Foyle Young Poets of the Year 2003:
Passport Pictures

The Heat
Zoe Bogart

When the heat comes, it falls

Just like a heavy tablecloth

Folding into little rivulets and sloppy waves.

But instead of landing on glossy wood

And billowing slightly under the chink of glass and china

Instead of rustling to the hum of pleasant conversation

The heat sinks into the rough, scarred road

Into the rough, scarred cars

Into the rough, scarred people.

The heat pours into their throats and ears.

It fills their lungs with a smothering staleness.

The heat blots out the conscientiousness

That made billy pick up the litter

That kept tracy from slamming the door.

Under heat, the lightness is lethargy

The buckled-up discontent bursts

And the delicate brain-curves unravel.


... an oppressive sensation captured subtly, using rhythms, images and nagging repetitions in a single verse paragraph to build up not just the heat but the shifts in feelings that it brings about - a poem about people, not just weather...
A rich, coloured-in evocation, this is narrative writing at its best, capturing those fractures of perception which accompany experience.
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson

Three Poems for a Girl
Nicholas Liu

1. The Grass Path

 

More tiring than the snaking sidewalk ascent built for two is the

return with the ghost of a kiss but sans company over mud

ants bruised leaves by the concrete downhill

through the humid girl-breathed air

on the grass path home.

 

2. I am walking outside where it is

 

raining and the half-lit sky makes everything blue

- the houses and trees and people and

yes, even the light pink flowers which

you commented on, decaying

pleasingly on the wet path-and

clad in cold and a too-thin shirt, the world

seems nothing like and full of you.

 

3. Boat Quay

 

Why do you ask me

if I remember that evening spent

at Boat Quay? Sitting

on the cool stone bench

as the sun set

hands clasped, lungs filled

with the breath of the city:

of course I remember.

 

[later we stood on the light-lined bridge

bodies against the bannister against

each other as we overlooked the water dark

as the sky with white reflections laughing

with more than our mouths we leaned out

over the black-coffee bay into the wall

of electroluminescence (i remember thinking

that the lights-so many lights-looked like bowls

of glowing porridge, food

from a post-apocalyptic fairy tale)

and dazzled by the light we shut our eyes

and kissed]

 

You know as well as I do

that the only thing about you that I could possibly forget

is the shape of your face.


... writing about love is famously beset with pitfalls, but this delicate and exact sequence avoids sentimentality, cliché and simple nostalgia, keeping its eyes on the precise sensations and observations, noticing the paradoxes, with surprising touches of accuracy in line after line...
Writing of great subtlety and melody which takes the risk of idiosyncrasy without missing a beat. Manages to make this old territory new and difficult once again.
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson

The March Goat
Sam Clodd

Needles prick my fingers. I distinctly

remember tattooed muscles; numbers

and Semitic features. I remember the

 

piano teacher. His smile and his wife's

biscuits, brought once a month for my

sisters. Of course, he always stunk of

 

varnish. Yes, yes, I remember all

this now. The brown shirts and the

pounding boots like hearses. The

 

wardrobe, in the house where we spent

our summers. The smell of coats. The

high stone wall around the garden. My

 

father, no, my father wasn't there and

my cousins and I picked flowers;

snowdrops, chrysanthemums later.

 

Maybe even I remember further back;

the stag-beetle-phoenix of Berlin. Yes,

the black, industrial fog. The taste of

 

stale bread; and the kite my brothers

made from wads of notes. I remember

that first, bright dawn of spring, after

 

the sting of glass between your

toes. The smiling faces, the

flags, the ordered rows.


... a remarkably subtle step into a sense of Nazi Germany, that has the fragmentary shifting feel of real memory and never feels like textbook research - the deliberate downbeat voice and the refusal of the verse form to play for big effects add to, rather than lessening, its capacity to haunt our imaginations...
Stunningly mature, this poem takes the risk of play and obliquity (as in the title) in dangerous, difficult territory, and in doing so achieves the profundity of understatement.
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson

the lady's most unbecoming...
Judith Huang

This day's delirious declaration

of the never-never blue; the expense of

jubilation, and the most

irrepressibly You - This must be

heaven's exclamation, to-

day's the Day I'm pro-

Creation; if you carpe

I'd be diem - all my fortunes

I'd lay open! This much beauty's

Exhortation - the final

damning of all rhyme and reason;

Behold: the day is Mort.


... a small delicious morsel of a poem vibrant with wordplay and the unsettling rhythms produced by setting the form on the page at odds with the sounds of the words - bursting with energy and yet wholly in control...
Playful and yet daring, this is a quiet triumph. Lyric poetry presents a particular set of challenges this poem meets head-on, and beautifully.
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson

Seven Reflections
L E Harris

i

 

She has taken my eyes.

