Please click on the title to read each winning poem.

 

First Prize: Charlotte Trevella (Christchurch) - 'Sum to Infinity'

First Runner-Up (Secondary): Sonya Clark, Hastings - 'She Has Seen Summers'

Second Runner-Up (Secondary): Rebecca Hawkes (Ashburton) -  'Rhapsodomancy'

First Runner-Up (Primary/ Intermediate) Oliver Sircombe-Kohen (Upper Moutere) -  'On the Walk to Separation Point'

Second Runner-Up (Primary/ Intermediate) Yanhao Tay (Christchurch) -  'So Sad'

Highly Commended:

Laura Hadfield (Auckland): ‘Me Little Small'; Charlotte Trevella (Christchurch): ‘Night Light', ‘Genetics' and ‘Brothers Grimm'; Harry Waters (Arrowtown): ‘Alone'.

Commended:

Sophia Frentz (Tauranga): ‘On Studying Biology'; Monique Hodgkinson (Wellington): ‘My Father is a Writer'; Tabitha Manson (Auckland): ‘The Bear'; Luke Masters (Auckland): ‘House of Animals'; Leika McIvor (Palmerston North): ‘Camping'; Kirsty Plowman (Christchurch): ‘The Last Formal'; Charlotte Trevella (Christchurch): ‘Weathervane' and ‘Summer etc.'; Sam Williams (Christchurch): Family Farm; Room 10 (Year 2), Victoria Ave Primary School (Auckland): ‘Blowy Wind'.

Judge's Report:

There were over 300 poems in this part of the competition. There were poems that sang it strange, sang it sweet, sang it sad, sang it silly. Occasionally there was a poem that did all of this on one page. I read every submitted poem at least three times. By then a strong shortlist had revealed itself, which, after countless rereading (often aloud), I was able to whittle down to the best of the best. Ranking the winners caused me much anguish, because all of these best poems had a number of qualities I was drawn to. Each was alive on the page, and I could tell that the poet had ‘lived inside' the poem while it was being written. The evidence was there in quiet, non-obtrusive clues, such as the line break being in exactly the right place for this poem, the beat being exactly right for this poem, the word choice being exactly right for this poem. Where students had worked with a teacher-given theme, like Anzac Day, or Autumn, the poems that shone were the ones that showcased the poem, not the formula, bringing the poem itself to the foreground and letting the reader's awareness of classroom exercises recede.

All the winning and commended poets went on a difficult journey. Each took a ‘poetic' idea or impulse inwards, on the quest for a whole poem. Each focused long and hard, so as to recognise the (sometimes camouflaged, often elusive) fragments of that emerging poem, bringing what was found to the surface - to the page - where all the reassembling and polishing takes place. The winning and commended poems shared the following attributes:

  • They were not overwritten. In fact they were rigorously pared back with a sense of attention having been paid to every single line, every single word. "Is this necessary?" "Am I repeating myself? And if so, do I want to?" "How does this fit in with the pattern I'm developing in this poem?" - these poets had asked themselves questions like this as they crafted their finished work.
  • The poets used language athletically - sometimes acrobatically. But elegance, as always, is deceptive: "If it doesn't look easy you aren't working hard enough", said Fred Astaire. The poems that didn't make the cut often used awkward turns of phrase, or clichés, in the hope that this would elevate the language into something more "poetic". The best work had been made from the inside out, like strong bones, not applied from the outside in, like an ill-fitting jacket.

