Our judge for 2008 was UA Fanthorpe, and we are extremely grateful to her and to Dr Rosie Bailey for the diligence and efficiency with which they carried out this task. It's not an easy job. Once the initial sifting has been done, the judge is faced with a short list of very strong poems encompassing a wide variety of subjects and styles, and the only way to arrive at a winner is to read and re-read them, sort them into piles, discuss them, re-sort them, lie awake at night thinking about them and generally live with them for as long as it takes. That process took place throughout January, and the results appear below. The poems themselves appear after the results table, along with UA Fanthorpe's comments.

We'd also like to take this opportunity to thank the often overlooked panel of filter judges, who read, discussed and sometimes argued their way through almost two and a half thousand poems to arrive at the two long and two short lists in each category. Without their unpaid efforts, it would be impossible to achieve the level of feedback that the Plough Prize provides.

1st, Short category

Geese in Market Crowd

Not a honk, gabble or mutter

as the six thread through chaos.

The mountains seem to be liquefying

this damp and blustery morning,

the sky is hesitant and lacks confidence -

so the geese are a certainty in what is shapeless.

They waddle, chittering in concentration -

their foolish feet, their pert rears

an order in the hopeless tumble

of junk mathematics around them.

Christopher North

2nd, Short category

Fieldwork

He and I ferreting on Ben Knowle HIll:

the chase, a scuffle, ears laid back, wild eyes -

the quick chop. A broken neck.

Turns to me, thirteen, in care, challenging,

There! Could you do that, Miss?

No, I reply. Here, I'm the illiterate, at risk,

although knowing too well the trap he's caught in.

Slits the soft skin, a yank, slings it. Reaches for the guts.

Now there's scarlet on green grass. Go on! Take it Miss!

Grins as he offers me this small warm nakedness.

Jane Williams

3rd. Short category

We will be happy

We will live above the cliff

and sleep to the drumming surf.

Our farmyard will be studded

with jaunty metallic cockerels.

Cold nights will crackle with frost and log fires.

You will collect early morning eggs

while I avoid eye contact with the pig.

I will glove your daisy fingers

in my ancient parchment hands.

We will be happy.

David King

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1st. Open Category

Interior with Forget-me-nots (Matisse, 1916)

Each time she walked into his attic room,

unbuttoning her blouse, she would enter

the painting that hung above the wide bed:

among its chalky greens, she could remove

her rings, put them on the three-legged table

next to the bowl bursting with blue flowers.

She'd take off her skirt, her best underwear,

kick her sandals under the curved black chair,

stretch out like a cat on the coverlet.

Beyond the gauzy curtains, the rush-hour

traffic crawled and hooted along the street.

They whispered like thieves; she stayed far too late.

Under his gaze she'd stand on the patterned rug,

one foot out of the frame, gathering clothes,

putting on her watch, inventing excuses.

Jenny Mayor

2nd, Open category

The Passing of Hay

I regret the passing of hay - made of late in the proverbial way while the sun shines

high in the summer sky on dew-dried grasses, purple-grey,

to be cut and turned and rowed and baled, stacked and carted from the field

by every man, woman, child: with breaks in hedges' shade for tea and cake,

and talk of other years' disasters, triumphs, laughter, tears:

then up and on with wagon load to make, and climb on top, and take

sedately swaying, the homeward road.

I regret the passing of jay, but silage is good - or better, they say,

sooner, safer, all done in a day, needing less sunshine, less labour, less pay -

and three crops a year, if you start it in May:

one man, one tyrannosaurus machine roars along roads into fields still green;

rolls up, spikes up, wraps with slick speed, in black plastic

our cows' convenient wintering feed.

I regret the passing of hay - when I forget the sweat of fork and pitch,

thistle's bare-skin prickle and itch, the aching muscles, breaking bales,

swollen hands that can't be mine, split by unforgiving twine:

the anxious watching of the weather: remembering

instead the fun of friends and neighbours come together,

the one-for-all and all-for-one, the showing off, the trials of strength

to clear the meadow length by length; then riding home last load of June

breathing night-sweet honeysuckle beneath the rising moon.

