All winners of the current competition will be announced on this page with links to all our previous poetry competition winners, specially commended entries and judges comments below.

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The 2021 Competition

The winning entries from our 15th competition are below.  Scroll down to view the judge’s comments.  To read the winning poems just click the title.  The poems will appear here for one month.  After that check out our anthologies page where we hope to produce our 3rd anthology of winning entries, spanning the years 2017-2021 by Sept / Oct 2021.

1st Prize       iii – Estelle Price (Wilmslow, England)

Estelle Price divides her time between Cheshire and the Llŷn Peninsula. She began writing poetry in 2014 and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester. Her poem iii is part of a sequence of poems about the Bloomsbury Group. Estelle was the winner of the 2018 Book of Kells Writing Competition and her poetry has been placed or listed in the National Poetry Competition, Bridport Prize, Canterbury Poet of the Year, Much Wenlock, the London Magazine, Yorkmix and other poetry competitions. Poems have appeared in The Lake, Marble Poetry and the Alchemy Spoon (forthcoming), the Stony Thursday Book, the Smith |Doorstep The Result is What you See Today anthology, Macunian Ways Anthology and Deep Time Volumes 1 and 2.

2nd Prize   The Yellow Light – Sheila Aldous (Newton Abbot, England)

Sheila Aldous is a North London girl with Devon in her soul. Living on the banks of the River Teign she is inspired by the natural landscape, river life, local history and love & loss.  Her first collection, Paper Boats, the Burning of Teignmouth and Shaldon 1690, was published by Indigo Dreams.  Sheila has an MA in Creative Writing from Exeter University.  She has won numerous competitions: the Welsh Poetry Competition in 2020, the Yeovil Prize, the NAWG, Riptide Journal and Happenstance 20.  She was shortlisted in the Bridport prize 2018 and has been placed in others.  Her second collection, a chapbook Patterns of All Made Things, is published by Hen Run, an imprint of Grey Hen Press.

3rd Prize     The Foundling Mothers List of Pain – Jane Burn (Leadgate, England)

Jane Burn is a Pushcart/Forward Prize nominated, award-winning poet who lives for eight months of the year in an eco-friendly lifestyle with her family in an off-grid cottage in Northumberland.  Her poems are widely published in many magazines, like The Rialto and Under The Radar.  She has appeared in many anthologies, including Emma Press.  She is studying for an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University.

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Highly Commended

4th    Shoes And An Old Woman Who Once Lived In Them – Julia Usman, Downholme

5th    Entertaining Caravaggio – Julian Bishop, Barnet

6th    Museum number 1984, 1002.1 – Estelle Price, Wilmslow

7th    Women of Birkenau – Bex Hainsworth, Leicester

8th    This Shy Architect – Dena Fakhro, Bahrain

9th    Modigliani Answers His Critic – Sheila Aldous, Newton Abbot

10th  Consoling The Whims Of The Tiniest, Whiniest Dictators – Jonathan Greenhause, New Jersey, USA

11th  The Milkmaid – Sally Russell, Winchester

12th  Rebel Song – Jean James, Swansea

13th  A Mural For ‘Kitty’ Wilkinson – Philip Dunn, Nannerch

14th  Lick and Split – Sally Russell, Winchester

15th  Becoming A Saint In Ely – A Speculative Life – Pamela Job, Wivenhoe

16th  The Rev’d Thomas With Scythe, Manafon – Ross Cogan, Faringdon

17th  My Shameless Lips – James Knox Whittet, Swaffham

18th  Daughter Of The Sea – Miriam Mason, Banbury

19th  Steatoda – Mark Totterdell, Exeter

20th  Blood Lines – Gwen Williams, Llanfairfechan

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Results were announced on our web site, Facebook Group and Twitter on Monday 9th August, 2021.  We have also informed the UK national press, Literature Wales, Pontypridd Observer and associated district newspapers, SW Echo, the Western Mail, BBC Wales and RCTCBC as well as many organisations on our mailing list.  Thanks to Kathy Miles for judging this years competition, and thanks also to all those who entered and look forward to reading your work next year.

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Special mentions:
In addition Kathy also liked the following poems / poets, who also deserve a mention.  In no particular order they are as follows:

Shedding Wilderness – Jonathan Greenhause

the behaviours of sheep – Lucy Crispin

Listen to the sea-women – Marion Oxley

Ravel at Montfort l’Amaury – Christopher M James

Escapology – Elizabeth Parkes

Mud – Ben Verinder

Him outdoors – Phil Coleman

Skomer Island – Stuart James

Kamikaze – Lindsay Pettifor

First watch – Anne Marie Connolly

Day 109 – Mark Fiddes

The Stone Cottage – Partridge Boswell

Winefride – Sheila Jacob

Ecologue with my dad on Bradnor Hill – Ken Evans

The icon in Room 711 – Denise O’Hagan

Porth y Wrach – The Witch’s Landing – Alison Wood

Hug – Pratibha Castle

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Judge’s Comments:

As a second-time judge for the Welsh Poetry Competition, I once again found myself humbled and a little overwhelmed by the huge number of excellent poems in front of me. Many good poems failed to make the final twenty simply because of the sheer volume of outstanding entries. Subjects were wide-ranging; lockdown featured of course, as did poems about nature, family, Welsh history and myth, climate change, and sadly, also many poems dealing with domestic abuse and the decline into dementia of a loved one. Whilst it was slightly disappointing not to see more pieces that dealt with contemporary political and social issues, I was surprised at the large number of ekphrastic poems submitted, all of which were exceptionally well written. Poems came in a variety of forms, from sestinas and villanelles to sonnets and free verse, and included a glosa, a golden shovel, a Viking lay, and a very funny rhyming poem, ‘The Naughty Nit‘, sent in by nine year old Camilla Heitmeyer.