All I have left are pink fingerbowls, dark shadowy orbits.

I grow goldfish here, suspended signals of love

In brimming waterholes rimmed with blood.

Fantails flail out like fingers pressing into thick orange lashes.

In this illuminated glass tank, I sense the people staring at me.

The fish writhe in their socket-seas.

 

ii

 

I remember so clearly the first time I saw you; the pale blue walls of the
waiting room,

The way the tetras were so transparent, their thin, nervous bodies,

Their bony waistcoats tipped with aquamarine.

You were there visiting a friend, your opaque visitor's badge so flimsy

Next to your green peace badge, permanent,

Like a limpet.

Then your smile, unassuming, unpatronizing, as though you knew,

And didn't care.

 

iii

 

The second place: the sign developing on the window like a cataract,

The too-small tank where the fish dangled as though fastened by their fins

Lifeless.

 

They removed me to another ward where fish struck the glass again and again,

Striving to smash the place they couldn't reach

Like tiny metal bells.

It made me sad, just watching them, knowing they were there.

Tossing in bed, I damaged my back; my spine extended, a vertebral paper chain.

 

iv

 

The third place was eyeful, cameras glinting on crested walls.

Bones like foam, I walked on crutches slowly.

There were no fish tanks here, but outside the sea chewed on the
sand-stretched beach.

You visited me then, persuaded them I was trustworthy.

We walked seaward; you made me laugh, then pointed out the gulls in moulds of oil-black.

That's how the psychotherapists are, no mistake.

 

v

 

You showed me the boathouse, the skeletal ships crystallised in salt,

The spar-white planks rising up from the ground- so many ribs.

We sat on the open shore, listened to the sand exhale, watched cold white stars emerge like scales, protracting needle-point patterns

To infinity.

We sat there together until the place was bare and empty,

Until boats silhouetted on to the skyline.

You gazed forward to the lighthouse, its undulations of light and shadow;

I watched your irises, the waves of silent feeling.

 

vi

 

When I want to ignore them now, I remember our first date,

You feeding me white sushi with black chopsticks,

The silver skin still gripping to the flesh, like our inhibitions waiting to be peeled away.

I remember you staring at me, the giant tank between us

Your eyes bending behind the blurred glass like seamless ripples of koi.

That was when you took my eyes.

They won't let you visit any more; apparently you've touched the inlet of my mind.

 

Last night, he offered me new eyes,

clear socially acceptable perspectives,

Tiny celluloid discs, tough like the shell of a mitten crab- plentiful, the same as all others.

He told me that my problems are as transparent as my skin, he can see right through me.

This is unlikely; how can he seize the corners of a moving shore?

 

vii

 

I do not grudge you my blindness.

I hope that you will wear my eyes around your neck, for my love for you was no fluid love

that rises and dips like Braille.

Believe me, it was not in cold blood that I removed them.

Since I cannot love you in safety, I let you keep my eyes.

They will float with you like lights on water,

Tiny portals, my life in yours.

... the seven sections, and the unspoken places between them, evoke a relationship with the richness of a small novel, spelling nothing out crudely, but letting their vividly-observed moments do the work - a case of looking outwards to imply what is within...
A Big Poem in every way, these reflections daringly fuse what's inner and what's outer, subvert the pressures of narrative and build a language all their own.
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson


Poem
Chloe Stopa-Hunt

1

 

the frost creeps

over our windows again

like sugar

the summer dew

enlivens drooping grasses

September

a foreword-

we are beginning

afresh

 

afresh

cold railings parting

before us the dim

halls closing up

behind beneath

rooms ringing with echoes

stirring our

dust left long intact

the phoenix children

 

2

 

only the dry

paper pale ghosts of

books and broken rulers

light as helium balloons

we wake to their

strangeness

 

no no no we are not ready

not ready to leave

this thin light and

the movement

and voices

of our multitude

beyond the gates

i think it is calling

calling

calling to us to come forward

to the horizon's glow

like an advert winding down

a balloon droops

the air gone somewhere

stand up

to be counted

 

 

3

 

in three years even our names

will have passed i think

there will be other girls

transitory as us

perhaps-

long live these children

live

a prayer

the light of striplights on black hair

these hosts

of us flaming

(the sibilance the hiss

of adolescents)

like angels or soldiers

going in

into the dark (Orphée return)

or light as we see fit

 

we are the

aftermath of fire and ruin

we are the rien we

do not have regrets (but I do)

we are the flowers

leaving

 

