- Tuesday, 6 April 2010 - 7:30pm
- Tuesday, 25 May 2010 - 7:30pm
Poetry Competition
Here are all the poems from 2008, 2007, 2006 (in PDF format).
East Coker Poetry Competition 2009
Jane Williams of Wells has won the East Coker Poetry Competition 2009.
Her winning Poem 'Space' was based on a tragic incident near Wells. Anthony Watts, our Judge, says about this poem:-
Space (‘Winter has its own comfort…’) by Jane Williams
"‘Space’ in this poem doesn’t mean rockets and stars and it isn’t about inner space either. This is the space of absence – the space left by a human being who is no longer there. Someone has either jumped or fallen over a cliff – I’m not sure whether this is a suicide or an accident, but I don’t think it matters. The point is that they have left a ‘new space’ in the world. The poem uses very economic means – the idea of a space – a human-shaped space, if you like - to express both the value and the precariousness of human life - and also the indifference of nature. A particularly nice touch is the way the moon daisies and yellow ragwort soon recover from being stood on by someone who’s no longer there - while the falcon still goes about its cruel business as though nothing had happened. A well-deserved winner."
Four other poems were 'commended' and here are Anthony Watts' comments:-
A pause on my walk - by Anne Gullo
"I do a bit of walking myself and I like the way this poem captures the sense of exhilaration and renewal you can get just from being out in the fresh air. I was rather puzzled at first by the fact that full stops are used instead of spaces between all the words, but David later explained that they were there because the poet’s space bar had stopped working! However, by that time I had already commended the poem – for its language and content, not for its creative use of full stops (which a less discerning judge might have praised as an exciting, innovative Avant-garde technique!) I like the sense of spaciousness and elation – particularly as seen in the last lines."
Space - a Haiku by Peter Farr
"This is a neat haiku. It’s a strict haiku – 5-7-5. Not all haiku in English stick to the strict syllable count: this one does. It gives you in an economic 8 words a picture of a rocket taking off and going into orbit. There’s a sense of accomplishment followed by tranquillity in that final line."
Space - by David Cloke
"There’s not much I can say about this one. It doesn’t really lend itself to in-depths criticism: it’s just a funny and entertaining poem. It’s a good laugh - and we can all do with a good laugh. I particularly like that prophetic ‘one small step’ taken by the 5-year-old aspiring astronaut - and little touches like the ‘small fruitcake’ pencilled at the top of the letter."
Space - by Ellie Madden-Crosby
"I commended this poem for its originality. ‘Space’ as a theme, tends to evoke the world of stars and rockets and astronauts etc. – and that’s how most of the entrants interpreted it. This poem, on the other hand, is more about inner space – the scary, vertiginous feelings you might get from trying too hard to contemplate your own existence. Who’s looking at what? It is, as the poem says, like looking at your reflections in two facing mirrors. I like the phrase ‘comfortable with edgelessness.’ I’m not sure what it means, but I can make some guesses. A thought-provoking poem."
All these poems, and the other entries can be read below:-
Entries 2009
A pause on my walk
A deep, deep breath
I drink the new air down
Suck it up, let it fill me, inflate me,
Scour those secret corners of self doubt,
Erase the layers of criticism
And polish the outside from the inside
Until I am obliged to spread wide my arms
Not to encompass, but to allow possession
By this full, this rich emptiness
by Anne Gullo
A Space Villanelle
A poem about space – a simple thing,
Easy in modern verse
You would have thought.
You need not rhyme, or scan, or punctuate,
Or even make sense in
A poem about space – a simple thing.
Myriad meanings has the small word "space";
A world of poetry
You would have thought,
Yet I am lacking inspiration for
The words to celebrate
A poem about space – a simple thing.
As spoken music, verse should flow and sing,
Please each and every ear
You would have thought,
And echo through the immensities of space.
Amid the whirling stars it's hard to write
A poem about space – a simple thing
You would have thought.
by Anne Bingley
Breathing
Part 1. The Outward Journey.
Stepping out of the house on a brisk April day,
I make my way uphill and through the shadowed woods
Where treetops hiss and sway, across the deserted road
And open fields, cresting the summit, confronting the wind
And acres of air. The endless greens take their eternal breaths.
Without constraints, I'm free as a bird and revelling in space.
The wide blue bowl of sky is washed by sudden rain,
Then, clean and rinsed, inverted, left to drain.
