Gregory Award Winners (4) - Emily Berry

The Yellow Hammer State

After we saw the bird man, I was gone.
They prised the big Coke from my hand
and all took sips at once; it made them laugh like crazy.
I had different types of ice cream in my mouth,
I can’t remember which but one had chunks in.
Part of the cone I was holding had been crushed by my thumb.
I knew if I moved or spoke a war would start
and I’d be held to blame so I said nothing.
If we’d lain down and all stayed quiet
it might have been okay, but I still had the big hand
on my other hand so I was always pointing at something
and that gave the game away.

Part of the problem was all the tiny yellow hammers
behind my face were tapping at my brain
and I didn’t want to nod or shake my head
in case they slipped. They had such tiny heads.
And the impact zone kept spreading
and there were pools of yellow over everything.
And they got into my mouth from inside out
and mixed up with the ice cream and dribbled down my chin,
and the others made a fuss and ran away.
I think they were afraid the bird man would snatch them up
and put the yellow hammers in them;
then they’d have to stay with me, and be the same as me,
in this knocked-out woke-up-nowhere place,
this yellow hammer state.


==========

Emily Berry's poetry has been published in various magazines including The Rialto, Poetry London, Poetry Wales and Magma. Her pamphlet is due out from Tall Lighthouse in November.

Gregory Award Winners (3) - James Midgley

Actaeon the Prodigal

I
 
So there is talk of him returning,
a voice wrung from dawn’s dishtowel.
Talk of him returning – which is itself a return,
phantasmal housemaids
clawing at shattered blinds and men
in shirtsleeves with knuckles of coal in their eyes
remapping their pockets
with some memory of a misplaced pipe.
I do not deny I look forward to it,
maybe a horse-drawn cart that stops and steams
and the curtains eased apart
with all our garden gates.
In preparation we must tug ourselves away from crowds
like ragged bodies from water, our lungs sparked with salt
and breakable as glass.
  
I look beneath café tables for his rolling head.
All day long a dog has circled outside, tied to a metre;
should I put my arm inside his mouth
and introduce a chain of arguments?
Already there is talk and more than talk,
conch-calls among skyscrapers
as televisions cease to function
and there is only this cold static in our ears,
the noise of caterpillars slowly swelling.
Nerves on edge. Bone and nerves resetting.
  
  
  
II
  
We have met the signs in our dreams –
the climbing-frames overclimbed by ivies,
our palms rubbed raw
to resemble blood-dusted moons.
And we have died a hundred times or more
between the beartrap mouths of pets.
Look they have little human faces.
  
We have seen the signs, picked our disguises –
ratcloak, flowerface, armours of wood –
mistaken the pickled egg
for a reckless human foetus
softly gleaming in the larder light.
Pity our infinite returns to childhood
you who are returning with us.
  
  
  
III
  
Actaeon into the fold, an umbral spear,
his head is so heavy, his empathy compulsory,
calves like ripe mangoes,
thighs strapped in bindweed.
Beckons from alleyways wielding a syrinx pipe.
It is difficult to forget that laughter:
a pool of bells, ever-clinking glasses
and this tinnitus.
Everywhere helicopters are crashing:
Chinook in a gyre one poet suggests.
Actaeon posing naked or skinless,
pointing to himself with a stick in anatomy lessons,
dissertating on the humours.
His antlers are optional, as are the wounds.
He runs through the woods disrupting foxhunts.
   
I was there when the streets wore through to dirt,
when Actaeon sat under the moon’s spotlight and sang –
red-in-the-face moon
trying to remember his shape again.
Here is a fanfare for resurrections.
Actaeon, you tousle-brained monster,
what is it you sing?
                              Elegies.
But the human ear is poorly suited.

==========

James Midgley was born in Windsor in 1986 and now alternates between Henley and Norwich. A few months ago he completed his undergraduate degree at the UEA, where he will be studying for an MA in creative writing from the end of 2008.

His work has recently appeared in publications such as Agenda, Magma, The Pedestal, The Rialto, Stand, Under the Radar, and The Warwick Review. This year he received an Eric Gregory Award. He edits the poetry journal Mimesis.

Gregory Award Winners (2) - Heather Phillipson

Mr Lonelyhearts and the Spendthrift Shopper

Everything is yet to come
on Morrissons’ in-store notice board –
jobs, used sofas, missing dogs.
I only crossed the street to get some ice-cream
and here are other people and wants
and anticipation. And the queues at the tills
are long! If I gave up my expectations
I might find all the morning has to offer

on index cards. If I dared
what I don’t dare I’d post up my desires –
in biro, in quadruplicate, like George,
53. He wants a nice lady. I want to slip
inside the sound of teaspoons on porcelain,
take my toast with Muscavado sugar, stop
trying to replace my first love’s voice. Perhaps
it’s handwriting and hope and ruled paper
with smudges that make things happen

and my shopping is superfluous. I could give up
all my goods before the exit. I could leave
without a punnet of raspberries
and only its scent. I could take what’s there –
chances, telephone numbers – and find
that’s how it happens, the future.


==========

Heather Phillipson is a visual artist and regularly exhibits her work both nationally and internationally. Her poems have been published widely and she won an Eric Gregory Award in 2008. She is currently Artist in Residence at London College of Fashion.

Gregory Award Winners (1) - Adam O'Riordan

The Moth

landed between paper tiger and paperweight
on the open dictionary, just short of papillon.
A natural under the spotlight
which must have drawn it from the night's
hot lung towards its sixty watts of promise.
Perfect, the disciplined pulse of its wings:
two coffee-stained teeth and all the grace

of your grandmother in her wedding dress.
Which you will know from the message I left.
But I didn't mention the tipulidae, the chironomidae,
that I'd had to kill the lights and I'm sitting
on a bed too small to contain your absence,
listening to something the size of a small bird
ricocheing off the walls, clicking like a stuck tape.


Originally published in The Ladder.



The Lakes

Now the sky has emptied
only a crow's call could map its vastness

or descending, open up the landscape:
the thistle-stitched guesswork of a hedgerow,

the feral earth, long-grass, leaf-mulch,
an earthworm musing through the thick dirt,

and the abominations of buried bones.
At this hour the sun lowers its cadaver,

a sinner to the pyre, sets its fire
spilling grain out across the water.



Chicago

In the moments between evensong and sleep,
you will remember how the scent lifted from her
as, blanched in a bed sheet, she left the room

with the kind of trail two parallel mirrors suggest
on any object caught between them and eternity
or the red whip of tail-lights on an empty street.

Or the vast harvest of rye, cut down, trucked
into town to ferment in huge steel vats,
condensed to a shot in a fat glass beaker.


==========

Adam O'Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982. He read English at Oxford University and later won a scholarship to study under Andrew Motion at the University of London where he was awarded the inaugural Peters, Fraser and Dunlop poetry prize. In 2006 he received an Arts Council England writer's award. His pamphlet Queen of the Cotton Cities (where these poems orignally appeared) was published by Tall Lighthouse in 2007. He co-edited Michael Donaghy's Selected Prose, which Picador will publish in 2009. He is currently Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere. You can see a video of him reading at the Ledbury Poetry Festival here.