The winning poem, 'Sum to Infinity', is both quiet and bold. I love the control of language, the delicate rhythms, the infinite space of this poem. It deals with something dear to the hearts of many entrants, but avoids cliché, sentimentality and melodrama. The poet muses on the nature of infinity. The poem starts with an assertion about the "original miracle" and ends with the word "forever". So this poem is about life and death, and, though couched in philosophical and scientific language, is personal as well as cosmic in its reach. The centre of the poem is now - "this week". The "I" of the poem is fixed in time and space, sitting exams in a "huge and/ hollow building" while "the sky/ accelerated towards/ us". Of course what is also accelerating towards the speaker is the future - adult life beyond the relative safety of school ("hollow" to the student who is preparing to leave) - exciting, but also daunting: "black with voltage". This poem perfectly captures this moment of being poised on the brink. Childhood is behind (because we can't "hold on tight enough") and the unfathomable "smooth planetarium/ of sky" future lies ahead. "With physics nothing is a/ miracle anymore," states the speaker, and those two lines are allowed to hang by themselves: a flat, "hollow" conclusion. Ah, but not a conclusion - see how the statement ends with a comma, not a full stop. Straight away this thought (that "nothing is a miracle anymore") is rejected by the speaker: "but how strange" - and now the poem loops back to the balloon image from the first stanza. But now the child's "helium balloon" (weighing "less than nothing") is a "red balloon", full-blooded, ready and willing to dare "puncture" that sky, and start "travelling".

'She Has Seen Summers' [First Runner-Up, Secondary] cooked up an entire landscape. It's a smoldering poem, almost suffocating, where "steam drips down her face" and a "thirsty" sun is "stuck/ in the afternoon's sky". The grandmother's uneasy reminiscences about "the drought of ‘89" and "the fire of that summer" form one part of the narrative. In the first stanza we are plunged into heat and violence: "cracked the concrete", "splitting". This is underscored by queasy, fearful helplessness ("She had watched the dogs bark themselves sick/ as their collars cooked their necks. Too hot/to help..."). These memories are interwoven with images of what she is doing right now ("she pours/ her fingers into cooking/ fruit"). Standing at the stove watching "the steam and how it rises like smoke", the grandmother is nearly paralysed by memories and fear ("her hair hangs limp"; "she is watching"; "She watches"). Meanwhile the pot is boiling over and "splinters of burning grass" might be closing in from the horizon. The last line is expertly judged. "There is a bucket of water nearby" - this is first mention of cold water in this combustible poem and it comes as a quench of relief. But... only a bucket? The relief is momentary, as we realise how inadequate the water is. And immediately the jumpy fear comes rushing back, in the repeated panicky pulse of "just in case, just in case".

'Rhapsodomancy' [Second Runner=Up, Secondary] unfolds as a series of observations about an un-named someone who is "so light/ ... I swear you must have/ Sparrow bones". The poem charms and alienates in turn, so that the reader is first hooked in, then kept at arm's length having to work out what is going on (like the observer in the poem, I suspect). The poem, like the person being described, is sometimes heartbreakingly beautiful, sometimes playful, suddenly almost revealing but then suddenly elusive or obscure. The beat or rhythm of the poem is all fits and starts: bursts of long-line energy ("Effervescence carved into calculated agony-euphoria-love-hate-caffeine-highs") followed by reigned-in two, three or four word lines. At its most de-energised, the poem is all but catatonic (see the one-word lines "Rude", and "Echolalia"). Immediately, though, it swings back towards euphoria and fantasy ("The wings on your back"). The language, likewise, "flicks as it moves", balancing a palpable love for the observed person with an underlying fear for their safety. This is a poem describing someone on the edge: "You trace your frame against the edge of nature"; "Your heart lies somewhere between perfection and dust." Instability lies at the heart of the impulse for this poem, and bleeds into its structure. The poem - like the person the poem is addressed to - struggles, at times, to contain and control itself. Yet this poem, so empathetically written, so accurately observed and honestly articulated, put a haunting on me which I can't shake off.

