Editorial
This is a special issue of FROGMORE PAPERS for a number of reasons. It is the first number that has been devoted exclusively to poetry, and it contains the winning entry and runners-up for the first Frogmore Poetry Prize. Congratulations to David Satherley, Samantha Dyche and Margaret Browne whose work the adjudicator, John Rice, comments on below.
It is also the first issue in the new format, which we hope will prove popular with supporting subscribers and casual readers alike.
Finally, being a double issue it contains work by a far greater number of writers than has been possible in the past.
Views on any or all of these changes would be welcomed by the editor.
Report by the adjudicator of the first Frogmore Poetry Prize
As was to be expected, the poems entered for the Prize were, in the main, not very inspiring. It’s the same with every competition.
Topics, too, were predictable: childhood, pets, the war, poems about writing poems, and verses about ‘life’. One or two people tried to articulate their grief for the victims of the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster. This subject was close to the hearts of many, and rightly so.
Poets admire other poets, but try not to model their work too much on the efforts of their heroes: for example, it was not too hard to guess which Welsh bard influenced the author of the poem ‘Do Not Cling To The Measure Of Each Day’. And which eighteenth century versifier inspired the line ‘There’s a wondrous awe about the stars at night’. Other poets found it hard to ask questions: ‘Have you ever tried to express / A rose-scented summer day?’ - indeed they didn’t know which questions to ask so they made a fine, extensive list so that nothing might escape their prying sensibilities. Some versifiers struggled for rhyme, forfeiting sense along the way: ‘As over keys my searching fingers stray.’ Some decided to cast aside all ‘poetic’ language and tell it like it really is: ‘I was at the art class one Wednesday afternoon’. Such amateurism is hard to take considering the amount of writers’ classes, poetry workshops and educational events there are these days for aspiring writers and poets.
But just as there are bad poems in the batch, there are also some good ones. A few accomplished writers won through and are represented here. The standards they set for their contemporaries is high.
The calm cynicism of ‘The Rape’ is both enraging and sinister. The poem displays control of craft over emotion and sentiment: this allows the truth of the poem with its fierce anger and undercurrent of revenge to lodge itself deep in the subconscious. This is a poem that rings out into eternity when the words end. It is a worthy winner of the first Frogmore Poetry Prize.
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