Neil Gunn Writing Competition

4 Aug 2004 in Highland, Writing

Judging the Open Poetry Section

ROBERT DAVIDSON reflects on the difficult process of choosing the winning entries in the Open Poetry section of this year’s Neil Gunn Writing Competition.

THERE WERE over 130 entries in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition this year. All were read, most at least twice. The first cut, halving the numbers, was relatively simple. Many of that first group tackle some of life’s most important matters, love of children and grandchildren, appreciation of landscape and nature, love of country.

It is difficult to make these things new, though, and very often I suspect, the writers would improve their work by a wider reading, not only of poetry as such, but also of such critical thinkers as Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin. All three are wonderfully entertaining when they turn it on. Practice of techniques and critical dialogue within writers groups is also to be recommended. Above all, they should not be disheartened – very few really accomplished writers would claim their work could not be improved, most usually by being thinned down.

There were more cuts, each becoming that bit more difficult with, by this time, consideration being given to such things as entry and exit; such things as that additional, unnecessary stanza that is too often put in by way of explanation. When the pile was down to twenty I asked Ann Yule, Convenor of the Neil Gunn Viewpoint Trust, for her comments. This was most useful because some of her opinions were confirmatory and others sparked new thoughts. Eventually the choice came down to six poems for 1st, 2nd, 3rd , and three Commendations, and that is when this judge’s difficulties really started.

Let me say that in my opinion these six poems are all excellent and any one of them would have been recognised as a worthy winner of this year’s Open Poetry Section. I read and reread them and continually rearranged the order as each poem asserted its worth in turn until the eventual winner appeared at the top of the pile. John McPartlin’s poem opened slowly for me but, when it finally arrived, it remained at the top however much the order of the other poems changed.

I’ll go over them briefly if I may. As sole and final arbiter I have had to create a hierarchy among the three winners. Of course this is a matter of opinion and it would be amazing if everyone agreed. No doubt other judges would have decided differently. I very much hope there will be an animated discussion when the poems are placed before the public in The Sandstone Review. Dissent is encouraged.

Thankfully no hierarchy was required among the commendations and I will take them in the order they came to me, as numbered by Tom Bryan, which I believe is the order in which they dropped onto his desk. That is to say, at random.

“It is word inventive and idea inventive and was the first poem to reach the top of my pile and temporary first place.”

No 26. panmusica mysteriophysicum by Gordon Kennedy, a marvellously entertaining piece of word play that purports to be the review of a future concert. Gordon justifies the poem about the centre, which I don’t usually like to see (too gimmicky) but that seems appropriate for a poem with more than a touch of Bhuddism about it, here and there balancing the sexes against each other, as in ‘ompapa and ommama’ and in lines like ‘they mandolin and femdolin inmaking little mandala’. It is word inventive and idea inventive and was the first poem to reach the top of my pile and temporary first place. If I have to make a negative point I would say I would have preferred it without an explanatory sub-title, believing the poem could better stand on its own, fully justified in its own existence.

No 135. A Calm Crossing by Allan Gay is a landscape piece that requires little explanation. Each stanza is a delightfully drawn sketch of what is or what is happening and Allan makes his pictures well, closing his poem with the arrival of dawn, observing ‘a skyline ridge/crowned with fanned embers’. If I have to make a negative comment it would be in the closing line ‘re-igniting forgotten glens’. No one gets to take out copyright on a word, but if they could then Derek Mahon would be due royalties whenever the word ‘ignite’ is used to unite landscape with light. Every time I read Alan’s line I found myself back at Carrowdore Churchyard at the Grave Of Louis MacNeice where ‘You lie/Past tension now and spring is coming round/igniting flowers on the peninsula.’

No 151 Incomers On Eynhallow by Yvonne Gray, who was Featured Poet in Northwords Issue 33. Yvonne has woven the thoughts of visitors to Eynhallow together across the centuries, the present day visitors (tourists apparently) reflecting on the thoughts of the earlier monks who came to stay. The two threads interwoven is an effective technique and Yvonne brings to it the precision of wording and imagery her many admirers have come to expect. If I have to make negative comment I would say this poem resonates very strongly, possibly too strongly, of George Mackay Brown as a poem located in Orkney, with time as its subject, is likely to do.

All three of these commended poems are delightful and honour the Neil Gunn Writing Competition by their presence. Another judge might have placed any one of them in the first three. But now we come to this year’s winners.

“Jon gives us the best opening line of the whole competition in ‘I hear the ratchet of the decades slip a notch’.”

Third Place. Walking On Ice by Lynda MacDonald. Lynda takes us to ‘Amsterdam on that January evening’ in a poem I found to be well nigh faultless. It too found its way to the top of the pile in its turn. I could find no unnecessary words or pointless lines, the four stanzas delicately progressing like the subjects themselves. The couple walk on ice across a ‘Dutch Master’ landscape. Thoughtlessly venturing under the bridge where the ice is thinnest and only made aware of this by the ‘sharp intake’ of their companions breaths. Now the narrator fears falling through and ‘drifting underneath/its unyielding transparency, and/being framed like an ice portrait.’ The couple did get through though and, on the other side of the bridge, found they emerged ‘exhilarated, beside/the solid silhouette of the Westerkirk.’ And this religious symbol might be more than a beautiful piece of the built landscape. It might represent redemption or renewal, possibly of their marriage, or an afterlife of some other sort. I am glad to be left, as a reader, to project my own meaning without further guidance.

