Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition 2012 - winner announced

Thomas Lodge reports:

The 600-strong Auckland Branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors organises occasional competitions for its members and it encourages well-known senior literary figures to lend their names to each event and to act as judges. For this year’s “Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition” well over 100 pseudonymous entries were received and from these entries a final list of 12 poems were selected to be read at the Friday meeting.

Kevin Ireland, (left, photo by Richard Robinson), commented that the final cut was made only after some tough decisions had been made and several deserving poems only narrowly missed out.

“I'm delighted to see that there are new names on the list as well as several well-known writers very much in form,” Kevin said.

His final list of twelve finalists was [in no particular order]:

Ila Selwyn ‘Matariki over the Manukau’, Maris O’Rourke ‘On Being Told I’m to be a Grandmother – a Villanelle’, Helen Sword ‘Journey of the bones’, Wensley Willcox ‘The Merry-Go-Round’, Alistair Paterson ‘Transit of Venus’, Sue Reidy ‘Out Look’, Sue Fitchett ‘Magpies still’, Sue Gee ‘Ghazal’, and Jenny Clay ‘Dying for Colour’.

He then chose two poems as runners-up that deserved special acknowledgment [and a bottle of wine]: Siobhan Harvey’s ‘The teacher’s teachers’, and Bernard Brown’s ‘Getting the Bird – Letter from Yalta’.

Which left Riemke Ensing as the outright winner, for a poem on love and loss, called ‘A different kind of Hemingway episode’. Kevin Ireland described how, “every word of it is crafted, poignant and precisely right. There is not even the shadow of a comma to spare. We are privileged to have this entry.”

All finalists read their poems to an enthusiastic audience, the largest Friday night attendance of the year.

The winner, Reimke Ensing, received $250 and an engraved plaque.

Footnote:

It was a special week for poet Ensing as she had been awarded the Lauris Edmond Prize for Poetry the week before at the Christchurch Writers Festival. The Bookman offers his warm congratulations to her achievements..