Four in the morning.

 

There’s no light at the edge of the

world, no crack of dawn, no eggshell

hue. No boastful cock crowing.

 

But I’m awake.

 

Hungry,

with the ache that belongs

to those who yearn.

 

I want eggs. Soft yellow eggs

on a gold-edged plate

 

I want to eat in the dark,

in the garden, while thyme

curls and sparrows stir

 

and the moon sets, there,

in the nest of the valley.

 

I want to leap the grey clouds

and race ahead of the sun

 

I want to feel pin-feathers prickle

under my skin,

swell and bloom into wings.

 

Then I’ll take the Milky Way,

be blown by a cosmic wind and

 

The sun cracks a joke on the hillside

and now the cock crows.

 

Four in the morning

 

and I shall eat eggs. Soft yellow eggs

on a gold-edged plate.

 

 

Life is drenched,

this whole world soaked

in my love for you,

so much that

I leave behind me

wet footprints, that the birds

land quietly to drink from

then fly away

languid and summer drunk on

how happy I am

 

The old bridge, chipped grey

concrete, arcs over a deep-

running stream where boulders

raise white shoulders and willows

twist.

 

A red blanket lays in the stippled

light, scattered with crusts, apple

cores and one empty bottle.

 

You are sprawled in the sun and

smiling.

 

In my dreams I fly, skim through

sightless cloud. Dip below wires

that stretch, humming, across

the plains.

 

I drip with rain,

arms out-flung,

heart amazed.

E nga rangatira, tena koutou. Koutou katoa ko te mai nei, ki te tuwheratanga o te whakanui nei, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena ra koutou katoa.

 

Thank you all for your attendance, and your attention; I'm honoured to be asked to judge this competition.

 

The last speech I gave was at my son's wedding, and I described myself then as a New Zealander, born in England, who is the proud father of four Maori sons. Among my wife's people if you set yourself up as a judge or an authority on anything the first question is, 'Who are you?' Which means, where do you come from, what have you done, what right do you have to judge other people's work?

 

I think that is a good tradition, and a fair question; so I would like to introduce myself briefly and tell you a little about how I approached the task, and the privilege, of judging these poems.

 

My name is Simon. A long time ago, in another life, I graduated MA from Otago University, with honours in English Literature. My special fields of study were the poems of TS Eliot and Dylan Thomas. I am old enough to have been at Otago when Baxter, and then Tuwhare, were Burns fellows. I remember Baxter slipping quietly through the corridors in a long gaberdine overcoat and a pair of once-white plimsolls, without socks; and on a never-to-be-forgotten occasion Hone counselled me on my love life over a jug of Speights at the Cook.

 

I spent twenty years of my adult life as a teacher, and about twenty doing other things. At last, having run out of excuses, I wrote a novel, and more recently I won The Press prize for summer ficton.

 

My poetry is a bit of an unknown quantity, to the world and to me. Steve Braunias published some of my work when he was Features Editor of The Listener, but since Steve moved on to The Sunday Times I haven't made much effort to have my poems published. I do read them at the Geraldine Poets and Pints evenings, which is how I came to be suggested as the judge for this competition.

 

For both writer and reader, poetry is a very subjective business, and an individual one. There are no absolute rules, because poets have done away with them in the search for freedom of expression. If your poem has not made the prize-list this time, don't give up - dismiss me as an ignorant old fart and keep writing.

 

If you are one of the winners, well done - you have touched my heart and brightened my life, and you can feel confident of doing the same to others. On the other hand you may already have reached the same heights of self-possession as James Joyce, who used to show his writing to friends with the comment, "Of course your opinion is of no importance; I have already made up my mind about the quality of my work."

 

Poetry, as much as any art, is a matter of personal response rather than critical rules. But then, I still believe in quality - that there is something, not quite absolute but recognisable, that marks a very good poem out from the rest. In judging a competition I felt I owed it to the contestants to have, and be willing to share, a set of criteria against which I tried to judge each poem. Here are my criteria:

 

1. Originality

A poem should dis-cover a fresh subject, or a fresh take on a familiar one.

 

2. Imagination

I use the word in the sense that Coleridge did - poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity, conveyed from the poet to the reader through the creative power of the imagination.

 

3.

Rhythm

I do not necessarily mean metre; but a poem should contain rhythms which add power to the experience of reading it, and mark a true poem out from prose with a ragged right-hand edge.

 

4. Language

Sometimes the simplest language can be the most effective; but a poem should leave a relish in the mouth, a sense that the words used are well chosen and apt for the purpose. Whatever the Post-Modernists say I still relish imagery, those clear and sweet, or harsh and bitter, sensual images; and I appreciate figurative language, the dear old time-honoured devices whose names we learnt at school - simile, metaphor and the rest; and the tricks of sound that enliven the meaning: assonance, consonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia. And I believe that, well-used, these are what lift poetry to the heights of human experience.

 

5. Form

 

Where a poet has written in a traditional form, perhaps using rhyme scheme and metre, I have given this equal weight with others who have chosen to write free verse. As a general comment, I would say that the challenge with traditional forms is to make them fresh, to avoid jogtrot rhythms and to prevent the rhyme scheme from rupturing the flow of language. The challenge with more modern forms like syllabics, sprung rhythm and especially free verse is to produce any sense of rhythm or pattern that lifts them above ordinary prose, without sacrificing the casual subtlety that is their strength.

 

6. Suchness

 

This is my own watch-word, and I don't think it's often used to talk about poetry in English. It's a translation of a Buddhist term, tathata. It refers to the Buddhist principle that the true nature of the world, and the mind, is just 'such' - what it is, not what we theorise or say about it. In Buddhist poetry, it is exemplified in the very direct, simple 'showing' of the world in haiku, where there is no talking about the subject, no rhapsodising about how beautiful it is, or how terrible, but a spare, stripped-down giving of it, which blazes the suchness into the mind. For me the very best poets achieve this, and I honour them for it.

 

7. Quality and Power

From all of the above, plus a few more subconscious responses, an overall impression emerges that simply says, "Yes. This poem has quality. It moves me; it makes my toenails twinkle" - as Dylan Thomas put it, in one of his soberer moments.

 

So - thank you all for having the good taste to write poetry, and the astonishing courage to submit your poems to be judged by someone like me. Thank you all for the pleasure I had in reading your work; and please be assured that I read it most carefully, in the spirit of the old Bremworth carpet ad, which incidentally was pinched from Yeats: "I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams."