Stripped of sentimentality, raw and beautiful.
Authentic, deceptively simple and relatable
This shortlist was all about lives – lives born, lives saved, lives lived, lives lost – and it is perhaps fitting that the poem that came first with voters was that which looked at a life arrived at and a life accepted.
Rosie Jackson lives in Teignmouth, Devon. Her latest collection is Love Leans over the Table (Two Rivers Press, 2023). Widely published, Rosie has won many awards, including Commended in the Troubadour Competition 2024 and the National 2022. www.rosiejackson.org.uk
Rosie has asked that her £25 ‘prise’ be donated to Oxfam.
Arrival
Today, I talked with a friend about death
and what it means to have arrived in my life
before I have to leave it, what it means
to be no longer waiting for my life to start.
I did wait, many decades and now – later than most,
earlier than some – it has started and I am living
the life I was unwittingly working towards.
It’s an uncanny sensation.
If I’d arrived earlier, as a baby say, if I’d coincided
with my happiness before now, the lines on my face
would be in a different place.
And now I know this is where I wanted to be,
it will make it harder, much harder, to leave.
But, at the same time, easier, for I will no longer
be my own unfinished business.
Voters comments included:
I love the cyclical way this poem moves between living and dying and how the poem tips towards the beautiful last line. So thought provoking and penetrating.
An affinity with the idea of arriving on your life.
Really loved this poem. The concept and the artistry.
The poem’s profundity, honesty, and clarity
I am there where she is.. she laid it down well.
I feel I resonate with this poem a lot, the sense that one can ‘arrive’ at a place in one’s life, where nothing else is required or sought, where the present is enough.
A reflective poem with a lot of hidden depth and a balance of the spiritual and the personal.
She so eloquently enjoyed that now is the time to start enjoying living in the present rather than striving for something in the future. “I am no longer my own unfinished business”. Lovely!
the bitter sweet quality
Rosie’s poetry has a poise, a spiritual clarity and vulnerability about it, and this poem is a great example of this.
Such a concise clear exposé of a deeply personal and profound emotional self reflection
I have arrived at that time in my life, with the same sense of surprise – and have tried to write about it, but have no succeeded as well as Rosie has.
the sort of poem you want to read again and again and cry another time
It addresses big stuff – the business if how we live and how we die and how, if we’re lucky, we come to self-acceptance.
An extraordinary example of true individuation and the gift of being fully present in one’s life. Inspirational.
I admire the challenges inherent in the poem, how universal they are. I also admire the poet’s deft handling of these challenges.
I found it the most resonant and moving. Skilful in its simplicity.
Depth of thought and feeling achieved through lucid language, ease of phrasing and a real sense of control of the lines.
It captures my own story in a powerful, lightly held hand and holds it gently, reflecting my own arrival back to me.
There is something spiritually/psychologically convincing about this poem, yet I had not seen life/ageing in this way before. And the final line is stunning.
A strong sense of mortality with a great final line.
Succinct, hits deep
I found this poem immense and wondrous. It made me say ‘Wow’ out loud. Deep and beautiful and enigmatic, hopeful and radiant and sad. It made me cry.
Original, develops in a vivid and unexpected way and prompts deep reflection on life, death, happiness
Because it openly grapples with the clandestine questions we all have but seem reluctant to share, like what am I for? And isn’t that what poetry is for?
Stripped of sentimentality, raw and beautiful.
I recognise the experience in the poem – that sense of trying to attain a destination that eludes you, only to arrive by an unexpected route.
I love the honesty of the poem and the acknowledgement that dying will now be much harder as living has become so much more alive.
For being authentic, deceptively simple and relatable
Helen Ivory wrote: “I love how this poem speaks philosophically about a life’s journey, while is at the same time embodied within the narrator’s own life experiences. I personally connected with this phrase: what it means to be no longer waiting for my life to start. And the repetition here it will make it harder, much harder, to leave, comes across as a visceral ache.”
THE REST OF THE JANUARY 2025 PICK OF THE MONTH SHORTLIST
Driving lesson
Before the first turn of the key, before
adjusting the mirror, before releasing the handbrake even,
Dad said: there are two things you need to know.
The first, he said, is double-declutching.
It’s got me out of many a scrape. It keeps the gearbox sweet.
How many revs are there? There’s the counter.
The second, he said, his voice hoarser, more intense,
is what to do in the event of aquaplaning.
