A definitive vote (unlike another significant, recent election) saw Jane Wilkinson’s ‘Your location’ chosen as Pick of the Month for May 2017. Some of you fell a little in love with the poem, describing it as beautiful and evocative, enjoying its rhythm and form yet there was unease and mystery there too.

Jane was shortlisted for Lo and Behold!, the Poetry School’s 2014 Micro-Commission, and has a response poem to a Shakespeare sonnet in Live Canon’s 154 anthology (2016). She lives in London with her family and is a Landscape Architect.

‘Your location’ has been chosen as one of Ink Sweat & Tears’ entries for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2018.

 

Your location

Round the corner I hear you
coming I hear you coming
round the corner of the barn
I arrange my arms and legs
I hear around the corner
of the barn the gravel’s tough
back teeth working doggedly
on splintering a bone
I spin up a cloud
of smoke to be within
position myself beneath the salty buttered light
farm manure bellows cold pools like clouds of sound rising slowly as the milky way
we gather like water
and ripple open

 

 

Voters comments included:-

So many undercurrents indicated with such economy – powerfully visual, palpable – so much expressed, compressed.

Mysterious and rhythmic. Intriguing and seeped in longing(or fear). Loved the music. Every time I read it I find something else.

Enchanted by the rustic tug of the writing and the dreamlike agrarian imagery.

Fantastic sense of place, while creating uncertainty of subject

… this gets my vote for its strangeness and complex concision!

I love how the simple repetition of the first lines moves towards the beautiful language of the ending.

This poem speaks straight to me. I like the straightforward/no nonsense way it has been written.

…I like the form, repetition and flow of the poem plus the wonderful imagery of ‘the gravel’s tough back teeth’ and ‘salty buttered light’.

I love the free-yet-structured feel of it; so much thought in that opening stanza, the recreation of the excitement/game fear through repetition spot-on, and the beautiful ending, ‘we gather like water / and ripple open’. A really evocative recreation of childhood play, where the ‘I’ is at one with its environment.

Lovely broken lines

strong simple words building to a powerful image –

feelings of fear and expectation, finely wrought

I like the way way the poem is composed to reveal the situation in a simplistic way, each of your senses is engaged enabling you to paint a picture of the scene described with your imagination..

I felt that the line about the gravel’s tough back teeth splintering a bone was the best line from all of the poems – it captures something of what only poetry can do – put the sounds of the world into words that give you both a simple delight (at the joy of the words,) and a deeper empathy for the atmosphere and feelings of the poet herself.