Ver Poets Open Competition 2019 Results
First Prize: Rag & Bones Poem by Jeri Onitskansky
Second Prize: Gouranga by David Van-Cauter
Third Prize: Hopperesque by Rachel Goodman
Runner Up:
- witness by Lucy Crispin
Highly Commended:
- Valediction by Sandra Galton
- Designing the Chair by Jacqueline Gabbitas
- Self-portrait by Steven Jackson
- Puddles by Josh Ekroy
- To His Fingertips by Stephen Boyce
- Safe house by Estelle Price
- The Obituarist by Justine Knowles
- Next Best Thing by Robin Houghton
Selected:
- All photographs… by Anna Kisby
- Sweet chestnut by Tista Austin
- Two days after… by Roger Elkin
- Spur Bridge Mortlake by Colin Pink
- Fern by Juliet Troy
- Quotidien by Sandra Galton
- Om by Sandra Galton
- Out of a Wall by Mandy Pannett
- Spaces … by Mandy Pannett
- Field shed 1964 by Jennifer Hunt
- Winter Garden by Jennifer Hunt
- Magpies by Emma Simon
- Crude Metaphor by Tammy Swift-Adams
- Desire Paths by Justine Knowles
- Bank Holiday Diorama, 1875 by Bill Holloway
- Tatterdemalion by Konstandinos Mahoney
- Mudberries by Jeri Onitskansky
- Winter Ways by Susan Skinner
- In Winter by Dennis Tomlinson
- Opening up the Cellar… by Catherine Swire
- Short Street in Autumn by Rodney Wood
- The Devouring Sun by Rodney Wood
Our competition anthology, The Ver Prize 2019, includes all of the above poems and Kathryn Maris’s report. All those included will receive a copy. Further copies can be ordered by sending a cheque for £4 (plus £1 p&p), made payable to Ver Poets, to 181 Sandridge Road, St Albans, Herts, AL1 4AH.
Ver Poets Members’ Ten-Liners Competition 2017 Results
First Prize: The goblin under the stairs by Daphne Schiller
Joint Second Prize: Perspective by David Van-Cauter
Joint Second Prize: Pastorale by Kevin Maynard
Highly Commended:
- A Waiting Room by Selwyn Veater
- Poem by Terry Jones
- Red Kytes over Home Farm by Anna Avebury
- A Penny for the Guy by Bill Holloway
Commended:
- Feeling Blue by Sylvia Banham
- If I wanted to by Chris Delaney
- Ten Liners by Alan George
- Odour of New Baby by David Mark Williams
Ver Poets Members’ Summer Competition 2017 Results
First Prize: 45 Deg C by Kaye Lee
Second Prize: Summer at Jackie’s by Daphne Schiller
Third Prize: If You Lose Your Way by Bill Holloway
Shortlisted:
- It is August by Beliz McKenzie
- Light of the shore by Patricia McCaw
- Heat by Valerie Morton
- August by Valerie Morton
- Silences by Selwyn Veater
- Sloshing About in Memories by Selwyn Veater
- Assault by A C Clarke
- Be Tempted by David Jones
- Midsummer, Lake Macquarie by David Jones
Open Competition First Prize
Rag & Bones poem
Jeri Onitskansky
Old
bitterness—
the fox
among hot love’s
downy chicks—
old nettle
long caught
in frocks
of exquisite
waviness—
how it might feel
to lose you,
my brouhaha—
my overcooked stew?
If healing
unfurls its ubiquitous
tiger lilies and
good will
sparkles
in chandeliers
of future years,
could I say I knew you
well enough—
the mood roughly
hewn, most
loutish of blues?
Open Competition Second Prize
Gouranga
David Van-Cauter
…and I’m sat static behind the wheel under that bridge on the M1 that used to have a scrawl that said CT London but now says Gouranga Keep Hunting and I’m thinking why me and why now and I check my watch and feel in my pocket for the sample I produced 30 minutes ago and I’m trying to keep it warm and I need to get to Bushey within the hour so it can be taken away and worked on and I can get back in my car and thunder back up the motorway to Hitchin where you will be waiting with another doctor who will do the rest and somewhere past this endless queue of cars I imagine you waiting and thinking he’s late again and today of all days and there’s nothing I can do and I’m cursing this mad arrangement where procreation happens in three separate places and all I can think as I stroke the plastic tube is keep on swimming don’t give up keep moving while I sit here helpless as the rain begins to fall and I start to shake like a sperm hitting the egg repeatedly with its head and I weep on the dashboard and hit the horn and start a Mexican wave of blasts along the queue past the scrawled-on bridge and down the lengths of grumbling cars vibrating trying to rev out the anger as the clock ticks on relentlessly and I’m thinking why me why now keep hunting keep hunting and the rain pisses down like tiny javelins and I try to breathe
but I can’t I can’t…
Open Competition Third Prize
Hopperesque
Rachel Goodman
The lonely thing has been overdone he said, there’s more to it
than that and don’t tell me that my pictures are voyeuristic.
We all have glass between us, and behold the silent scrabbling
in apartment cells like bees, with yellow resignation.
Blank blocks of wall stare in sunlight daring the unruly movement
of a fly, clouds have no scurry to them, there is not a teaspoon
on the kitchen counter nor the stipple of a crumb.
Nothing is going to happen. The afternoon’s a flat unyielding
surface I can get no purchase on, the barn door black and
unremitting without scratch of sound. This lack of detail is too hard,
I want the entrance that a scribble gives, a paper bag,
a crumpled scarf, a borrowed book that opens at page three.
But there are skies of cruel space in paint, burning up
the shadow pools, and I’m too tired to cross the yard.
