We're delighted to announce that Lucy Thynne from Lady Margaret School has won the Forward/emagazine Creative Critics Competition 2019 with her poem 'My mother, swimming', a response to 'Dubrovnik'. Click on the links below to read her poem and commentary, as well as those of our runners-up – Katie Kirkpatrick (Hills Road Sixth Form College) and Anna Holland (St Nicholas Catholic High School Sixth Form).
The entries were judged this year by emagazine editors Barbara Bleiman and Lucy Webster. Poet Daljit Nagra made the final selection from the 10 shortlisted pieces. You can read his comments on Lucy's winning poem and on those by our runners-up, Katie and Anna.
Lucy Thynne, Lady Margaret School, Hammersmith Fulham
Daljit Nagra comments:
A stunning, wise, structurally complex yet immediate and heart-stopping whopper of a poem, which is beautifully explained in the commentary. I love the way Ravinthiran’s compact sonnets have served as source of influence to create a series of quatrains that look ahead to the absence of the mother, then return to the speaker’s own birth, and then back, further back to the grandmother and the mothers before in a lineage of creation, ‘like Russian dolls’. There are many striking achievements in the poem, including the precise diction, the assured tone and the lovely syntax as it loops around the lines and runs over verses. This poem is elegy, is dithyramb and ultimately it’s a love letter to birth and life and death. The poem ends with a domestic rapture that in a darker reading moves both forward in time to convey the love of joy and communion, and of despair at the final breath, ‘I love you, I love you’.
Katie Kirkpatrick, Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge
Daljit Nagra comments:
A piece of mosaic lies ‘just beyond the coastline’, which becomes the central focus of this delicate and sensually alert poem that is always precise in its focus. This poet has learnt well from Tookey’s poem that the expansive power of poetry lies in synecdoche, where part symbolises something vaster. In the case of this formally subtle poem, we are given glimpses of a life that takes on several possibilities, as indicated by the insightful commentary. I love the exactness of detail, ‘the inside of his lip’ and ‘he looks up expectantly’, as though the past is coming alive again, as the commentary states of the ending, is this ‘really mosaic, a memory, or a living person.’
Anna Holland, St Nicholas Catholic High School Sixth Form, Northwich, Cheshire
Daljit Nagra comments:
Dynamic performative style of the repetitions that help cut through the chase to reveal a passionate plea for compassion. The simplicity and clarity hark back to Jay Barnard’s oral poems, and like them this poem spoke of hurt and fear, it spoke of contemporary politics of a place that in turn speaks of all places, which to some degree, seek to silence certain ways of being. The bare final line is well achieved and earns its right to simple address and exposed vulnerability.
The following students were all shortlisted by the emagazine editors and are highly commended for their poems and commentaries.
Lyra Christie, Gosforth Academy, Newcastle upon Tyne
Em Power, Esher College, Thames Ditton
Chantelle Arangalla, Gumley House Convent School, Isleworth, Hounslow
Isabella Bonnell, Rugby High School, Rugby
Lily Rachel, East Barnet School, Chestnut Grove, London
Naomi Thomas, High Storrs School, Sheffield
Adelaide Whitelaw, Bedford Modern School, Bedford