4

 

we had a reflection in the playground-

personally it was on what Siegfried Sassoon

would have made of those towers

and whether or not we should sing

and how grey the tarmac was

how blue the sky

 

sometimes i feel that this poem

must be completely original

or else that everyone is writing

it inside their own heads

or has written it

or will do

when the new season comes

 

5

 

is it now really?

the time to shake off

our dark shells

and the acne and exercise books

like a chrysalis

suddenly insignificant

lying discarded

clothes

on the changing room floor

 

and in response we are light fresh

and strong as spiders web

dreamy and

free in the gold air

 

or will nothing change

only the same anger

with no centre

spiralling outwards like dark blood

or oil paints spilt and spreading

simply something

we might breathe

in the air like anthrax

or bullets to silence

 

6

 

laughter of a voice

i had thought most

wise is the most startling

thing

today

when all seems twisted

confusion is like

the fractured black branches

in the wobbly

intense charcoal sketches

our ashes

the applause

dying away

 

can you open windows?

so many did

and hungrily

we devoured the bright air

the courtyard flowers suddenly

transformed

i want i hunger

to hold it all within me

cradle each moment like a new child

to kiss each aspect

individually

imprint the lost seconds

each with my self's shadow

stained

irrevocably


... like its undemonstrative title this sequence moves with exactness and restraint (without capital letters or full stops) through one of life's rites of passage - leaving school - opening out specific moments to look beyond them, and back at the poet's own reactions, subtly and honestly...
This ambitious sequence takes the risk - and pulls it off - of that most challenging of poetic tasks: to bring the complex abstract idea into the concrete world of image and metaphor.
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson

Passport Pictures
Helen Mort

We lie, empty, on the grass,

waiting for

the thoughts of the world

to pollinate our sleepy brains,

and all that I know is how

I want them to capture us now;

not bleached with effort

in a broken booth, but here -

our hands stamped with memories,

your steam-breath seducing mine,

twining round in lazy courtship.

 

I want to see this time

immortalised, want them to find us,

ripe with frozen pleasures and stories,

to be picked and savoured.

They all fall at once. I am struck

by the salt we drank in Havana,

the beggar man who

grabbed you with his yellow palms.

I turn too late;

bruised by Tibetan snow

and history, I look away

from the snake of children

climbing the mountain

and the thunderstorm

we flew through.

 

Sense it, planted deep

inside your head.

If I look hard enough,

I see your face

as your cheating laughter

ripples across Australia

and you stand in the wedding shop

lying through your teeth.

Deeper still, I find

a boat in Spain, the greed

of the waves and the

burn of the sun

on your red shoulders.

 

I turn away now.

Birds on the horizon

snap their wings like shutters

and all of it is gone

in the flicker of a phrase.


... a poem that creeps up on the reader unexpectedly, as a not-unusual emotional moment opens suddenly back and back into imagination (maybe memory, maybe fantasy) like a whistlestop trip through possible lives, coming back to find the everyday transformed...
This unexpected idea for a poem bites and keeps biting, remaining suggestively in the memory. There's a real ease and fluency in the diction too.
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson

Mirror
Hazel Perryman

This is what's beautiful. This.

Me on the bed by the

Window.

My pink toenails reflecting the music, the

Gaze of my dog, the

Gingerbread man on the white rose plate, the

Music of language hanging in the air, the

Sky cool and gaping blue,

Moaning night outside my window.

The skin against the sun.

The past that lives in tonight.

This;

The lamplight in the colours.

This;

The letters.

His laughing.

The water rolling from the tap like diamonds.

This.


... a courageously spare and subtle slim poem, with just the right sprinkling of precise observations and space around them - delicately hesitant rhythms, and the nerve to stake everything on the simplest of words like (sometimes in a single line, a one-word sentence) 'this'...
Rhythmically and imagistically perfectly-judged, with a fine eye for idiosyncratic detail and a fine ear for assonantal and alliterative music.
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson

