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![]() Emma Danes |
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The 2008 theme was 'Sloth' - the antithesis of the National Poetry Day theme of 'Work'.
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Eleanor: "The subject of the competition – Sloth – wasn’t an easy one: of the seven deadly sins, sloth is of its nature the least entertaining. The entries resolved themselves into two categories, poems which slipped into lotus-eater mode, and those which took the animal as subject or metaphor."
"The best ten poems moved on to negotiate their own space within this tricky subject, and it is from these that I chose the winners."
Eleanor: "The mastery of the form – a sonnet – crept up on me as I read, the rhymes never jumping from the page, or drawing attention to themselves. The poem blends the lyricism of a love poem, with a delicate self-effacing humour. The final couplet is a splendidly managed resolution."
Richard: "This poem was written as part of a PhD in Poetry I'm doing at Nottingham Trent University - a project in which I'm writing poems about masculinity and male sexuality. That iconic James Bond image just had to be written about! I thought it was quite a puritanically-minded sonnet with its wake up! work! finale - until I began performing it. Then I realised a large part of the audience would always be smirking with mischievous recognition!"
Richard chose a free Poetry Prescription as his prize for winning.
Eleanor: "After Hours takes the form of a simile, into which the reader slips easily and deceptively. We have to remind ourselves at the end that this whole dream-like poem is an image for Sloth, and that the drowned village isn’t real."
Emma: "The various inspirations for this poem came together quite unexpectedly with the idea of sloth: a beautiful lazy afternoon skimming stones at Lake Vyrnwy where a village was drowned (after being rebuilt lower down the valley), Chagall’s nostalgic paintings of Russian village life, and organ music heard in an empty church. The image of the drowned village suggests for me the essential qualities of sloth: a timeless, dreamlike, submerged state, accompanied by a guiltless distancing from responsibility – very welcome, however briefly, at the end of a demanding day."
Read more of Emma's poems on our Members' Poems pages (Summer 2008) and the 2007 Stanza Poetry Competition page. Read more about Emma on our Members' Profile pages.
Eleanor: Gap Year Letter from a Five-Toed Sloth was the best of the comic takes on the subject, its form again controlled with an ease which may be more apparent than real. Whichever it was, this neatly-tripping verse was engaging, and avoided the rather portentous humour that characterised some of the entries."
Diana: I've always had a thing about Gap Years. It seems to me that after all those years of bringing up children, it's the parents who deserve the break rather than the children! A case of too much indulgence, I think.
Read more of Diana's poems on our Members' Poems pages (Summer 2007). Read more about Diana on our Members' Profile pages.