We are delighted to announce the winning, highly commended and shortlisted poets in the new Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition 2021, judged by Taz Rahman, Matthew Haigh and Nia Morais. The winning pamphlet will be published by Seren Books in February 2022. Ten shortlisted poets will receive feedback from the judges, while 2 highly commended will receive a mentoring session in the new year.
A sample poem from each pamphlet is available to read below. A PDF version of the following poems is available to download here:
Winning Pamphlet
SL Grange, Bodies, and other Haunted Houses
Highly Commended
Jane Thomas, The Presence of Absence
Faye Rhiannon Latham, Ruin/Nation
Shortlisted
Connor Harrison, Clean Water
Z.R. Ghani, In the Name of Red
Holly Magill, 20
Zarah Alam, Enough
Lizzie Holden, Amber
Dominic Weston, Gomorrah Bypass
Jeanette Burton, What is this, a family outing?
Ava Patel, Here’s to the Moment
Bethany Lettington, Waterbodies
Courtney Conrad, This Tongue Knows Birth and Death
Winning Poet
SL Grange, Bodies and other Haunted Houses (due to be published February 2022)
SL Grange is a queer writer, theatre-maker and multi-disciplinary artist. Their recent work includes A Note to Mary Frith, commissioned by Shakespeare’s Globe for the Notes to Forgotten She-Wolves series; and of his family commissioned by Improbable for Fly the Flag 2020; and currently Wou D’Ulzecht, an audio-walk project with composer Catherine Kontz commissioned for European Capital of Culture 2022. She also creates performance work as The ELMS in partnership with artist E.M Parry and is currently engaged in a PhD exploring more ethical ways that we might ‘do’ Queer history, and in turn how that history might do us, which involves a conversation across 400 years with cross-dressing performer and trickster Mary Frith.
The Glory
by SL Grange
The bar has been left exactly as it was found
except some small adjustments for safety.
On the round tables
are a number of sticky marks
from rum and coke on ice
slopped over rims and fingers.
The smell is stale sweat, ancient now,
a mere hint of smoke machine tang by the stage.
We know there would once have been a tinsel curtain.
We think it may have been taken by looters
perhaps for an important burial.
One of the most surprising finds
was just the sheer quantity of glitter.
It was likely used in rituals
perhaps of rebirth or sacrifice.
If you stand still at the bar and listen
you can almost hear the cheers
for the twin half-smiles of top-surgery scars
on the man on the stage
who is taking off his clothes
to prove he survived-
if not unscathed, at least loved.
What will you order
before you take the microphone
and let the ghosts have use of your tongue?
What taste would you like in your mouth
as it fills with leather and someone else’s flesh?
Highly Commended Poets
Jane Thomas, The Presence of Absence
Jane has recently been shortlisted in The Rialto Pamphlet Competition, The PS Stanza, Fish, Live Canon and The FPM-Hippocrates Prize and published in: Stand, The Rialto, Envoi, Mslexia and The ORB. She is based in Oxford and works in a Health and Social Care think tank
She is an active member of Oxford Stanza II and Ver Poets and occasional reviewer for Sphinx.
https://www.janethomas.org/ @janethomas33
Your Front Door
by Jane Thomas
The frame and limit of your world.
You’re locked in and locked out,
the alarm on both sides your wired sentry.
A pane of mottled glass at the top
conjures up spectres of all who knock.
The letterbox in the middle is sealed
(all communications long since redirected).
At the bottom the draft excluder looks
like a sleeping serpent eating its own tail.
You want to go home but you’re already here.
Faye Rhiannon Latham, Ruin/Nation
Faye Latham is a writer, visual poet, rock climber and all-round mountain enthusiast based in Snowdonia and London. Faye’s debut poetry collection will be published by Little Peak Press in September 2022. This visual collection takes F. S. Smythe’s British Mountaineers (1942) as its primary text and transforms the pages through the subtractive process of erasure. In January 2020 she was awarded the Literature Wales Bursary for Writers Under 25 to support the development of her poetry, which resulted in her work being published in various literary journals and online magazines including UKClimbing.com, Lumin Journal, The CTC ‘Rewilding’ Anthology and the Cambridge Literary Review.
