The Winners:
1st: 'The Load' by Jack Thacker (Bristol) - £2000 and a week at Cyprus Well
2nd: 'The Year You Turned Into A Fish' by Joanne Key (Cheshire) - £250
3rd: 'Walk A Mile/ Stepping Out' by Liz Breslin (Hawea Flat, NZ) - £100
Jack Thacker is the winner of this year's Charles Causley International Poetry Competition for his poem 'The Load'. Jack grew up on a farm in Herefordshire. He lives in Bristol, where he is studying for a PhD on contemporary poetry and agriculture at the Universities of Bristol and Exeter. His poetry has appeared in PN Review, The Clearing and The Literateur and has been commissioned by the Bristol and Bath Festival of Nature and the Bristol Nature Channel. He is the co-founder of the University of York-based poetry magazine Eborakon and is a board member of the Bristol Poetry Institute.
Making my final decision about the poetry prize, I wanted to balance my admiration for risk and the spirit of adventure with my liking for poems that obey their own laws of organisation. I felt ‘The Load’ managed to get the best of both these worlds, and in the process to achieve something at once clear and suggestive.
First Prize
Listening to your recording
crackle away like kindling,
my mind becomes the barn:
the sun reaches in through
a single door, the floor –
years’ worth of dry muck
and straw – is kicked and
raised to dust by the strut
of cloven hooves, and when,
from out of the shadows,
your voice arrives, I can
hear the scream of the bull
echoing along the beams,
glimpse its shuddering hide
through gaps in the steam.
Standing on the threshold
the men are shaking their
heads. That’s when you –
when you were sixteen –
vault the gate and stride
towards the tonne of stress
and muscle. I can read
the surprise on their faces
as you reach out your hand
and loop your finger through
its nose-ring – so easy –
like I might thread a
cassette-tape with a pencil,
winding back the spool
to listen again to you
as you calmly lead the bull
away and into the light.
We are delighted to announce that this year’s entries to the poetry competition came from a diverse range of poets, both established and emerging. We noted a considerable increase in the number of international entries, and the panel of shortlisting judges – Dr Kym Martindale, Dr Luke Thompson, and Charlotte Walker, writer-in-residence at Cyprus Well, spent a day at Charles’ house reading and discussing the poems before selecting a shortlist to send to Head Judge, Sir Andrew Motion.
We look forward to welcoming the first prize winner Jack Thacker to Cyprus Well for a week long residency opportunity to work on his writing and explore North Cornwall. Awarded second and third place were Joanne Key and Liz Breslin whose poems will be published here this week.
Joanne Key lives in Crewe in Cheshire where she writes poetry and short fiction. Her poems have appeared in various places online and in print including The Poetry Review, Bare Fiction, The Interpreter’s House, Prole, And Other Poems, York Mix, Clear Poetry, Three Drops From a Cauldron, and Ink, Sweat and Tears. She won 2nd prize in the 2014 National Poetry Competition. She has yet to publish a first collection.
As a child in the UK, Liz Breslin memorised Charles Causley’s poems, sitting in the bath. She now lives in Hawea Flat, New Zealand and writes poems, plays, stories, articles, and a fortnightly column for the Otago Daily Times. She also edits, parents, partners, skis badly, gardens sporadically, coordinates a school student volunteer programme, drinks too much coffee and loves getting her feet wet.
Liz’s first collection of poems, Alzheimer’s and a spoon, will be published by Otago University Press in 2017. She is comfy on the page and the stage, was second runner up in the 2014 New Zealand Poetry Slam in Wellington and did an audience-response poem at the 2016 TEDx Queenstown. Liz took part in the ‘52’ project in 2014, where she discovered new voices and fantastic practices. Her poems can be found in Landfall, Café Reader, Takahē and other places in NZ, overseas and online, as well as brewing in the bath. Poems give her hope, connection and stoke. www.lizbreslin.com
We have also selected five highly commended poets to receive mentoring from a Cyprus Well writer in residence and a small cash prize in recognition of their talents, they are:
‘A Gap In The Field’ (Victor Tapner)
‘Portrait Of Us As Snow White’ (Theresa Lola)
‘Le Nez’ (Jill Munro)
‘A Romp in Brompton Cemetery’ (Tony D’Arpino)
‘The Earth of Cumberland is my Earth’ (Kerry Darbyshire)
We would also like to give a special thank you to Dr. Barry Helme for kindly sponsoring the International Poetry Competition and aiding the Trust. We thank all those who entered and send our congratulations to the winners. We look forward to sharing the winning poets and poems with you in the coming weeks and hearing what you think of them.