I fill my lungs with rich spring air, heady as champagne.
Part 2. The Inward Journey.
I fill my lungs with April air, cool and fresh.
It's sweetness flows down the windpipe, the trachea,
Divides, goes into narrower bronchia, smaller spaces,
Ever smaller, thinner bronchioles and tiny alveoli.
The last barrier is reached, a cell wall, and then –
Oxygen bursts into the blood, reddens the haemoglobin,
Enlivens, invigorates, fizzes through arteries and veins.
Breath-filled, it brings life to muscles, heart and brain.
Life – to savour one glorious breath again.
By Iona Lambe
Dreaming in Space
If I were an alien from outer space,
Nothing would inspire me to join the human race
With its drought and famine wars and greed
Why should some humans have more than they need
They all have space to use at their leisure
But many abuse this God given treasure
The innocent bird soars high in the sky
If I were an alien so might I
I would float in the air as free as that bird
But dreaming of course it's really quiet absurd
For when I look in the mirror
What do I see, just a reflection
of little ol' me…….
by Barbara Chatwin
Space
For modern verse there is nothing worse
Than engaging in metre and rhyme.
It is seen as a bore, but in truth it takes more
In both concentration and time.
To compose in blank verse can be very effective,
But rambling prose is even worse when it’s dull
Self-indulgent invective.
I need space for myself, I need space to be ME,
I am the great I AM ,
I must do my own thing, be my very own man,
I need to be free, to be free.
My life is my own; I need no other,
My spirit must fly with the wind and the tide,
Give me lonely places with ever more spaces
And my own precious ego to ride.
Yes, we all need to spread our wings in flight,
And be free from others clowning;
Give me space to expand and to hell with the hand
Held out for the man who is drowning.
But when we are old, it’s a different matter,
Being lonely with lots of space
Is being the long distance runner
With only the wind in your face.
by Geoffrey Cradock
Space
Forget the fearful,earthly frets and aches.
Let blueness lure you to a future place.
Per Ardua ad Astra's what it takes.
Just heed the spangled darkness for your sakes.
Vega entranced my childish upturned face.
Forget the fearful,earthly frets and aches.
And feel the force and might that Heaven wakes.
Enskied, the legends Ancients used to trace.
Per Ardua ad Astra's what it takes.
Look up at the infinity He makes:
The firmament,omneity yea,Space.
Forget the fearful,earthly frets and aches.
Beware the sometime apocalyptic quakes.
Volcanic tragedies,polluted race.
Per Ardua ad Astra's what it takes.
May Space engulf us when the mayhem breaks.
And grant us gentle going full of Grace
Per Ardua ad Astra's what it takes.
by Margaret Fisher
Space
From the tiny dark spot of space
in the back of my eye
bred an infinite space
beyond madness
and I looked back into
the mirror facing mirror
facing mirror
and saw myself reflected endlessly.
I got lost in the space and couldn't find the edges
(I felt quite sick)
and saw the young man with
schizophrenia who felt so
comfortable with the edgelessness.
I felt even more disparate, dissipated, deranged.
(I didn't even know how
this poem would end.)
by Ellie Madden-Crosby
High Flight
And while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee 1922 – 41
Late afternoon, sitting outside my cottage
feathered finger s of the tree next door point upwards.
A collared dove soars from its topmost branch
like a blessing descending.
I stare into the richness of the clear-blue August sky
seeking the sanctity of space.
Dusk -lit the tree next door drapes its silhouette
across crystal dimming heavens,
expressionless.
Imperceptibly the evening star shines.
I watch the lights of a plane
furrowing the brow of heaven.
Perhaps only a pilot praying in war torn fear
is privileged to see the face of God?
Night gathers, I gaze into the growing deep, blue- dark,
observing the lonely planet rising above the tree,
now an uncertain ghost.
Stars emerge glitter by glitter.
Earthbound, I see angels;
host upon host of fiery eyed folk
fixed in the movement of time and space.
Messengers and guardians
aeons beyond any pilot’s touch.
I light candles in the courtyard,
infinitesimal pinpricks of earth light;
but I am certain that the angels will see them
and know that I am watching them
watching me.
Night black, ghosts gone.
Plane lights that last only the span of a pilot’s life,
barely illumine against the abundance of stars.