Shortlisted Poets
Connor Harrison, Clean Water
Connor Harrison is a writer based in the West Midlands, UK. His work has appeared at Lit Hub, New Critique, The Moth Magazine, Hinterland Magazine, and Review31, among others.
Fatherstuff
by Connor Harrison
God set the stage.
He herded the stars
into wildlife and tools,
soaked the bodies
with gravity. He
blew the blueness
of the clean glass sky,
cut a hole in the night
to make the moon, filled
the roof of his mouth
with saltwater, and rested it
between continents. He made
the horizon from white
noise and the beaches
from the silt in his
pockets. He moulded
foxes from the pre-morning
mist, the mist from
the damp breath
of bats, bats from
the black panic of
a cornered mouse,
mice from dropped
corn husks, corn from
horse mane, horses
from lightning cracking
a bare African plain,
the plains from
the deadeye of a
meerkat, meerkats
from dog-snout, dogs
from the heart of
an oak tree, oak
trees from the skin of dawn,
dawn from an eagle’s wing,
eagles from sharktooth,
sharks from pure
slick oil.
Z.R. Ghani, In the Name of Red
Z.R. Ghani lives in Enfield, North London. Her poems have appeared in Magma, Black Bough Poetry, The Willowherb Review, Square Wheel Press, Fevers of the Mind, and The Adriatic. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University, and likes to explore themes of identity, femininity, and religion.
Moths of the Red Room
by Z.R. Ghani
Passing round a flame, we whisper of moths,
trembling in our nightshirts whiter than ghosts.
If a moth touches your eye, you’ll go blind
or worse – you’ll see nothing but red forever.
The Red Room operates in darkness,
so if you dare, step lightly in case of wings,
graze the tapestry, and glean from the textures:
nature’s instinct needs no instructing.
One fruit for each one of us in the family.
The moths are needles needless of thread,
always stitching my fallen fruit back onto the tree.
My sisters joked that mine was troubled,
and overdue for the moths’ intense unpicking.
They locked me in the Red Room with my bad fruit.
A keyhole-shaped glow from outside captured a moth –
wings lust-red; eyeless eyelids blinking senseless;
scarred with embroidery; pearls like crystal balls,
misting the future—then assaulted by tears.
Holly Magill, 20
Holly Magill’s poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. In 2019 she won first prize in the Cannon Poets ‘Sonnet or Not’ competition. She co-edits Atrium – www.atriumpoetry.com. Her debut pamphlet, The Becoming of Lady Flambé, is available from Indigo Dreams Publishing.
A princess dies in a car crash and I’m not really bothered
by Holly Magill
The funeral is all over the telly Saturday.
I watch cos I’ve nothing else to do.
Everyone hates the paparazzi.
Crowds in London, lots weep into
souvenir editions of The Sun and Mirror.
*
Early memory: cross-legged on orange carpet.
Disappointment – nothing like real princesses in storybooks,
her hair all short and she looks sad. She couldn’t
dance and skip with that dragging trail at the back.
*
The photocopier jammed 63 times this week.
Toner black on the left sleeve of my new white shirt.
Broderie anglaise, from River Island.
I still don’t have a washing machine.
Two boys walk behind a coffin.
Elton John makes a show of himself.
Fortnight ago I had a screaming match with Mum
outside Homebase. We haven’t made up.
Kylie Minogue changes the title of her new album.
 
Zarah Alam, Enough
Zarah Alam is an aspiring novelist and poet from Birmingham. She graduated with a first-class in English and Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham and is a HarperCollins Author Academy alumna.
Her poetry has featured in Streetcake Magazine, Ad Alta: the Birmingham Journal of Literature, Gully Collective, the Writing West Midlands’ Spark Young Writers Magazine, Redbrick newspaper, and her university’s Writers’ Bloc journal.
