Black Eyes Publishing UK in conjunction with the Gloucestershire Poetry Society.
2021 Open Poetry Competition
Thank you to every poet who submitted to our competition this summer and made it such a great success. I look forward to reading more of your poetry next year.
Josephine Lay
(Director of Operations for the Gloucestershire Poetry Society & Editor for Black Eyes Publishing UK).
Winner:
Resurrection of a Black Man
by Jenny Mitchell
(£100 & Featured in the Steel Jackdaw magazine)
Potent, full of anger and love, and rich with brutal and tender details that carry the reader through the poem’s time-jumps and juxtapositions to its strange and beautiful conclusion, Resurrection of a Black Man struts in as high a style as the man the poem is about.
Second Place:
Outfitting a Kayak
by Sophie Dumont
(£50 & Featured in the Steel Jackdaw Magazine)
An impeccably measured poem that lays out in compelling, curious, empathetic and tenderly obsessive detail, the deep histories of a new hobby.
Third Place:
At Once the River
by Scott Elder
(£25 & Featured in the Steel Jackdaw Magazine)
A breathless, compelling poem, laced with startling images, that spills from the tongue like rushing water when read aloud.
Highly commended (in no particular order):
Ye gods un little fishes…
by Emma Purshouse
(Featured in the Steel Jackdaw Magazine)
A deliciously observed vignette that captures its subject beautifully, with a dash of dialect and prayer and a lot of telling detail.
Pretty Poet Purge Night
by Jo Else
(Featured in the Steel Jackdaw Magazine)
A thrillingly irreverent two-fingered salute of a poem that sets out its stall in furious style, and is a joy to read aloud.
London Snow
by Caroline Hammond
(Featured in the Steel Jackdaw Magazine)
A beautifully sustained study of the city made strange and new.
Main Judge - Adam Horovitz
Adam Horovitz is a Stroud-based poet, performer and editor. His first full collection was Turning (Headland, 2011), followed by A Thousand Laurie Lees (History Press, 2014) and Little Metropolis (a CD of poetry and music commissioned by the Stroud Fringe Festival in 2015).
He is one of Ledbury Poetry Festival’s Versopolis poets, and was poet in residence for Herefordshire and the Pasture-fed Livestock Association. His second full collection of poems, The Soil Never Sleeps, was released in a second, extended edition in 2019.
He co-presents The Thunder Mutters, a poetry and music podcast, and is one of 10 poets featured on Cerys Matthews and The Hidden Orchestra’s album We Come From the Sun. Released on Decca in January 2021. His next book, Love and Other Fairy Tales, will also be released in 2021, by Indigo Dreams Publications.
Long shortlist compiled by Josephine Lay
Copyright
Worldwide copyright of each entry remains with the author but Black Eyes Publishing UK and the GPS has unrestricted rights to publish the winning and runner-up poems in the Steel Jackdaw Magazine, Website and Social Media pages and any relevant promotional material.