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Winning Poems for March 2008 First Place I could almost choose this poem for its one line, "we whose homes and lovers have blown like scarves over the world's edge," but there is much more to like, here. The poem is beautifully controlled by its four-stress lines--it is a carol, after all--but within the lines, many wonderfully strange turns. The tension of the darkness of the two people's lives set against the ringing alleluias of the season does not include one maudlin line or image. "Midnight snaps shut, a padlock against hope." Metaphor is smart in this poem. This poem is smart and polished. --Fleda Brown Second Place This poem lives up to its fierce title. It moves flawlessly into the craving, the mad passion that "gorges itself,/ and then slips to some cave apart/ to gnaw the bones of memory." I am in the presence here of pure energy, no blunder of language in the way between us. I love "rain beating/ like the frantic hands of a jealous wife," which may inform the poem, leaves us to guess that it does. Then the last stanza, which pulls us out of the immediate, tells us this passion is long past, but not at all, really. It's after the speaker "like a pack of hounds." What apt metaphors! --Felda Brown Third Place I pick this poem because of its affecting unpretentiousness. When one begins a poem with T. S. Eliot, it's not easy to be unpretentious. This small poem is like the tapping of a drum. The poem is about sound: the "litanies of London," and rhythms "that would stun Rimbaud and Donne." Just when I think I know how the poem will sound, the next line does something different. The poem pulls off its abstractions. It almost gets lost in them, but the plain lines, the plain language, keep my feet on the ground. Who would think that a poem could get away with "interface/ with "the soul's active ingredients" without floating into space? Yet when I get here, I'm nodding my head, listening to the drum, and it's okay. --Felda Brown Honorable Mention Honorable Mention Honorable Mention Honorable Mention Honorable Mention |
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