It was a privilege to be involved in the judging of the inaugural Shelley Memorial Poetry Prize and to be invited to read so many inventive and challenging poems: 105 in total. The range of entries received testifies to the power of literature to continue its ongoing conversation with the giants of the past, and it was fascinating to see the different ways that poets interpreted themes that preoccupied Shelley two centuries ago, while also reinventing them for a contemporary audience.
The winner, St Kilda Mouse, is a surprising, multilayered poem which effectively employs the golden shovel form (where the last word of each line forms lines from a pre-existing poem; here from Prometheus Unbound) in order to open up a rich seam of ideas and images. The subject, an extinct mouse on display in a museum, is used as a springboard to explore the impossibility of bringing the dead back to life. The speaker in the poem is struck by the ‘gleam’ in the eye of the dead mouse, which evokes a further connection with Shelley in calling to mind his famous electrical experiments to bring dead creatures to life. The evocative detail of arteries being ‘emptied of crumbs he scratched from the post office floor’ suggests how alive the mouse is in the imagination of the speaker. It was a standout for both judges.
The second prize went to Cor Cordium (Heart of Hearts), a deftly crafted, rhythmically accomplished poem which deals with the aftermath of Shelley’s death - his beach-side cremation and famously incombustible heart. This grim subject matter is handled with a balance of pathos and humour, and quite without sentimentality. Lines from Shelley and Keats are woven into the poem creating a sense of prescience and inevitability. The combination of word choice, rhythm and syntax impressed greatly.
Yellow pufferfish at bedtime was awarded third prize, both judges being drawn firstly to its relatable and humorous observation of modern parenting, while also enjoying its subtle yet consistent references to the dual settings. A light-touch poem, its strength lies in its simplicity and intelligent use of line breaks to deliver twists and turns in the poem’s narrative, while at the same time offering echoes of its source poem (Love’s Philosophy).
In the highly commended section, Dangerous Vision explores the power of a solitary place. Fluid enjambement means that the rhymes are unobtrusive, and its ‘Romantic’ theme is explored in a contemporary way offering a simultaneously bleak and hopeful vision.
Shelleyan Threnody is a stirring lament for the losses sustained in political terms in the two centuries since Shelley’s death. The judges enjoyed its careful, polished crafting and were drawn, in particular, to sound: bitter plosives and acid assonance offer a pleasure to the ear.
Memorial was selected for its modern take on Ozymandias and the way it invites the reader to reflect on our contemporary times, values and the climate crisis. When we are invited to observe the lifting of ‘hard-baked layers of mud’, unearthing a ‘tribute in this waste’, the sense of loss, waste and impending challenges chimes with readers stepping out of a pandemic into financial and environmental catastrophe. The satire applied to our own age serves to offer hope for a brighter future with changed priorities.
A beautiful and unsettling poem, dreams of flying imagines a dream-swap between human and avian sleepers. Jubilant and dark, the poem’s use of line breaks and economy of language build a sense of the effort and weightlessness of flight; balanced by the sinister trade-off of ‘dream for a nightmare’ as the bird finds itself ‘a head full of words/ where there ought to be song’.
A number of further poems from the longlist were also selected for the anthology.
'Shelly' is a touching social commentary in the first person in which a speaker intuits the hidden past of a street beggar: the childhood violence, abuse and neglect that led her to homelessness, addiction and destitution. The speaker - a passing shopper - briefly but powerfully connects with ‘Shelly’ before they ‘hurry past your spot/ on the pavement [...] on my way to Waitrose’. Ultimately, the connection is lost, the good intentions and empathy impotent: a powerful invitation to the reader to consider their own responses to social inequalities.
Hymn to the Apprehension of Beauty in All Things begins with the way in which drought recalls springtime rain and in turn provokes epiphanies about the nature of love.
Excalibur visits Shelley’s death by drowning and the fragility of human connection using blacksmithing metaphors to convey Shelley’s maelstrom of a life: ‘bond’, ‘hardened’, ‘smelted’, ‘blunted’, ‘to temper’ and concludes - as all super-heated wrought ironwork ends - in water: ‘even Love/ needs a secluded shore:/ a lake in which/ to drown.’
The garden of life is a thought-provoking poem that travels through garden metaphors, from the cutting of ‘voices, whispers, wind between boughs’ to ‘rain strikes, skitters on leaves’, ending with a startling image in the final stanzas: ‘What commerce can we have/ with light, how much can we take?’
With a friend in Sussex is a moving poem about bereavement, loss and memory, set in Sussex lanes that ‘wind & twist & turn’. Despite the pain of losing a ‘faithful friend’, the poem ends with the comforting knowledge that ‘you walk with me still’ and ‘share a view’ of Shipley Mill.
Highlights Reel was one of a number of political poems linking The Mask of Anarchy to contemporary times. Using rhyming couplets, the speaker humorously conveys how we are still ‘reeling from the damage done’ by recent events, including Covid, Partygate and Brexit, and voices exasperation with entrenched social inequalities: ‘Though we are many, they are few/ somehow they always jump the queue’.
Ted Gooda and Nicola Garrard