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Bridport Prize 2006

   2006 Poetry Judge - Lavinia Greenlaw

The things I was looking for as I made my way through the entries were either abstract or technical: surprise, precision, imagination and risk; and a proper attentiveness to and use of cadence, lineation, enjambement, metrics, etc. Yet the word that came to me when a poem stood out was alive: that it was a breathing, palpable, energised, shifting creature.

There's a lot of dead poetry about. Some of it is beautifully made. There's poetry which seems to be written to reassure people who don't like poetry, who feel nervous and bored at the thought of it and are delighted to be offered something that sounds like poetry (portentousness, complex) and yet slips down easily and settles the soul. In this age of proficiency there are poems made from creative-writing kits and those whose explosiveness is no more than a tiny fizz of domestic epiphany, like a hangover remedy dissolving in water.


A poem has to become more than that of which it is made. As Robert Lowell said, "A poem is an event … not the record of an event." In that sense, it has to take on a life of its own and so, yes, has to be alive. I've dismissed poetry that is beautifully made and nothing else, but a good poem begins in the beauty of its making. I am not using 'beauty' reflexively. Beauty is a vital part of a poem in terms of harmony, grace and proportion, in the adjustments and balances that bring it into being, that make it work and give it what it needs to run itself. This has as much to do with meaning as with music. In this age of broken metre, there is often too little attention paid to the line - how it works within itself as well as in its place. Much of the intrigue of a poem lies in the way in which its lineation isolates and lights a particular word or a phrase.

I have talked about what I was looking for and what I wasn't looking for, and would now like to say something about what I found. The poems that came first, second and third were provocative. I thought: Oh I like this! But does it stand up? That's a bit risky … Does that big word earn its place? … It sounds good but … Is that just being grand or romantic or does it make absolute sense? … These linebreaks, how do they add meaning? … I like the way it subverts its own argument but what does it add up to in the end? Are there just glittery pieces all over the floor? How do they work aloud?

None of the top three winners are long, but each contained enough complication to repay several re-readings, and revealed more each time. They caught my eye, drew me in, made me want to argue with them and having won me over, pleased me more than some I liked on first reading but which quickly revealed their limits and flaws.

The winner, "Panegyric", is a poem with such a singular and coherent voice that its complexities are worn lightly. It risks collisions of concrete and abstract, actual and figurative in ways that are illuminating rather than muddying. The panegyric is traditionally a public address, the fulsome, extensive praise of a person or people, and here it is being used to praise a forcefulness which is as brutal as it is joyful, and whose logic exposes the limits of human judgement. The poem's language ranges across the full compass of such feeling, and each line is properly balanced and measured.

I'm wary of poems about writing poems, yet "The Same Old Figurative" won me over with its argument, and the way in which its voice is shaded by the clever placing and misplacing of the poem's parts. A poem should be in part a disturbance of language, and the point of that disturbance should be to reveal. This poem uses subtle shifts of meaning, agitated further by lineation and cadence, to amplify and encompass its complicated subject. It risks the Poetic with its talk of hearts and music, but does so to insist on what matters without irony or comic relief. Like "Panegyric", it has something real to say, something hard to be pin down but absolute.

The third-prize winner, "she took a fall", is a fine example of form working in extremis in order to serve an extreme subject. It is a remarkable distillation of shock, confusion, helplessness, action and reaction. The hurly-burly of the entire emergency is caught in the fractured language and the ways in which observations and perspectives trip over one another.

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