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Imago Poetry Journal (Award Finalists)
IMAGO POETRY JOURNAL selection of Award Finalists
The Robert Graves Award is in existence to promote the legacy and vision of classical scholar and writer Robert Graves (1895-1985) – author of over 140 books, including 55 books of poems and author of such books as I, Claudius (1934) and The White Goddess (1947). The Robert Graves Poetry Award is an annual award given to a poet writing in the English language and has poems previously published by Imago Poetry or other small press publications from the UK. Shannon Kerry is the editor.
The 2004 Robert Graves Award Finalists
Dee Rimbaud,UK
Nigel McLoughlin, Ireland
Michael Spring, USA (winner)
Kristy Bowen, USA
Sarah Miller, UK (runner-up)
Merryn Williams, UK
Enclosed are the works of three finalists:
Sarah Miller, Merryn Williams, and Kristy Bowen. The other two finalists (Nigel McLoughlin and Dee Rimbaud) and winner (Michael Spring) can be found at the links below.
NOTE by Shannon Kerry, editor of Imago Poetry:
All six finalists are spledid poets. They are all winners! They were chosen from over 100 nominations for this award. A single winner will be chosen, but the other five finalists should know that they are all on equal ground with whomever wins The Robert Graves Award. Our mission is to introduce and give a little more attention to these particular poets. And like Robert Graves, the editors and judges at Imago Poetry believe they are all visionaries. Please read and enjoy each and every one of them.
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Finalists: Sarah Miller and Merryn Williams
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Poems by runner-up: Sarah Miller
Two Questions on Familiarity
Orangutan meets beluga whale, falls
with a sopping splash in love, drowns.
We've seen this scene before, acted out
in other languages, with other players.
We hardly wonder any more; we go on,
sliding our fins along familiar currents,
quite forgetting the day the thing
first fell into our lives: a warm, alien shape
that frightened us, then disappeared.
But I've been meaning to ask you: what
do birds think when you turn your fins
against the current and with your own
explosive splash break through the surface
holding you? And will you grieve at last
for the lost orangutan when you leap
too far in search of birds and land
on rocky shores, and drown, and disappear?
_______________
People Want Clarification
You turn away.
There is a stone by the road,
a crow on the fence.
You have tried
opening the house;
the chairs you throw
at black-tinted glass
hang in the air and people
want clarification.
At the well, you drop
cobblestones. You cannot
hear the water splashing.
You carry a hammer
to the lake and the ice
will not crack.
The stone weighs down your hand.
You know it will never
reach the fence post. The crow
will not take flight.
Your arm swings back
and you give them what you can:
the brief flight of stone,
the silence of its fall.
________________
Notes on Discovery
And now when you turn to me
it is the slow spading of dirt
out of an archaeological dig,
the sound of wet earth falling
on dry, the tossing of detritus
to one side, the uncovering
of time-mottled stone, the scars
on the face of chiseled granite,
the artifact, the ruin, the waste.
__________________
Before You Meet Catullus
(First published in Verse Libre Quarterly)
He's the sort of guy you meet in night court,
you waiting to plead not guilty, he expounding
eloquently the differences between stalking
and adoration. He'd finish waxing on his girl,
slip the clean-shaven bailiff directions to a no-tell
on the way out. He attends political rallies
like a fanatic, learns everyone's name, writes
on highway overpasses: Jason hugs trees, envies
their little sticks. He sat four hours in an airport
writing his brother's elegy. Missed his plane.
You need to know these things. He loves
his girl, will sleep with a goat if it slips him
a promising line or two. He'll steal your breath,
take the words right off your tongue, publish them
behind your back. You'll love him for it, love the lines
of his hips on yours in bed, of his fingers in your hair,
of the note left on your pillow in the morning: I burn.
Sarah Miller's recent work has appeared online in journals such as Verse Libre Quarterly, 3rd Muse, Poems Niederngasse, 2River, Wicked Alice, and Stirring, which nominated her for the 2004 Pushcart. She is the editor of Half Drunk Muse. She received an MA in English from Ohio University and is working on an MPhil in Classics at Cambridge University.
http://www.millertarized.com
http://www.halfdrunkmuse.com
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POEMS by Merryn Williams
GETTING SMALLER
Light is drawing back from the corners of your room,revealing less and less, and you hate glasses.
