No pictures, frost or footnotes in your submissions please, begs National Poetry Competition judge Nick Laird
Subtle observations … Patricia McCarthy, winner of the National Poetry Competition Photograph: Kevin Lake for the Poetry Society
I spent a few weeks recently reading through 10,000 of the 13,000 entries for the National Poetry Competition. Many were very good; a few hundred were excellent. Of those, I picked my final 50, as did my fellow judges Vicki Feaver and Bill Herbert and, over the course of a long day, we whittled down our combined 150 to a few prize-winning poems, which you can read, and read about, at the National Poetry Competition website.
The winning poem, by Patricia McCarthy, which comes at its subject, the Great War, in a tender, oblique fashion, convinced us with its quiet technique and subtle observations. Jane Draycott's runnerup was dense, mysterious, and swept from a London living room across the whole world. John Freeman's third-place entry was neatly constructed, both love poem and elegy.
It was heartening to see poetry take a central role in so many people's lives, to read the evidence that thousands of people frequently sit alone for an hour or two, trying to capture or clarify something in words. Still, reading the poems was also, sometimes, depressing. There were poems that weren't good, and they tended to have features in common: a lack of control or occasion, a lack of linguistic felicity or surprise. A judge must be hard-hearted, looking for anything that will let him drop the poem into the No box. He wants to fault the poem.
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The winning poem, by Patricia McCarthy, which comes at its subject, the Great War, in a tender, oblique fashion, convinced us with its quiet technique and subtle observations. Jane Draycott's runnerup was dense, mysterious, and swept from a London living room across the whole world. John Freeman's third-place entry was neatly constructed, both love poem and elegy.
It was heartening to see poetry take a central role in so many people's lives, to read the evidence that thousands of people frequently sit alone for an hour or two, trying to capture or clarify something in words. Still, reading the poems was also, sometimes, depressing. There were poems that weren't good, and they tended to have features in common: a lack of control or occasion, a lack of linguistic felicity or surprise. A judge must be hard-hearted, looking for anything that will let him drop the poem into the No box. He wants to fault the poem.
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