Brave new worlds
Judge Alison Chisholm is transported by the winners of Writing Magazine’s Different Reality poetry competition
The only limitation to the theme of writing poetry based in a new reality is the boundary of the writer’s imagination. Boundaries can be nudged, pushed and smashed through, and the poets entering this competition did plenty of nudging, pushing and smashing.
There were poems about the human body at every stage from conception to death, even taking in the situation narrated by a transplanted kidney. There were poems about novels and poetry, the evolution of an island, and altered states of thought. There were invaders from space, characters from mythology, and delvers into the deepest recesses of the dictionary.
One factor common to all the entries was the writer’s ability to think inside another character and show an alternative reality, and this made the whole set a fascinating read. Wherever a powerful sense of identity and place fused with an interesting narrative, a poem was created that made the reader think, absorb, and wonder.
The poems explored numerous forms, with blank verse, free verse, prose poems, villanelles, sonnets, a sestina and a range of nonce forms, in which a new pattern was devised for the occasion. Most of the forms were handled well, and interesting variants were included. Unfortunately some pieces were let down by inaccurate punctuation, or punctuation omitted for no apparent reason, making it more difficult and less pleasurable to study the poem. A few made rather too heavy use of repetition – a legitimate device in poetry, but one that needs to work artistically and with delicacy, rather than being heaped onto the poem.
A high proportion of the poems entered, a third of the total, merited serious consideration, but after several readings two pieces emerged as strong winners. In first place is Loss
by Elizabeth Horrocks of Wilmslow, Cheshire. The title and opening sentence, I miss my sister, suggest an obvious grief; but the poem turns that on the head by showing the reader that these sisters are, in fact, mermaids, one of whom has chosen to give up the sea to find love on land.
The poem narrates the manner of her defection, and manages to demonstrate the undersea world to readers, and feed in information about mermaid lore, without ever falling into a pattern of telling rather than showing. Through the narrative we learn of the merpeople’s longevity, of their hero and anti-hero, the High King and the sea-witch, of their physiology and their joy and laughter.
The poem is written in blank verse, and Elizabeth Horrocks has taken pains to break up the strict regularity of the metre with variants for added interest. For example, the fifth line of the poem begins with initial trochaic substitution, where the expected iamb is reversed to give the trochee’s stressed followed by unstressed syllables, reverting to the iamb for the next foot. The trochaic Ever is immediately followed by the iambic
again. At the close of the same line is a feminine ending, that extra unstressed syllable that allows a subtle lingering at the line’s end, with the tenth syllable stressed, and an unstressed eleventh to
complete pleasure.
By its nature, blank verse doesn’t rhyme, but there are occasional repeats and rhymes, in amongst
plenty of slant rhymes, to add music to the lines. From the start, the repeated not know rhymes with grow, by picks up the sound of die, there’s consonance in cloud/did/ spread, use/race and wrath/death, assonance in brings/until and race/ stays faithful and alliteration in spell/
spread and wild/waves. These are just the examples at the line ends. Slant rhymes are also used within the lines, tightening the mesh of sound that supports the poem.
The poem’s vocabulary enriches its voice. There are numerous examples of onomatopoeia, with phrases such as thrusting upward, tail twist and turn, and words like sparkling, enticing, potent and
withered. The consonant clusters in
tranquil nights draw out the sound to imply tranquillity, the adjacent plosive sounds in the middle of ribcage have a jarring awkwardness, and the multiple sustained consonants in
phosphorescence linger in the mouth.
The most poignant part of this story lies in the science the poet has created for her new reality. Human/ mer-biology dictate vastly different lengths of life. The effects of pressure, weight and gravity take their toll, and the changed physique means that the sister’s metamorphosis is irrevocable. We grieve with the narrator for the loss of her sister, and with the sister for her decision.
The second prize winner is narrated by another character who assumes a completely new set of characteristics. In a Murmuration of Starlings by Angela G Pickering of Ely, Cambridgeshire, sees the narrator diving from a tower prompted by no death wish, just a lust for flight, and joining with a flock of starlings as it whirls through the air. We know that neither practised art nor feathered bird is involved, and we are drawn in to an intense description of the starlings’ gathering and flight alongside the narrator.
At the end of the poem, the birds drop to settle, and the narrator is left in a dilemma, asking Could I trust myself to land? We don’t learn the answer; but we are almost reassured by the closing comment that such was the reality… / I did not care.
The narrative would be a straightforward description if it were not for the astounding events being shown here. There’s an almost matterof-fact quality to the suggestion of diving from a tower to fly with the birds that makes the reader’s imagination do a double take.
As this is a free verse poem, it doesn’t have the metrical requirement of blank verse, but the rhythm is natural and attractive, the flow of language giving a lilting quality to the descriptions. Here again are plenty of slant rhymes, notably in the middle of the poem the succession of unaccented rhymes that opens the fourth stanza. We also have the full consonance of sweeping/ swooping, the repeated consonants in wheeling/swirling, and the half rhyme of colliding/glided. The latter resonates later in the stanza, forming consonance with thinned/spread.
There are some powerful images, particularly of sight, touch and sound. The cloud of starlings is described as thick smoky whorls that thinned and spread, and anyone who has seen starlings in flight has a clear mental picture. We hear A single cry then a murmur, a rising, a thrumming, a hum, and feel the draught of ten thousand wings.
At the end of this poem, the poet returns to the point made at its opening, that I was not made like them, and somehow the reader can suspend disbelief. The new reality has made the incredible credible, proving the success of the poem.
The winning and shortlisted poems demonstrate how writing on new realities stretches the imagination into fresh dimensions that can excite, inspire and terrify. These are poems to give joy, thought and wonder.