Fast forward, pause for thought - the truth:

is what I miss community, or even more, my youth?

Perhaps, but every time I pass the marrow-stripe of any spring-cut field,

and see, like monstrous black and shiny slugs, its heaped-up plastic yield,

without the smell of drying grass that always spelled a summer day,

whatever kind my other loss, what ever count of more or less,

I regret the passing of hay.

Virginia Hobart

3rd. Open category

The Company of the Invisible

The architect,

who designed a rejected baluster rail for the Oxo building,

had a drink with Kirsty on the same day a scream she'd made

tripping on some steps delivering software to a recording studio

had been dubbed into a sequence in a Madonna video they were doing.

They used it for a moment when the diva leapt from a car

but it wasn't acknowledged in the credits

- that sort of video doesn't have credits they said.

                                                                         He also mentioned

a tall and hearty man he'd met at a rodeo in Salinas, California,

who had a short-term contract with Warner Brothers to guffaw

in the soundtrack of a cartoon series they were making about a family

of donkeys; but his guffaw wasn't used. One of the in-house cartoonists

found he could copy it. So the hearty man remained a janitor

but would always produce the guffaw if asked at parties and so on.

He maintained a positive attitude and opined that, after all,

they got to the guffaw they needed by way of his -

he'd been a a link in the chain. He'd played a part and wasn't bitter.

Just another day at the wrong end of the telescope.

                                                                              And then

there was that ornate conservatory extension with structural trouble

on the back of a house in Amersham that I'd saved by some sound advice

during my surveying days. Every morning I would drive past

and mutely salute my contribution to that corner of Metro-land

until, that is, last week when the whole thing was demolished

to make way for a block of flats.

Christopher North

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Judge’s Report 

First, let me say how very much I have enjoyed reading the poems in this Competition. 

The short-listed poems this year were of an impressively high standard, and it was no easy task to come up with a final list of winners.  The wide variety of subjects, and the range of technical approaches only made the task more difficult.   I wished, indeed, that there had been far more prizes to present. 

Open Poem 

First:  ‘Interior with Forget-me-nots [Matisse, 1916]’ – Jenny Mayor
This short poem doesn’t put a foot wrong.  It is a quite straightforward account of a visit, but the visit is into the painting, and the poem very economically integrates the details of the occasion with the details of the painting, so that ‘reality’, as it were, and painting fuse.  The painting, in a sense, controls the poem. What I most admire is the restraint and delicacy of the piece; the poet allows the poem to say just what it needs to say, and no more, leaving sufficient clues for the reader to do the reader’s necessary work.  It’s both satisfying and tantalising, celebratory and uncertain, at once. 

Second:  ‘The Passing of Hay’ – Virginia Hobart
This poem is also very cleverly done. It’s an interesting subject, but there’s no fuss here; it’s a very workmanlike poem. The writer has two problems - how to convey the necessary, quite complex, information, and how to deal with a subtle but important patterning of rhyme and echo.  A good reader is expected: one who will have a sensitive enough ear to respond to this pattern.  The many details are handled skilfully (‘thistle’s bare-skin prickle and itch’), and the tone is well sustained: the determined, almost pedestrian, long lines carry the argument in a leisurely fashion, and the uncertainty of the writer’s position (‘pause for thought...’) is slipped in without apology.  The poem comes to its conclusion neatly, forthrightly. A very well-shaped poem. 

Third:  ‘The Company of the Invisible’ – Christopher North
This poem’s subject is of quite startling originality: it is about what nearly happened but didn’t. And yet, in a way, did...  A non-subject, perhaps? but the leisurely, rather random  way the tale is told carries the interest along through a mass of chatty detail, relying on a kind of developing intimacy with the reader which moves from ‘the architect, who...had a drink with Kirsty ... ‘ and side-tracks into the anecdote about the ‘tall and hearty man’, returing to architectural details about ‘a house in Amersham’... which ‘last week’ was demolished.  The torrent of ingredients offers clues - but bewildering clues - about time and place and significance, and the whole thing comes to nothing in the end: which is exactly what should happen.  Well-sustained, absurd, witty; the unexplored edges of everyday experience given a chance to be themslves for a moment.  