Hymn no. A4
Nii Kpakpo Addo

Travel west of the A4 past London

feel Whiteness burning eyes fixated

Layers of fields stretching pylon cables slack

And the next, alight

burns with vegetable oil

 

the tree trunks are cracking

invading outwards

running through linear tubes

swallowing my eyes

splitting liquids in hollow sockets

 

but driving, Grandma sits in solitude, unperturbed, with the neck brace she

doesn't like

wearing for people's stares

 

the past

flaking walls of flats-

and my eyes are no more white anger

 

the best thing about being on road

is the playing of these thoughts

on road

again that humming wind

mixing feelings

the driver - dee - deeing

 

reaching Bedford, we drive past a bus depot

where stands a body, energy bent out

gasping

 

tanned girls like ruffians, stutter past

laughing spontaneously

I smile into them

a futile desire to touch them- different lives

even if I screamed back the silence

past the glass and

car lock

then my family, mum her reflex reaction- would be to get cross

the cracks reaching their faces


... (literally) driving rhythms move us through a journey where contemporary landscapes and street scenes flicker past outside, family thoughts and memories inside the car, all captured in a voice that can be as relaxed as conversation and as intense as poetry can be...
A virtuoso enactment of travel, this poem is reflective, reflexive and yet immediate. Layers of perception are lightly built into a careful rhythm of movement and of arrival.
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson

hot blooded. my my my.
Mary Chen

hot blooded. my my my.

sleepy world

boy are the youngsters out tonight

 

I'm waiting for my eyelids

to sink in themselves

and my goosebumped skin

to even out

with my butter knife, like frosting.

 

I'm so ravenous my hands

turn into claws,

sharp and padded shadow casts.

 

I'm an empty cup waiting for tea,

sugar cubes to be poured in.

 

I cut a slip in the screen door

to let the flies in

and paw down the night.

Is it not filled with bodies?

 

Innumerable stars, you are

my only companion,

cold and asking to be slapped.

 

Do me a favor

and smother me

if not with something like love,

then with a sweet wet towel

or a cute little pillow.


... a curious, unpindownable intensity runs behind the almost casual slipping from one image to the next - there's a dangerous feel to it, as if the voice won't be restricted to a conventionally poetic tone, but can speak with unsettling directness, without warning...
Brave, intense writing, whose prosody hides behind no tricks, but which exhibits a poet in absolute control of her material. So much in control, in fact, that the poem almost appears to "express itself" in images of startling clarity.
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson

Fragmentation
Harriet McCulloch

That summer words came broken to their lips,

falling in pieces, their mouths unheard, sly -

or else choked by the sprouting freckles, shy

colour in the down of their forearms. Eclipsed

by the glance of a hand on the sheet, the

moths and the white noise hum of heat in the air,

aching and battering the light: bare,

beaten, drumming down the sun. Persistently,

the air hung closer, insidious, sweet,

pinning arms to sides, clothes clinging, sheened.

Drowsy wasps murmured, jolted, gleaned

from the air, falling sacrificial at their feet.

 

From the air, falling, sacrificial at their feet

drowsy wasps, murmured, jolted, gleaned.

Pinning arms to sides, clothes clinging, sheened -

the air hung closer, insidious, sweet, bare,

beaten, drumming down the sun. Persistently

aching and battering the light: bare

moths and the white noise hum of heat in the air.

By the glance of a hand on the sheet, the

colour in the down of their forearms eclipsed,

or else choked by the sprouting freckles, shy.

Falling in pieces, their mouths unheard, sly -

that summer, words came broken to their lips.


... a technical trick that takes real control and nerve: running the twelve lines of the first half back in reverse order for the second... and somehow producing a real poem from this formal feat - a fine reminder of the way that using form can release, as well as constrain, imagination...
No mere technical exercise, this is true virtuosity: the mirror-form of the stanzas displaying just that evocative, disturbing character which is the poem's "point".
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson

Drug Puppy
Maria Achieng Onyango

Amanita muscaria

Pop-pop-popping

 

The base sliiiding through my v-v-veins, who cares when you're riding high

c-c-ceeeee me, I've got chicken fever growing like shiny crystal in my eyes

Bite the dust, bite the dot that's the essence of the big fat white shot

Fantasy in flaaaash vision sparkling gold dust onto my curling lashes

Green gravel makes my eyes weep- hawk, sharp eyes and sharper needles

Icccce hissing through my blooooodstream. Piercing. Gold studs so p-p-pretty

 

It's a krank caller I hear. A lady killer so they say

Liquid-acid-gold, baby, let's take some liberties with life

Release the love doves though we know it's only lust

Just a lightning flash in the proverbial p-p-pan

Facing the northern lights, and me without my make-up on

Liquidising my insides to a sickly sour paste

Rainbow coloured rocks discoing in my g-g-guuuut

 

A short back and sides please

And a shag for the skunk

Dancing wildly in a drift of snow

Pass the soap, I'm getting clean

Manic laughter, tranquillise me

Tripping through the tulips

and snagging on the weeds

 

Zero tolerance

Zero Charlie

Zero state of mind

z-z-z-zeeeeeerrroo


a glorious challenge to the reader who wants a comfortable ride, this one makes pulsing music out of street-talk and startling imagery, twisting, stuttering and stretching the words to create an effect that speaks aloud off the page...
Strong, committed writing, whose passionate feeling is communicated to the reader, this is what Trevor Pateman means by "the full word".
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson

Anatolian
Andrés Ramiro López

I walked into industrialized cafés throughout

asia minor and I kept thinking of the prehistoric

starbucks back in America as a kind kind of

mother church and of each mohammedan

swinging on Vienna's gate to an' fro at

the order of Kara Mustafa Pasha. Turks

handled the pelts of an American newspaper

as they would a Western bible - envious - and

licking their moustaches. They have no fez and

pray make Atatürk smile in his grave.

