I'm delighted to report that the future of New Zealand poetry is in good hands, based on the entries in this year's Open Junior section of the Poetry Society International Poetry Competition.

The poems showed a lot of imagination and promise, as I expected. But what I didn't expect was to find so many writers whose work has already passed through the ‘promising' stage, into fully fledged good writing.

I didn't have any set criteria that I was judging poems against, and tried to keep my mind open to what each poem could say to me, and what the poet was trying to achieve. But I have noticed that there are several things that make a poem work well for me.

• I like it to make me feel something. Sometimes that's a feeling of recognition (‘Yes, I've felt like that'), or sometimes a feeling of understanding (‘Now I understand what that feels like'). Sometimes it might just make me laugh, or think about things in a new way.
• I like poems to surprise me. I don't like to know where the poem is going - like I've read it before.
• I enjoy unexpected metaphors and similes.
• I enjoy poems with interesting ideas or new ways of looking at things.
• I like poems in which all the words seem right and necessary. Where the words flow smoothly and the poem isn't overwritten.
• I like poems that end in the right place. This depends very much on the poem: sometimes ending with a twist or a bang is nice, but sometimes a quieter ending is right. (I often find that the way to fix an ending that isn't working is to just cut it out altogether).

Secondary Students

The winning entry, ‘Other people's gardens' does all of those things. It begins:

"When you were
five years old, you knew
how to pick up an
ant
between thumb and
forefinger"

It took me straight back to how it felt to be a child, when the adult world was almost a separate but parallel place. This is achieved partly through addressing the poem to ‘you', which makes the reader feel included. But its real strength is the very specific details the poet uses. Some of them are pleasant images - the miracle of an ant, ‘roses in perpetual/sepia' - but other images are nightmarish - huge carnivorous insects, cicada eyes and rotting ground. It all makes the garden seem very big, exciting and a bit threatening - like the grown-up world. The poem is nostalgic without becoming schmaltzy or clichéd, and its end subtle but perfect:

"How you listened but
did not understand
as they talked
about who would mow
the lawns now?
and how much bluer
agapanthus was
when Harry was alive."

I agonised over the second and third place-getters, as all of the highly commended poems were outstanding, and all very different. Congratulations to all those poets for their excellent work. But after much thought, and reading them all out loud several times, second place when to ‘Aftermath'.

‘Aftermath' is a deceptively simple poem; small but perfectly formed. It conjures a story of a troubled relationship without need to tell the reader very much at all. Not one word is out of place or awkward to read, and it rolls beautifully off the tongue. My favourite lines are: "Sometimes she was like warm clothes on a cold day./Sometimes she was the cold day". It almost had me shivering. The poem ends with the extended metaphor:

"He is a dog curled on the ground
chewing on her apology
like a bone."

Similarly, the third placed poem ‘evening in the hotel' is about a relationship - this time between ‘you and I' instead of ‘he and she'. Again, it doesn't need to tell you very much to hint at the tension between the people and what their situation might be. I enjoyed the way this poet placed the words on the page, not just sticking to the left margin, but using extra spaces to emphasise some words, and alter the rhythm of the poem. The striking sentence:

"What words of comfort
I could say now
are caught in
the ashtray."

is placed against the left margin, setting it apart and providing a pause between the first and second parts of the poem. The last stanza of this poem is at once straight-forward and mysterious. The moths "beating their wings/helplessly/against your skin" may be actual moths, but also seem to be symbolic of something else.

Two of the highly commended poems are about words and poetry. The complex and well-thought-out ‘Child Baking Biscuits' parallels watching a child baking with writing a poem. It tells us that

"the shattered biscuit is
not crumbs, but Bis Cuit,
French, meaning twice cooked.
this is the proof
we don't really know what
we're saying"

Similarly, the excellent ‘her mouth says no but her eyes say yes' deals with how language can be deceptive:

"[...] nowadays
it's hard to find the meaning in the real
thing. we're thrown back on words,
imperfect as they are, so I'm warning you,
when they want to take away
your language,

say no."

