across the world. We were delighted to see such brilliant and diverse fenland-themed poetry.
Judge’s Report - Clare Best
It is a great privilege to be invited to spend time with other people’s poems and with the emotions that inspired them. Because these poems are associated with fenland subjects photographed for the Snap the Ouse Photography Competition, I had a powerful sense of having been in those landscapes and spaces. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of poems about reflections, sky/water, birds (especially swan, heron, sedge warbler, godwit), paths, portals to other worlds, parallel lines, sunsets. Consistency of setting meant that, more than ever, poems really had to say something fresh in order to stand out. I admired those poems that tackled historical or narrative fenland themes – these were interesting and daring. But in the end the three poems that stayed intact in my head from one reading to the next, and the next and the next, were those that evoked the beauty, strangeness and singularity of the landscape but without the writer/writing attempting to control or own it – instead letting the place speak. This is far easier said than done.
Spouse (1st prize) is confidently voiced and holds the reader’s attention from the first line. The violence implicit in this poem is both shocking and realistic, and the feeling of regret is visceral, palpable. I found the extended metaphor utterly convincing – this is a poem that works on several levels. And it ends with such a beautiful image. Congratulations!
Anguilla Anguilla (2nd prize). I enjoyed the boldness and physicality of this poem and its form, quite apart from the insights it offers into river and eel life. The sound world is gorgeous and surprising, the images work hard, and hooray for the skilled and economical use of descriptors.
Silhouettes (3rd prize). A tightly worked short poem, showing how much can be achieved in twelve lines. Well judged images. Great choice of verbs. A very satisfying piece – its precision allows the reader to retain a strong sense of the speaker whilst experiencing the central image clearly.
Skating at Earith (Highly Commended). This poem really captures the sense of disorientation and transience that are typical of fenland landscapes. It also works well as a lyrical evocation of historical time, with that wonderful line at its core: ‘Each man can see his father down the road.’
Girl, Lost (Highly Commended). A strange and haunting piece, this is a true elegy. That one colour – the yellow of the eel-catcher’s lung, somehow lingers throughout the poem and comes back fully in all the ‘l’ and ‘w’ sounds of the final stanza.
About the judge
Clare Best has been a bookbinder, a bookseller and an editor. Excisions, her first full collection, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, 2012. Other poetry publications include Treasure Ground (HappenStance 2010), Breastless (Pighog 2011) and CELL (Frogmore Press 2015). Clare’s prose memoir was runner-up for the Mslexia Memoir Competition 2015. Springlines, her collaborative project with the painter Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis, explores hidden and mysterious bodies of water across the South of England – work from this project was shown at Glyndebourne in summer 2015 and there will be further exhibitions at galleries in Tunbridge Wells and Lymington over the next two years. Clare is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing for the Open University, and in 2015 was one of two Writers in Residence at the University of Brighton. www.clarebest.co.uk Clare blogs at selfportraitwithoutbreasts.wordpress.com