Every Childhood Portrait Left My Skin the White of the Page
by Zarah Alam
Possible reasons:
- I got bored and stopped drawing
- There’s rarely ever a good brown crayon
- Seriously, no one is that shade
- Another kid got to the brown crayon first
- I didn’t even know brown crayons existed
- I forgot I was brown
- I thought I looked perfect.
Lizzie Holden, Amber
Lizzie has been published by The Emma Press, Sable Books, Medusa’s Laugh Press, Dream Catcher, Live Canon, Smith/Doorstop, Dempsey and Windle, the Cabinet of Heed and The Frogmore Papers.
From the Bottom of the Wishing Well won second prize in Paper Swans Press Pamphlet Prize and will be published shortly. Her full collection Amber was shortlisted by Hedgehog Press.
Just One Hair
by Lizze Holden
Just one hair
on a pillow slip or crumpled sheet.
And I would lie, contented on my side,
gaze at it, as if it were you.
Dominic Weston, Gomorrah Bypass
Dominic Weston produces wildlife television programmes, runs over the Mendip hills and writes poetry. His work often relates to family and the natural world, undercut by a healthy slick of darkness. He has also slipped off the page into Poetry Film.
In 2019 Hastings Lit Fest awarded him first prize for ‘Ghost of a Flea’’ and his poems have appeared in many publications including Agenda, Black Bough Poetry, Dreich, Magma Poetry, Poetry Scotland, The North, Under The Radar and The Iron Press Book of Tree Poems.
Good Clean Fun
by Dominic Weston
For Mrs. Cousins
Sheila Capellaro wore Crimplene before it became ironic
but I never saw her wear the matted modacryl wig
or the gauzy polyester nightdress
her daughter regaled me with –
drip dry cast-offs I delighted in
My mother vigorously erased pink crusts of Windowlene
in time with ‘the Brandenburgs’ on music cassette
as I tottered along The Avenue until
high heel caught in violet hem
I tripped and chestnut wig slipped
I know she heard me
her only son
ask
Have I smudged my lipstick, Laura?
Jeanette Burton, What is this, a family outing?
Jeanette Burton is a poet and English teacher from Belper in Derbyshire. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University and has taught A level Creative Writing to students at a Sixth Form College in Nottingham.
She has poems published by The Emma Press, Poetry Wales and in the forthcoming Candlestick Press pamphlet Christmas together: Twelve Poems for Those We Love. She was a runner up in the 2018 Mslexia & PBS Women’s Poetry Competition, longlisted in the 2020 Paper Swans Press Single-Poem Competition and in the Artlyst Art to Poetry Competition, selected in the 2021 Ver Poets Open Competition and commended in the 2021 Ware Poets Open Competition. She won first prize in the 2020 Welshpool Open Poetry Competition and first prize in the 2021 McLellan Poetry Competition.
Poem in which my dad’s ear is haunted by the ghost of Tutankhamun
by Jeanette Burton
He announced it shortly after tea one weekday evening.
The doctors couldn’t find a logical explanation for it,
no formal diagnosis forthcoming, no sign of infection,
no glue ear, no need for syringing, no apparent hearing loss,
antihistamines for out-of-season hay fever proved fruitless.
So it was that this strange tinnitus was labelled a visitation –
Tutankhamun’s spirit had hitched a ride inside my dad’s ear,
curled genie-like into his ear canal, coiled itself around
the cochlea, for no other reason than to send him near mad
with buzzing, whistling, the sense of being submerged in water.
This certainly wasn’t the first time his body had been possessed
by a King of Egypt. No, this curse was long standing, a pharaoh
had been squatting in my dad’s head since my parents visited
Luxor for their 25th wedding Anniversary. Then, it spooked
with panic attacks, a racing heartbeat, bouts of depression.
This most definitely wasn’t the result of sudden redundancy,
dad said, or the textile industry moving to a foreign country,
or starting again after thirty years of working his way up.