Commended: ‘New Delhi Street Scene’ – Stephen Beattie
A neat, elegantly done piece, a verse each dealing with the cows, the dogs, the boy and in the last verse bring them powerfully together.  The physical and the spiritual are deftly dealt with; ‘pale-skinned’ suggests, for instance, a sort of useless pity. The writer simply records the facts: these make the feeling clear. The end is striking and memorable.  

Commended: ‘Sandstone’ – Elizabeth Page
This poem works so well because of what’s left out.  The detail is important, as in ‘New Delhi Street Scene’; here it is used to sketch a background to the very punchy last line.  There are subleties, too, in this carefully-crafted piece: consider, for instance, the hints in ‘sun’ (son) and ‘when I shone...’  It’s a (geographically) tiny domestic infant moment of enormous significance.

 Commended: ‘Plums’ – Clare Diprose
This poem is very elegantly done; a really good teacher comes to life in a fusion of plums and ideas. The two elements work together to bring alive, effortlessly but vividly, a remarkable person. The last verse remains in the mind long after the poem is read. 

Short Poem

First:  'Geese in Market Crowd' – Christopher North
'Geese in Market Crowd'  shows just how much you can get into a poem and (more importantly) how much you can leave out. It’s an amazingly skilful piece: not a wasted word, and they’re all the right words. The setting is vast, confusing: the geese, a symbol of order.  The whole is so economically done that all the ingredients work together, and every word has earned its passage.

Second: 'Fieldwork' – Jane Williams
Another very economical piece; we depend much on the stacccato hints for an understanding of what’s going on..  We  aren’t even introduced to the rabbit, and the description of the boy is minimal. But it is a very dense little poem, and the writer uses words strikingly to echo among the tersely recounted facts: she is ‘illiterate’, in this situation - though she knows his need for murder. As the boy ‘grins’ she identifies with the rabbit. And the boy knows, too, what he’s doing to her. There’s a lot of very significant material in a very few lines;  it’s full of challenges, and disquietingly predictive, too. 

Third: 'We will be happy' – David King
All about an idyllic, detailed future.  Again, there is  a lot of information -  the setting, the surf, the cockerels and log fires - all triggers for contentment. But despite this precision not a lot is known. What’s the relationship?  Those ‘parchment’ hands?  Why is it set in the future so firmly ? ‘Will’ (repeatedly) suggests some resistance, some conflict. So a nice tidy neat little poem has perhaps hidden depths, and although there’s a light-heartedness (as he avoids ‘eye-contact with the pig’) we can’t quite be confident.  A teasing little piece that exploits the brevity of the regulations well. 

Commended:  'The Charcoal Burner' – Dr Frances Green
A faithful, detailed patient evocative account, by a writer with an ear for sound and a strong sense of atmosphere.  The poet has cunningly allowed his ten lines to be long lines, which gives the scope for the appropriately detailed and generous description, and his love of words and sensitive use of echo and half-rhyme make this a very satisfying piece.

Commended: 'Small Poem in search of a Title' – John Godfrey
This is a very appealing little poem. The reader has no idea at all what’s coming: it’s a (very short) journey of discovery. The scene is set with care, suggesting such a lot of possibilities: it’s almost a romantic, even a faintly spooky, scene.    It doesn’t attempt to be deep - but it does its jokey work very neatly. Witty, enjoyable, successful - a cheering use of nine short lines. 

U A Fanthorpe

January 2009 

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Best Local poem

Nan's Handbag

Was an open house,

inviting little hands and little eyes.

Adjusting to the darkness and its source

a nose full of her Barley Sugars - atomised.

The hiding place of Crawfords and Peak Freans,

the studded Lincoln, sugar crusted Nice.

A leather barrel rolled in from a dream

A sack of joy where all were free to feast.

Handkerchiefs that fragranced us with safety.

the blunt, friendly ends of knitting needles.

A cotton reel, a British Rail diary.

The scent of warm milk before it curdles.

Far too heavy to carry in any weather,

Grandad was always threatening a trolley.

But somehow, Nan and that handbag

with their reassuring bulk,

held us all together.

Marcus Parnell