Meanwhile the shining planet slips below the horizon,
and I commune with countless angels
Peace-bright.
by Anne Lovejoy
S P A C E
Scientists Planned Apollo Crew Experience
Physics Aeronautics Chemistry Entwined
Astronauts Conversed Excitedly
Chaos Erupted
Explosion!
by Diana Turton
Space
Saturn Five Rising
Second Stage Separating
Silent Orbiting
by Peter Farr
Small Town Summer
This is the season of botch jobs; buzz of borrowed drills,
a swift climax of hammer blows; of uncles in overalls
painting the chipped door jambs without an undercoat;
a season of parched and dusty children slowly reverting
to their natural state, colonisers of wasteland niches
within sight of aggregating supermarket chains,
while on market stalls plums, dark as contusions,
swollen in the heat, feel their own skin split from lack of space
and leak a sticky juice onto warped wooden crates;
and in the lunch hour we taste the sweet
disturbing smell of last week’s meats
reheated in communal bins or by the bus station
receive a rank and pungent greeting radiating
from sheets of corrugated iron baking
in the sun. Through glinting office block windows
we catch views of roads that end abruptly
in fields, where an old woman in a polyester pinny scratches the dry earth,
and below us a cracked egg cooks on the concrete.
Later a red hot symposium erupts on the tennis courts;
a vodka bottle suddenly smashed across the baseline
and small bright embers glow together through the night in wild applause.
by Frances Bathgate
Space: a meditation
Asked to find space in my day
To write some words on space
I found I could not find the space.
Events crowd on apace
But the space between them remains elusive.
Perhaps there is no such thing as space.
Galaxies in their unending motion race
Through a carapace of emptiness – the vast
In which once hung an infinitely small and heavy marble
Preternaturally hot, but scarcely intrusive
In the abundant nothingness that robed it round.
After the bang, all things burst forth to blow
Across the emptiness and make it glow,
Cooling at last no doubt
And... spacing out.
But note: there is still a good deal more of what isn’t than what is.
Nothingness increases. What is remains obstinately static.
An un-increasing cache of lumber in an ever-widening attic
Pitted with holes, that suck what passes
Into some other place
To meld and jar with other masses,
Where strange dark matter or more space
Await the unwary.
And yet the matter’s volume cannot not vary.
So what do I derive
From the slight corner where I briefly thrive?
Across the void, essence must seek one face,
One voice, one touch –
And only one:
Yes, in the summer fields by the Gard, I have seen that much:
Seen sunflowers by the springs that form their race
Swing round on stems that yearn toward the sun.
Thus all that are, like them, for good or ill
Seek for that space that only One can fill,
And since I am, it follows I am such:
This is my space, enough being here to hold me -
As I look out, enfold me.
by Colin Bailey
Space and Time and God and Stuff
I’m told are now just near enough.
My space, your space, our space all,
Into no metrication fall.
So no boundaries mark our personal space;
Its coverage correlates exactly to our state of mind.
On occasion when in a certain mood,
Vast plains and pastures are needed where no-one may intrude.
At other times, when a more needy humour prevails,
Our personal space disappears within
And a hug from a friend marks our space as our skin.
Humankinds place in the cosmos is likewise ill defined.
And no geometric marks our space and time.
Each new discovery seems to change what is true,
And the shifting goal posts of our understanding are now just stuff anew!
by David Johnson
Space
had beckoned him since the age of five
That one small step he took with a shilling in his pocket
to the shop with the rocket in the window
and though it had taken forty years and a change of name
Gagarin Armstrong Blenkinsop was finishing his dream
though his neighbours called it something else
on the complaint form sent to environmental health
Built by hand, sponsorship having been politely refused
by Black & Decker, though it's true they were amused
by the Union Jack tied to the colander that formed the rocket's nose
Nervous neighbours in Wordsworth Avenue were eventually advised
by the council that home made rockets that comprised
of more than wood and paper could not be recycled at the local tip
there was no dedicated skip and the matter would be referred quite soon
to a sub committee that would meet…… perhaps next June
The harassed police were happy that the rocket was neither speeding
nor failing to comply with the weights and measures act and not wishing
to take a side, their hands, so to speak, were handcuffed
Air traffic control, advised of the date and the path the rocket would take
filed the letter, with a small fruitcake penciled at the top right-hand corner
But the great day finally came; Rule Britannia blared
as the blue touch paper flared in the quiet suburban air
and with a terrifying roar (terrifying that is, to the dog next door)
'Bostik 1' lifted off with Gagarin strapped to his Vauxhall Astra seat
and in twelve seconds reached an altitude of eighty seven feet
before plunging backwards to the cemetery, deranging a row of petunias
Gagarin was not hurt, as a plywood panel from MFI
failed to make it to the sky, landing him in a privet hedge nearby
The Press were ecstatic. Here was a failure of Galactic proportions
A new Eddie the Eagle. The little man who boldly goes
The Dunkirk spirit. Officialdom given a bloody nose
The Council shamefaced, renamed the street 'Sputnik View'
And at great expense, wrote off the cost of the petunias too
by David Cloke
Space
Space is a conundrum,
A mighty paradox.