'On the Walk to Separation Point' is the first runner-up in the primary/intermediate section. This poem is beautifully controlled, with the form echoing the sense. The writing was so mature that I had to check that it wasn't actually a secondary school entry. The reader accompanies the poet on a walk. In a sense the walk is circular: the title and last line are identical, and so we end where we started (and we knew where we were going all along - to Separation Point). But at another level the poem is a meandering walk in one direction, and the Separation Point in the last line of the poem is quite a different place to the imagined Separation Point of the title. It isn't a fast walk. There is time to observe, time to contemplate. The poet notices "crusty branches" obstructing the track. The children are "muted", "hunched" as slow or awkward as turtles. Midway things almost come to a complete halt with the description of the tree "fallen in the bay". This is the only couplet in a poem of triplets - it looks as if this stanza has become separated from its third line (possibly from the title). By now, we are starting to realise, ‘separation' is everywhere - branches separated from trees; the speaker separated from a line of children ahead; the children's voices "fragmenting"; a whole tree separated from its earth and fallen in the bay. As if to strike back at this, to make a connection rather than a separation, the very next word is "we". But though the group has near-military attributes, it has no power in this landscape: "We tramp forward/ A drum roll of muddy boots/ On a graveyard of skeleton leaves". The last stanza is in itself a beautiful resonant poem. Here the poet finally uses the pronoun "I" - not once, but twice ("I am thinking of things I do not have"). It's a moment of insight or acceptance (and it leaves room for the reader to imagine what those things might be). In the next line "my hand curved round a grainy old stick" is a powerful image - it could be simple hiking support, or it could be a weapon, like a taiaha, or it could be fuel for a fire, or the first upright for a hut, or (being grainy and old) it might be a grandparent's walking stick... you decide. Now the poem concludes: "On the walk to Separation Point" - which, in a lovely paradox, closes the circle, and ‘unseparates' the end from the beginning. Nice!

'So Sad' [Second Runner-Up, Primary/Intermediate] is a small poem of only 17 words, including the title, and many of these are repeated. The word sock is repeated three times, the phrase favourite soccer sock twice, and the word so is echoed in sew. In three lines and a title the poet has used end rhyme, internal rhyme (so, hole, sew), and alliteration (so sad, soccer sock, sew). Visually and aurally the poem starts small and expands as it goes, each line building on the previous, the two beats of the title and first line (So sad; hole in my sock) becoming three beats in the second, and five in the last. That beat is slow as a funeral drum - you cannot read this poem quickly, even though it is so small. The first line lays out the problem: hole in my sock. The second line tells us more: my favourite soccer sock. Not just a soccer sock, but my favourite. The last line is a question without an answer. For me, this poem goes on expanding in my mind long after I've read the words on the page, exposing more and more "hole" in place of answers. It made me feel "so sad", even though on the surface this poem is simply about a holey soccer sock, and even though the repeated phrase "soccer sock" tickles my tongue and makes me smile. That's another thing I really like about this poem - how it balances the comic tickly ‘t' and ‘k' sounds (favourite soccer sock) against long sad vowel sounds (so, sew, hole, who). And the word that goes on ringing in my ears long afterwards is not any of the repeated words. It's the word Who. With its ‘h' and long oo, with its first-word-of the line placement and emphatic stress, it harks back to the poem's opening word: Hole. Now when I listen, Who sounds like hoo, which sounds like a ghost blowing through the hole in the poem. Then the word sew echoes the so in the title, reminding the reader that the poem's called ‘So sad', and suggesting a far greater sadness, a far emptier ‘hole' - an absence, or the fear of absence, of someone important. I bet the writer didn't consciously intend any of this when he or she penned this little masterpiece! Nevertheless the effects are there. This young poet has the ability to climb inside the work while he or she is writing, perfect pitch, and the confidence to know that less is often more. Well done!

In a poem called Feeling and Form, American poet Marilyn Hacker wrote: "... I do like words/ which is why I make things out of words/ and listen to their hints, resounding like skipping stones radiating circles..." The winning poets obviously like words, have listened attentively for word hints, and crafted poems that go on ‘radiating circles' long after they are read. It's been an honour and a pleasure to read your work. Congratulations and keep writing!

Sue Wootton, June 2009


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