It was in no way caused by having to learn the world anew,
months of applications, interviews, psychometric testing –
only to be told, You were very close, it came down to two,
but in the end the other candidate just pipped you to the post.
No, it was none of these things, it was Tutankhamun and his tricks.
I had my doubts, we all did, but it didn’t stop me from booking
a holiday to Egypt last Spring. I followed in my parent’s footsteps,
cruised the Nile, accompanied other tourists on a dawn coach trip
to the Valley of Kings. I inched my way down the steep corridors
to his famous tomb and standing before the tiny sarcophagus
of a dead teenager, I held my hands together as if in prayer.
I whispered: I want my dad back. Please get out of his ear.
Ava Patel, Here’s to the Moment
Ava Patel won Prole Magazine’s 2021 pamphlet competition with her debut pamphlet ‘Dusk in Bloom’. She’s been published in webzines (London Grip; Ink, Sweat and Tears; Atrium; Porridge) and magazines (South Bank Poetry; Orbis; SOUTH; Dream Catcher; New Welsh Reader, The Seventh Quarry). She runs an Instagram poetry page: @ava_poetics.
Septic
by Ava Patel
My problem is I don’t know
who to love or how to
love or which to lose.
I miss things
like crayons and
soft boiled eggs.
I blow out candles and wish for
the pitter patter of paws on
an expensive marble floor.
I dream about your
grandparent’s barbecue, pretend my
bathtub is Krka River.
During a ritual sacrifice, I give up red lipstick
and the red dress I wore to my rape
even though it still hangs in my closet.
I’m not brave enough to juggle potatoes
anymore or order Chinese food, cut up
an avocado or order a Snakebite.
There is nothing
left that I
can do.
Bethany Lettington, Waterbodies
Beth Lettington is a recent graduate of the University of St Andrews’ MLitt Creative Writing programme. She currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland where she works as a copywriter and volunteers for cultural news site Rock & Art UK.
Colouring in
by Bethany Lettington
Lilac is the colour of your lips, the silk we dress you in.
Turquoise the lady who dresses all in turquoise, drives a turquoise car, smells turquoise when she picks me up to pin my arms with her arms.
White is not for coffins or paper plates on fold-out church tables, cold skin, or snow falling the same evening. White was when you threw a glass at the wall.
Yellow is always honey, sticking two sides of bread together in a lunchbox. Yellow on my fingers.
Ochre is a funny colour. I want to call it brown, but really it is sunlight going sour in its carton.
Green passes underfoot – our house was surrounded by fields. You are surrounded by fields.
Blue should be the sky or the ocean. I want it to be bath water, or the water in the jug we poured over your head; but water isn’t blue, and there was no sky in our bathroom.
Courtney Conrad, This Tongue Knows Birth and Death
Courtney Conrad is a Jamaican poet. Her poetry explores the intersectional politics of race, religion, gender, sexuality and migration. She is a current member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme. She is an alumna of the Obsidian Foundation and Roundhouse Poetry Collective. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, The White Review, Magma Poetry and Stand Magazine. She was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize 2020 and Poetry London’s Mentoring Scheme and longlisted for the Rebecca Swift Women Poets’ Prize 2020 and The Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Competition. She has been a featured poet at Glastonbury Festival, StAnza Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, UKNA City Takeover Festival, Stay at Home Festival and Brainchild Festival.
2 Cars 1 Parking Lot
At lonely street hours, Lust makes a hotel out of Tesco’s car park. He
reclines her car seat into a bed; his car freshener, a pine forest candle.
She strips, revealing high vis lingerie.Their body heat, a smoke machine
gifting them privacy. Lust’s tongue and the lamppost flickering in sync.
Her gearbox waist, close to turning jumper cables into a defibrillator. His
car nodding as if on a faulty hydraulic jack; offering background action
for my bay parking lesson with my mum.
Wonderful poetry and poets! Thank you for introducing me to them!