Not just a far infinity
But resting in us, forming galaxies
Of cells and milky ways of nuclei.
Space is that small divide of shape
Man, mountain, tree, that makes us who we are
Defining matter as light may the dark.
Space is more than us:
It is the radiant movement between clouds,
The point the painter has not placed his brush,
The seemingly unnoticed pause
Between two notes,
The moment held before a birth
Cries into life;
The place where no thing is
And yet without which that which is
Could not appear in all its glory manifest.
Without the grace of space our love
Would not exist;
No touch, no homing of the heart,
No catch of breath, no sigh
No union, just a darkened density
Of mass more cold than death.
And yet, conversely, could it be
That as we gaze towards infinity
The outer reaches of our inner space
Stretch, claw and touch
The edges of that place where no thing is,
And find affinity?
Confirm the fact that shape is earthed
And finite, while we in essence
Seek a formless space
And vast eternity?
by Gaie Vickers
Space
Stars, Galaxy's
Rockets, Astronauts
Floating, Milky Way
Enormous
Never Ending
Infinitive Space
Meteor showers
Planets, Sun
Melting Mars
Valiant Venus
Energetic Earth
Amazing Mercury
Jammy Jupiter
Saturn's Rings
Unbelievable Uranus
Nice Neptune
Puny Pluto
Space
by Francesca Turton
Space
Space was a place
Where the human race
Would finally face
The eternal silence that had so frightened Pascal.
Armed with the treasures of the enlightenment
We would at long, weary, last
Turn our backs on
The burning of witches at the stake,
The torturing of heretics,
Slaughtering each other for the ambitions of tyrants.
But instead we fell for the new lies:
That there must always be a return on investment;
That all enterprise, however noble, must be subject to mere commerce.
As our dreams choked in the old ambitions of new tyrants,
Benighted once more, we slithered comfortably back,
To the burning, the torture, and the slaughter.
Surrounded yet by infinite space,
Where the stars still shine down,
Appalled.
by Ian White
The Earth Will Creak
When will the earth become obsolete in its turn?
When we shall cast death's significance to a hungered mind.
When logic's bitter knowledge will no longer burn,
When our thrumming pulse, to love, is blind.
Once upon a future date, the earth will groan –
Will creak and grind as she rotates beneath the blinking stars.
You must keep safe her slumbering throne,
Murmur and weep onto the crooked stars.
We live upon the eye of the universe's elder,
And on one metallic day, our comfort will be not thoughts.
But imaginings of how natures course was the welder,
Of a new born world and the wilderness of sweet supports.
The breathing flourish of freedom's rich day,
When buffaloes thundered over rain sheeted ground.
There was no possibility of a sanctuary for the stray,
The burning tiger roars, through shadows, surround.
"A warning for you, my eager heart,
For when my breath runs dry within my throat…
The people of Earth will tear love apart,
And you must cling to what God here wrote."
by Bethany Davies
(untitled)
There is a space inside your head
Where you can go when life crowds in .
Walk up a hill and breathe the air,
And soon that space will grow within.
by Nell Stephens
Space
Winter has its own comfort:
late dawn and early dusk
filter the light,
offer camouflage.
Some mid-summer mornings
the sun’s rays are too bright;
but who can say what brought him,
squinting, to that dangerous edge
where a woman walking the high footpath
heard a cry, then saw opened up suddenly,
a new space.
On the empty ledge
moon daisies and yellow ragwort
soon straighten;
peregrine falcons still
wheel above the space he left,
using the cruel transparency of light,
brimful to the quarry’s edge,
to hunt and kill.
by Jane Williams