Second Place. Reading The Obituaries by Jon Miller. Jon gives us the best opening line of the whole competition in ‘I hear the ratchet of the decades slip a notch’. When you read a line like that you know you can relax into the rest of the poem, this guy really knows what he’s doing. And what he’s doing is taking us into a relaxed, lightsome ambience where we can look at the facts of aging and death with a wry smile. In fact my smile broadened as I read through the poem and returned through many subsequent readings. Not everyone realises how rare a gem is wit in all forms of writing, but especially poetry. Bawdry and the belly laugh are relatively easy and anyone can be miserable, often with good reason. Wit, though, is a rare and precious commodity and any wise editor will fall on it with glee. When Jon combines his mastery of image with originality of lines such as ‘those shimmering impractical ball gowns’ and ‘a nomad babbling Mongolian, shuffling/across unknown latitudes of existence’ and ‘Their bony foreheads nudge the horizon of my birth’, his wit is pretty well irresistible. All that stopped me in this poem was a personal thing. I was sitting back, enjoying this amiable, avuncular, grandfatherly tone, until I came to those ‘1970s flares and Kevin Keegan haircut and nine inch platform soles’ and realised the author must be at least ten years younger than me. And I’m not ready for the obituaries yet!

“John brings much else to the page to create this worthy winner of the Open Poetry section.”

First Place. Breakdown by John McPartlin. This is a very fine poem but I must own up to being stopped in my tracks by the second thing I meet when approaching any poem, but I’ll come to that in its time. The first impression comes from the shape on the page, the visible form. Some years ago I was in conversation with the artist Dean Melville and we were talking about drawing. What he said, or asked, was; if you draw a ladder do you draw the shape of the wood or the space around the wood? This leads to quite another way of looking at objects, and the poem on the page is an object. Look at this one, set out in five stanzas of eight lines each, and look at the spaces around them. It does resemble a ladder, implying ascent or descent, at any rate progression because reading down the verses can (and in this case will) enable transference from the material world into the realm of ideas and language. And there are five verses, not the usual two or four or even six that you would expect in such a form. Experience tells me, in these cases, the poem is likely to turn on that middle verse, and so it later proved.

The second thing approached is the title, Breakdown, which I’m afraid comes across to me as end-stopped. Could this poem be a description of nervous collapse? Will there be no element of ‘getting through’? If so, why read on? In fact, ‘getting through’ is what the poem is about. I hope I don’t labour this point too much but the title is very much part of the poem. It has a job of leading on to do but this title, I must say, presented a barrier to this reader.

This might be the reason why John’s poem took so long to reach the top of the pile but, as I said earlier, when it did arrive it stayed there, gradually revealing its treasures and its worth. Now, that’s enough of the title and of negativity, John brings much else to the page to create this worthy winner of the Open Poetry section.

There are three characters, the subject being referred to as ‘you’ and the narrator as ‘I’. So you’ll see we are invited into this poem as eavesdroppers. We are not given the sexes of these two, or indeed their sexuality, nationality, religions or anything else that might aggregate in their sense of identity. Of course we can make an assumption that they have such things and that they may not be to the third character’s liking, although he is no longer present in his person.

This third character is ‘Grandfather’ and he exists only in spirit and in effigy. He appears, yes, in that middle verse with his ‘no doubt eyes’ and his stolid ‘arms akimbo over taught braces’ stance. His picture is ‘black-framed’; and in this country that probably implies a religious dogmatism, although I would suggest it might represent any form of assured intolerance, religious, political or social. His is the interior presence that ‘you’ has had to come to terms with and done so while ‘I’ was absent. Indeed this was probably something ‘you’ had to do alone, eventually throwing the black-framed effigy into a nearby field.

There are religious references through the poem, especially grain, bread, ‘an unleavened cloud’, and at the end Harvest after which, recalling the parable of the wheat and the tares, ‘the print and stubble burn’. To me this represents an old notion of Hell that few practicing Christians would adhere to in present times. Grandfather may well have though, being a man of his own time. It is the sort of cudgel he may have drubbed an upcoming generation with. In which case all I can say is he is welcome to a taste of his own medicine.

John delivers all this through a highly developed technique. He can produce a beautifully flowing line of iambic pentameter when he chooses, such as; ‘you saw sierras in the breadknife’s blade’ and ‘yourself become beyond what you can make’. He rhymes in a distant ababcdcd pattern all the way to the closing verse and there turns to an appropriately relentless abababab. There is also that other rhyming that Joseph Brodsky refers us to, where there is a congruence of meaning. To put it another way, sense linkages. Together these provide such impressive echoes as ‘breadknife’s blade’ with ‘new scores, made’, ‘collarless’ with ‘taught braces’, and ‘polemic’ with ‘you can make’.

In the early turbulence of the creative process these things probably appear by chance but the tactical poet looks for them and enhances them where possible to subtly assist the fixing power of the poem. John McPartlin, I suspect, is very much the tactical poet. Certainly he is very accomplished. Accomplished enough, I’m sure, to be a user of such methods and not their slave. He will know they are nothing if they do not deliver messages from Life’s various battlegrounds, as where the past hinders the subject’s life journey and serves to constrain the growth of the individual soul.

Breakdown delivers in these ways, standing eventually as both existential experience and waymarker for those who follow.

Robert Davidson was judge of the Open Poetry section of the Neil Gunn Writing Competiiton 2004. This is the text of his speech when he announced the winning poems at Dunbeath Heritage Centre.

The winning poems can be read in the Poetry section of issue 2 of the Sandstone Review from 2 August at the Sandstone Press website.