You carry the printed sheet to the window,
hold it at a distance.
You are my contemporary, or nearly,
yet you fumble, while I see clearly.
More than the odd line, or bag under the eye,
these are the signs by which I mark your ageing.
The little sisters who were to have been your bridesmaids,
grown up and with their own husbands.
Our jokes about our old headmistress
(how old now?), the receding line of birthdays.
That much time couldn't have passed?
But it has. I remember
lamps in my grandmother's house, before our own age reached her.
We grew accustomed to them in the end, avoided
the glare of electricity.
Small, lightless rooms they had in another century;
low, sloping ceilings; tiny windows; daylight
filtered through diamond panes - how many
ruined their sight, reading or sewing by lamplight?
It goes and does not return.
Gradually, sky and sea are drained of colour;
the lumps of amethyst fade, the light
ebbs back. Your room is getting smaller.
A SISTER RECALLS
My brother had a quiet voice; you had to strain
to hear him from the back of a crowded room.
My brother spoke in the debate on conscription, said
he'd always be last to go forth and the first to retreat.
When the newspapers cried, 'Young men, march forward!'
he sat in one place and smiled, 'I'm a coward'.
He liked chess problems, hiking above the snow;
should have been a girl because girls didn't go.
My brother was lost in the summer advance;
his name is written on blue glass
in the college chapel. They dedicated
the window before the Lord Lieutenant
and other dignitaries, swathed in black.
I went there and looked once. I shan't go back.
BLOOD DONOR
It all floats back. I'm staring at the ceiling,
as others queue, to give blood for Vietnam;
tense as a cat, deliberately ignoring
the scarlet trickle leaking from my arm.
I see you stand up, taller than all the others,
stagger, somebody guides you to a bed;
stare through the crowd, my interest never wavers
trained hard on you - but touch me not, you'd said.
The capsule cracks; high windows, August heat,
me lying on the white unspotted sheet.
There's no real sequel. All those students scattered,
some dead. Vietnam stopped bleeding long ago.
I turn the page; my son becomes an adult,
walks those same streets, the age and height of you.
In dreams, I feel the needle scratch my wrist,
and think of blood, our blood that never mixed.
ON THE TIDELINE
Slowly, he came round.
He knew this was the Intensive Care Unit, but he'd been dreaming
of sixty years back, walking Yarmouth sands with his father,
who'd told him about Newton,
the discovery of light, how the seven colours
blend into white at last, and of how he had said:
I seem to myself to have been like a boy playing
next to the sea, picking up some bright shell or pebble
while before me the mighty ocean lay unexplored.
Three doctors sat round his bed.
They introduced themselves as specialists, so he knew
this was crunch time. One said:
'Good afternoon, Mr Smith.
A scientist, aren't you? Yes, a distinguished scientist.
Four days we've been reducing your medication
so you can understand what's going on. It isn't
good news, unfortunately. If we end the treatment
now, you will die. If we continue, you will
still die, some weeks or months from now. It would mean
kidney machines, exhaustion, a long struggle
and no good outcome. What do you wish us to do?'
Next to the German Ocean, his father had told him
the shells he liked to pick up were the hard casing
of creatures that lived in the sand or rocks, whose bodies
were washed out by the sea when they died. 'There is no God' -
he thought - 'but I can cope with that'. How the old man,
a parson, had grieved when he had made the decision
to follow truth step after logical step! He said:
'I prefer to die now, when I'm in control. Please take
that oxygen mask; it will not be needed'. The February light dribbled away.
The grandchildren came in,
in tears, prepared to argue. The girl, in particular, looked
like him. He thought, I'll walk into the darkness
open-eyed; the colours will not be lost, the atoms
regroup themselves. 'I am leaving', he said, and turned
to the ocean.