‘the art of blending' cleverly uses painting as a metaphor for a relationship -, the blending of painting parallels the blending of lives. Like many of these poems, it was a pleasure to read out loud, so I could fully appreciate its subtle use of alliteration and assonance. For example, the repeated ‘cl' and ‘ight' sounds in the opening lines:

"your favourite light
is crisp morning
white and clear
you paint clouds"

‘Nautilus' also makes good use of alliteration: ‘sea birds/suspended mid-air and my mother imagining the worst', with the ‘s' sounds reminding of the sound of the ocean. This poem hints at a story - the poet and their mother on a boat near Stewart Island - but only gives us glimpses. There is a strong tension that something bad may happen, with mother imagining the worst and the narrator putting a shell to their ear and hearing:

"no gulls or breakers, just the terrible sounds
of my own breathing resounding into a corkscrew of
noise."

Congratulations also to the commended poets. Your work was of a very high standard and a joy to read.

I was particularly struck by the exuberance and energy of ‘Alice', a poem about a friend. It's structured in short sections, each with a different focus, like a series of mini-portraits of Alice. To me the most delightful was:

"At the Kaoutunu store we got three-scoop icecreams.
You cackled
as you gathered yours off the gravel."

I couldn't help but laugh.

Another poem about poetry and words is ‘Stopping', with this gorgeous image: ‘a poem is lost in the flash of//Sun on a turn of a leaf'. ‘Take a seashore memory' also shows an interest in words:

"the word macrocarpa
like sherbet
on my tongue
dry and pricked
with the itchy-eye scent"

Primary/intermediate Students

This is the first year the competition has had separate prizes for the primary/intermediate age group, as a way of encouraging our most youthful poets. Work by the younger poets displayed a lot of imagination and exuberance, and often had interesting new ways of looking at things.

The winner of this section is ‘The World', a thoughtful poem that compares and contrasts the confusingness of the world with maths and writing:

"It is not like maths,
where everything makes sense,
where everything has an answer,
and where everything fits together.

It's more like writing a story,
where things just happen how they do,"

The second-prize winner is ‘Anger', a poem of the type that takes a subject (in this case, anger) and describes it in various ways. It was the unexpectedness of these similes that delighted me: "It tastes like Brussels sprouts/Anger smells like a whiteboard marker"

Two other poems by primary/intermediate poets that deserve special mention both had exquisitely-decorated borders. ‘Can You Imagine...' is a series of rhyming couplets about what the future could be like, by a poet with a lot of imagination. For example: ‘A robot that teaches,/A chain of indoor beaches'. There were several entries that described winter in various metaphorical ways, and the most striking was ‘Winter the Evil Stepmother'. Winter is described striding in wearing her glistening white cloak ‘Pushing aside the Hippy that is autumn'.

Thank you to all the entrants, I very much enjoyed reading your work. I found these poems amusing, inspiring, touching and surprising - sometimes at the same time!

Helen Rickerby, June 2008

Winners

Primary/Intermediate:
First Rhianne Price, Christchurch - ‘The World'

Second Wanzhi Tay, Christchurch - ‘Anger'

Secondary:
First Charlotte Trevella, Christchurch - ‘Other people's gardens ‘

Second Nic Harty, Hastings - ‘Aftermath'

Third Sarah Daymond, Christchurch - ‘evening in the hotel'

Highly Commended:

Emily Adlam, Auckland - ‘Child Baking Biscuits'

Emily Adlam, Auckland - ‘her mouth says no but her eyes say yes'

Jess Fiebig, Christchurch - ‘the art of blending'

Charlotte Trevella, Christchurch - ‘Nautilus'

Commended:

Rosie Bolderston, Christchurch - ‘Fundamentals'

Rosie Bolderston, Christchurch - ‘Intervals'

Cara Chimirri, Christchurch - ‘Take a seashore memory'

Sophia Frentz, Tauranga - ‘Names for Girls'

Alexandrea Hollyman, Wellington - ‘Jelly-bean Princess'

Sue Mun Huang, Hastings - ‘Before Today'

Ashish Kumar, Singapore - ‘Stopping'

Alex Morris, Hastings - ‘Alice'

Amy Pepper, Hastings - ‘Dad'

Beth Rust, Hastings - ‘Blink'

Special Mention

Ashley Briscoe, Christchurch - 'Winter the Evil Stepmother'

Kate McIlhone, Christchurch - 'Can you Imagine...'


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