New Ross poet Patrick scoops €2,000 prize
CONGRATULATIONS to New Ross poet Patrick Maddock, who won the 2017 Strokestown International Poetry Prize of €2,000 with his poem The Fen Woman’s Redress.
Patrick, pictured right, is a former Hennessy Poetry winner, whose work has appeared in magazines in England and Ireland. He has previously appeared on the short list of competitions including Gregory O’Donoghue, Dromineer, Over the Edge and the Listowel Single Poem. The shortlist for the Strokestown prize included poets from America, the UK, New Zealand and Ireland.
Patrick’s winning poem is reproduced below.
The Fen Woman’s Redress by Patrick Maddock
On days you harvest corn from boats the ears an inch above lapping waves, days of the musk rat and the coypou, I’ll rest on a mattress of willow, my mind adrift and pleasantly fed somewhere over the mollusc bed. My moleskin hat may be wasted and my otterskin skirt long gone, but I asked for none of your measures or weights – quarters, firkins, tuns – my faceaches and earaches slight against the way my heart grew sore, I, squeezed out by the speculative, ankle-deep and webfooted, you said, from the body’s oil I refused to sluice not caring if my feet looked stained, and wearing garters of dried eelskins above the knees to ease my pains. You promised me an open prison of dykes and drains, a world to be scoured, one forced to unlearn its true course, a place made dessicate in the scab of a sucked-out mere on your ‘uncontestable’ ground, your ‘struggle’ with ultimate outfall dissolved in a great swallowing of registers and stout reports, conveyancing of schemes, crown and regalia of tawdry chains strutting privileges of a palatine, with all the secret entrances betrayed – a quaking world once known and loved by this slodger stalking on stilts feathers and mole’s foot in my pocket, marshmeadowing with the leaping pole, rowing and wading among the fowl, deepest of the undrowned, woman falling holding a dead man’s hand, an old word-ending to spirit me forth, a sudden breach in your works.