What I looked for in particular were well-crafted pieces that had that little bit extra; poems that made imaginative connections, which engaged completely with their subject, or where a slant viewpoint or strong narrative thread gave them a different perspective. All of the winning and Highly Commended poems have those elements in common. But every poet should feel extremely proud, because the work was of such a high standard throughout. It has been a real privilege to judge the competition this year, and I would like to thank Dave Lewis for inviting me, and all entrants for their great submissions.

1st  iii – Estelle Price

I came to this poem without knowing either ‘The Tub’ or much about the complex triangles of Vanessa Bell’s artistic and personal life; the subtext to the visual ‘iii‘s of the piece. But from the start I was struck by the freshness and originality of the approach, and the way the poet engages wholly and intimately with the artist, and with her thought-processes as she revises the painting. The artist’s feelings towards her subject – Mary Hutchinson, the mistress of Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell – are made abundantly clear when she removes a pitcher from the composition:

‘…..Boiling water can’t dissolve

the odour of this woman’s desire.’

The poem is a glorious and imaginative tale of revenge, as the painter quite literally strips her subject naked in the most marvellous and humiliating way: ‘Mary, Mary, you should / be nude for the sake of decency’, and changes the depiction of the tub to ‘a single-minded orifice that gapes at the heart / of the composition.’  There is cheekiness here, and more than a little touch of malice in the brush.  It was also a refreshing change to see an ekphrastic poem written about a female artist.  This is a beautifully-written and passionate poem, and is the one I kept coming back to over and over again during the judging process.  An absolute triumph.

2nd  THE YELLOW LIGHT – Sheila Aldous

A powerful and memorable poem, The Yellow Light vividly captures the thoughts of the Irish nationalist leader and teacher Patrick Pearse as he awaits execution for his part in the Dublin Easter Rising.  Again, the poet takes us right into the mind of his subject, as he writes a farewell letter to the mother he saw only yesterday:   ‘She had grown old overnight. A body cancelled: / lined like Renoir’s Old Woman accepting the dark.’  The imagery throughout is precise and intense, as he waits not only in the faint hope of a pardon from the authorities, but for

‘…… the priest who will mutter words of Christ’s pardon.

He considers this barterer who will haggle without blinking

for his soul, for the promise of a fag and dinner.’

The repetition of ‘he’ throughout, particularly at the beginning of the last five tercets, is a device the poet uses to emphasize the lack of control Pearse feels over his situation, and which serves to highlight the particular isolation and self-absortion of the condemned man in his cell as he hears the sound of his comrades being shot by firing squad.  And a superb ending, which takes us right to the heart of Pearse’s fears, and his hope for a swift death:

‘He had been told they would be precise, like swifts winging

through a black tunnel to the sun’s yellow light –

that it would be quick.’

A very worthy second place winner.

3rd  THE FOUNDLING MOTHER’S LIST OF PAIN – Jane Burn

A good list poem has to work both inside and outside of the restrictions of the structure to avoid becoming merely a series of tropes or clichés, and The Foundling Mother’s List of Pain does this brilliantly.  Set in the C18th, it comprises a list of imaginary ‘instructions’ to a new mother who is forced to give up her baby to a foundling hospital.  As the poet’s note tells us, such mothers were allowed to leave a token of fabric, in case they were able to reclaim the child at a future time.  The poem is a progression, starting with the moment of arrival at the hospital, where the poet guides both mother and reader through the process with a set of heartbreaking commands:

1. Walk, slow as you can towards that door
2. Cradle your child, feed on the scent of frail hair
3. Stitch the sight of newborn skin to the back of your eyes

We feel the mother’s pain throughout the years, in language which is simple and direct, but vividly paints a picture of loss:

16. Stop waking at night to imagined cries
17. Stop opening your palm to the ghost of tiny hands
18. Stop searching
19. Howl. Your throat is wolves

The grief of a mother for a child is timeless; these stages of loss bind the past to the present intimately and seamlessly, as do the directives, so reminiscent of the ‘self help’ guides of today, such as the ‘Tasks of Mourning’ models. A stunning poem.

Kathy Miles, 2021

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Past Winners

Photograph by Andrew Davies, 2007

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To see lists of previous winners and read some of the winning poems, plus the judges’ comments use the links below:

The 2020 Competition

The 2019 Competition

The 2018 Competition

The 2017 Competition

The 2016 Competition

The 2015 Competition

The 2014 Competition

The 2013 Competition

The 2012 Competition

The 2011 Competition

The 2010 Competition

The 2009 Competition

The 2008 Competition

The 2007 Competition

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See also our links page for details of other poetry web sites in Wales and beyond.

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