Don’t brake sharply. Foot off accelerator. Wheel steady.
Start the car then, he said, suddenly tetchy.
Tonight, in this storm, the car gliding strangely on a flood,
I think of him, control my memory, shift into neutral.
Bill Greenwell lives in South Shields. His first collection Impossible Objects was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. In 2017 he won the Magma Editors Award. He wrote creative writing course material for the Open University before retiring.
*
1997 – Dream as Animal J. Smith
Animal is going to disappear, completely
Standing out on the street
Down the backstairs
Of three-three-three
Smoking a nervous cigarette Squinting into the evening August sun Beard scratchy and hot with tobacco Chest tightening
Warmed flannel
Battered leather
Sweat building up in his pits
It’s the last show of four
And the second-to-last day of summer
Tomorrow he will clear everything out of the shoebox dressing room Sweep up
Glitter, hair
Hand-cut strips of orange cellophane
Pack props, instruments
Wigs
Into two big bags
Sling these over his shoulders
Give Jill the keys
Get his deposit dollars back
Stuff them in his jeans…
You can read the full text of Chris’s poem here
Chris Gylee (he/him, Stockport, 1983) is a queer writer and artist living between rural Finland and Berlin. Publications include the online collection FORTY and the micro-chapbook Ten For ‘A’ (Ghost City Press). Chris was long-listed for the Cúirt New Writing Prize 2023. www.chrisgylee.com / @chrisgylee
*
Waiting
For Mark
After you died,
someone asked:
What was it like
in those final sixteen days
waiting for your son to die?
I was not waiting.
Wanting, yes. Hoping, yes. For more days.
Finding joy in small things,
a game of Camel Cup, your favourite songs
and singing them with you,
reading to you
talking,
until you could no longer do
any of those things.
And then I watched your breath
entering and leaving a body
that had endured so much
and still remained beautiful.
We became a circle around you
just as you had asked us to:
your mum, your dad, your brothers,
your best friend.
We went with you as far
as it was possible to go.
Susan Jane Sims most recent collection is Splitting Sunlight (Dempsey & Windle, 2019). She publishes poetry through her Dorset based publishing company Poetry Space . She has been a poet in schools for Threshold Prize and a judge for the Poetry by Heart competition. She was a Hawthornden fellow in 2018.
*
The Rescuers
When the waters broke we were
out there, borderless, with just
a view of bloodshot sky from
the labour suite, his weight a
nautilus shell, face pinched in
perpetual sleep, one silk
eyelid pulled awry as dawn
held him at the edge of our
lives – it felt like All Souls Day
on a summer morning. Since
then, we waft wasps carefully
out the window, set woodlice
free, chase cats from wounded birds,
watch out for stray toddlers in
the park or chicks fallen from
their nests. We’re always on hand
to haul them gently back from
invisible boundaries.
Morag Smith’s short fiction has been extensively published, but she moved to poetry about four years ago and since then has been published in e-zines, magazines and anthologies, including the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems of 2023, Poetry Ireland Review, Crannog, The Scotsman and Gutter. She is the winner of the 2021 Paisley Book Festival /Janet Coates memorial poetry prize, was highly Commended in the 2020 Ginkgo poetry prize and shortlisted in the Bridport Poetry prize 2022. Her first pamphlet, Background Noises, about the re-wilding and human history of the partly abandoned site of Dykebar Psychiatric Hospital near Paisley, Scotland, was published by Red Squirrel Press in November 2022.
*
An Orange in the Dark
I rolled an orange across daybreak;
I waited for the moon to ripen.
I held you close, felt your ear in my palm
As I paced the candle-lit coffee table.
The biscuits had gone stale again
As buses crept under the open window—
Passengers lit up like an aquarium.
I felt your breathing regulate
As the waste bins piled high
And the fridge light became a companion,
Stolid and immobilised in the night.
I opened the tap into the mouth of morning.
I buried my face in the warm pillow.
I flicked through my phone calendar
And set arbitrary alarms to keep on track.
I wrote lists of food stuffs and house stuffs
And felt your eyes in the darkness as I
Counted objects in the fruit bowl.
I watched as the moon began to golden;
I rolled an orange across daybreak.
Henry Wilkinson is a South London based writer, poet, former music journalist, and editor/founder of Dark Entries zine. His writing is influenced by alternative music and culture, lo-fi aesthetics, gothic literature, and Moby-Dick.