Winning and selected poems published in the competition anthology.

Adjudicator: Rory Waterman

Highly Commended:
 

• ‘The Swallows have Returned to the Barn’ by Thea Smiley

• ‘Way to go’ by Richard Side

 
Commended:
 

• ‘High Fliers’ by Alison Allen

• ‘How I do the grieving a few years on’ by Kathy Pimlott

• ‘My mum accidently leaves me a seven-minute message on WhatsApp’ by Jeanette Burton

 
Selected:
 

• ‘What Mothers Do’ by Sam Szanto

• ‘Who Lives Behind this Door’ Laura Jenner

• ‘Lately, she’s been seeing things differently’ by Evie Salmon

• ‘Lycopodium’ by Helen Overell

• ‘Time of Day’ by Damen O’Brien

• ‘Grievance’ by Ian Heffernan

• ‘Porch With Weathered Angels’ by Ian Royce Chamberlain

• ‘The Lavant’ by Chris Hardy

• ‘Postcard from Poland’ by Jenny Hodson

• ‘Shaving an old Friend’s Head for the First Time’ by Peter Raynard

• ‘No Q and A’ by Adrian Buckner

• ‘Another day, placed like a gift at the door of dawn’ by Julia Stothard

• ‘ The Gatecrashers’ by Christopher Horton

• ‘Signage’ by Elsa Braekkan Payne

• ‘You feel it all’ by Rachael Hill    *Please see corrected version below

• ‘hummingbird | spaceman | boy’ by Mary Mulholland

• ‘Facing It’ by Siobhan Ward

• ‘Between Stations’ by Howard Wright

• ‘The Constitutional’ Howard Wright

• ‘The foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ by Derek Coe

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We apologise for the incorrect version of Rachael Hill's poem in the anthology. The correct version is reproduced below:

​

You feel it all

 

poised beyond the door; afterdark and time

is a bird at roost. A tram hum-whirrs past

road’s end, the mini suns of streetlamps drip

burnt gold on the pavement, smoke twirls lazy,

stars bleed the silent sky - and stillness. But

your body pulsing with impossible

life, every moment, atom, particle,

star, you fizz with chemical reactions,

with lightyears and nebulae remnants; how

the pressure at the sun’s centre equals

one hundred billion earth atmospheres;

how the edges of self blur into night.

You feel it in the yawn that shakes you, how

your body shudders with the weight of it.

​

Rachael Hill

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