Merryn Williams lives in Oxford and is the editor of the magazine The Interpreter's House. She also edits the newsletter of the Wilfred Owen Association. Books include Preface to Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca (translations) and two poetry collections, The Sun's Yellow Eye and The Latin Master's Story.
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Poems by Finalist: Kristy Bowen
Estuary
She still promises us an ocean
then, the lick of salt on our lips,
sand settled in the depths of our bodies,
Anchor. Motion. Tide.
In late July, we travel the road
to the quarry, the dry skin
of our heels cracking, rasping,
summer drying us out like sea grass,
weeds dragging the gravel.
She survives only on ritual:
her hands washing stockings at the sink,
the comb pulling gently at our scalp.
She whispers stories of mermaids, loss,
treads wistfulness like water.
At night, fires burn in the valley.
Her body listens, lists.
She dreams of boats and destinations,
while smoke settles in the curtains,
scorches itself in the weave of her day.
Her daughters become diction,
The ghost of us, our lost selves,
scattering across the continent.
We are roses pressed in a book,
the iron bed pushed against the wall.
We are furrowed, furious,
prone to strange weather.
We dream the water will take us back
one day, one by one, willingly,
our voices dumb as stones.
**********
Room 118, Arizona
Even now, her edges are blackening
under his tongue, the words livid
in her mouth, impossible.
The skies tonight are deceitful,
promise rain, deliver nothing.
This is their way.
Yesterday, she dropped like dime
into a crack, fell asleep
mid-afternoon, hurtling toward
Tucson, dreamt of burned-out
houses, intricate arsons.
He tells her she is never
quite as beautiful as she is
on her knees, the space,
the abstraction of her body, opaque.
She writes villanelles about other lovers
on the skin of his back, their history
annotated by gestures of supplication,
the time she dragged her fingernail
across a fairytale, and out fell
a dozen girls, wide-eyed,
red-lipped, april in their blood.
A palm reader in Texas warns
her of conduits and spells,
the darkness that puddles
like lake water in her mind,
the moths that know
only summer, nothing else.
She grows incautious, notes
the scorpions scurrying
beneath the bed, strands
of her hair, stained sheets.
Vacancy glows, a thousand
cigarettes, through the shears.
She forgets how early
the night falls here--
how early it fails.
******
Cassandra
She says the future is visible
at the edge of things,
the spaces between,
doorways and twilight,
launch and destination.
In his truck, hot to distraction,
feet splaying the dash,
she dreams of storms dragging
themselves sopping across the prairie:
a baby born in a field like an ear of corn,
the ache of a woman's wrists.
She looks where his hand meets
the wheel and blushes--
that pure burning there.
History is no more than a syllable
in a bottle, blue glass, a poem
written on the underside of a cup,
the thread from which she dangles.
Her lipstick grows soft in the cave
of her pocket and she knows it's coming,
this great desire, her body broken
like the spine of a book. Her mother
can smell it on her, persimmons
and vanilla, it tangles in her hair.
She says she will die in water,
learns to fear rivers and dishpans,
empty bathtubs and bottomless wells,
bides her time, slipping with him
beneath the quarry like a fish,
the blackness shimmering.
She is blood spilling,
witchcraft and needles,
this fold in the map
of her body meant for
nothing if not rending.
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Kristy Bowen’s work has appeared in a number of publications,
including Small Spiral Notebook, Stirring, and Poems Niederngasse. She is the author of three chapbooks, belladonna, Bloody Mary and The Archaeologist’s Daughter. A three-time Pushcart nominee, Bowen was recently awarded first place in The Poetry Center of Chicago’s 10th Annual Juried Reading Competition. A poet and text/collage artist, she has read, performed, and exhibited her work at a number of bookstores, libraries, galleries, bars/cafes, and festivals, including The Guild Complex and The Poetry Center of Chicago.
She lives in Chicago, where she edits the online journal Wicked
Alice, and is the founder of Dancing Girl Press, devoted to
publishing work by women poets. More of her work may be seen at:
www.angelfire.com/poetry/wickedpen.
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