POPE BEATIFIES D'AVIANO

My cap, its white N and Y mating atop each other

catches their focuses in between blinks.

Sir, here your cappuccino Sir? Sir?

O O Ok. Thank you.

the waitress bustles back, suspicious, and trying to

pass this off as an awkward cuteness.

The rest regard, and loudly shuffle on to the next

section. Capuchins. Only if, further than the

Poor Clare order, one cowl forming part

Of a monk's habit might have anticipated this.

D'Aviano must have recited battle salmos

in preparation to slay mohammedans

and cautiously, then, inspected and re-inspected

outside the gates before gutting the coffee sacks

that the Turks forgot. Thanking the Poles over some

coffee fashioned in sallets they must have

wondered about beans and colombia.

POPE: EU UNITY WILL BE MORE STABLE/ IF IT IS BASED ON ITS COMMON CHRISTIAN
ROOTS

What possibly could a frappuccino be?

Wiping several tables on the way, she makes way

toward me and in accented english whispers.

"Sir, sir - we apologize for thinking you are

American terrorist We know no terrorist could

come from the new york. They come from

texas and c-c-cali-califor-nia."

For even the Pope everything is timing.


... for anyone who thinks that poetry should limit itself to small-scale personal emotions, take a look at this - one of the edgiest conflicts in the modern world and the history that fuels it all touched in with a striking lightness of touch, with sound research, with knowing wit, with style and no easy moralising at the end...
Urban, sophisticated, contemporary diction brings history and the street today together to make a new "war music" which is never self-pitying but always sharp, intelligent.
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson

... love zack
Zack Simons

Summer has flown in (at last) with clouds

unseasonable, weighty. The day's grey and the night

is even darker. All the while

droughts of laughter, of that 'one'

we all can think of, can't we: one who never

lit a sky, maybe, but smiled

with pearly teeth, with giggling squeals

and lit something up in us. Now it feels

like Summer's brought us clouds (at last) to stifle smiles

and let squeals pass.

 

To clarify: a sunny stream (bear with this, now)

skipping, tipping musically down-wind,

winding in meadows, through balmy valleys, straight

out of a Lake District post-card. Lush and warm.

Feel this post-card glossy in your fingers, see the stream

in green, in glorious green, so clear (chocolate, incense, ice-cold beer -

all the same idea).

Just take a flowing stream for now, embraced by lilting, whistled breeze

and watch it freeze.

 

Or - turn this post-card over on its back

to really get the message. Read out loud each longing sound, juicy but void:

the stoneless plums of love. The 'need you now...'. The 'don't know how

life sounds without you' - well... I'd overlooked the tune.

No matter. Quietly, now, find the final word

(not my name, the word just before - the penultimate word) and now

you see what this is all about;

pick up your pen, unsheathe a sword, watch the word freeze

and scratch it out.


... all the twists and turns and wry asides of a real voice talking to you, one you could listen to all day, and hardly notice the real emotion, heartfelt, complex and exactly registered, that it sneaks up on you and suddenly clicks into focus at the end...
Poet as enfant terrible? Much more, this mature, fluent poem moves beyond mere characterisation of the authorial voice to a sober and achieved insight into the pains and responsibilities of unrequited love.
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson

The Living Air
Gloria C Dawson

The way the hand's small arabesque

curls into the dark straits between bodies,

caught up short

by skin's warm shore, the smell,

elusive, of a dreaming formed

some days ago, found just round the corner

in the bark of white young trees

like the flicker of a flap that you forgot

of an old bed blanket breathing

quick, dust, dust

your dead self out.


... moves the reader into the immediate, lyrical world of one small moment. This poem evokes a feeling of familiarity and ease at the same time as it suggests unease and the uses of enchantment...
With extraordinary delicacy, the poem unpacks a Chinese box of images in order to lead the reader, particularly through the unusual senses of touch and smell, through memory, the present and to a difficult idea of the future.
- Judges Philip Gross & Fiona Sampson