Judge’s report

Primarily, I was looking for poems that, once I’d ‘met’ them, I knew I wanted to spend a bit more time with, because of their connection with an emotional truth. 

Richard Hugo, in The Triggering Town suggests that poets should abandon strict factual accuracy to focus on emotional truth, using a specific ‘triggering’ location or object to unlock personal, associative language. He argues for prioritizing the ‘generated subject’, or where the poem leads, over the initial inspiration. A number of the poems I read contained beautiful, carefully-crafted descriptions, but they didn’t necessarily take the reader much beyond that. The poems who achieved this movement between a triggering idea and wider theme most successfully often seemed to arrive there through the power of ambiguity; the kind of ambiguity that invites the reader to find something fresh each time they return to the poem.

Structure is an important part of what poetry is, for me; and what differentiates it most clearly from other forms of writing. I am fascinated by how poets make use of the intrinsic ‘poemy-ness’ of a poem. It might be an interesting choice of form or meter, or use of white space. And I’m always in the market for a killer line break. I was also interested in poems which demanded to be spoken out loud, where sound patterns and echoes shouted themselves off the page.

Finally, I wanted to be struck by images that were surprising, perhaps because they were unexpected, or because they captured the essence of something barely understood. I was searching for the moment when you are brought up short, that makes you catch your breath. Emily Dickinson’s idea that, ‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’

I am (and try as I might, I can’t help it), put off by errors and inaccurate or unhelpful punctuation. In a competition, it is worth that final readt`1hrough to double-check before hitting send. 

Themes ranged widely. Many of the submissions, perhaps unsurprisingly, referenced local places. A number of poems entered a meta-dimension about poetry and the act of writing itself. The rise of AI and the impact of technology appeared as subject matter in a few poems. There were a good quantity of ekphrastic poems, inspired by or referencing other works of art. Others contained exploration of little moments of epiphany. Themes of grief and loss, relationships, and poems rooted in the natural world were prevalent.  

I hope that readers will enjoy the winning poems as much as I did. 

Winning Poems + Ted Gooda’s comments

Winner

“Loaf”           Miriam Patrick

When she drew her first loaf from the stove

history was in it.  Hlaf.

Saxon women labouring at a quern stone,

wind moving over miles of wheatfields,

summer in their ripening.

As the loaf cooled, the world was in it.

Homes with well-spread tables.

Hungry children clamouring at aid trucks.

She queued for rye bread at the Barbakan

with women speaking of lost homelands.

She recalled how all through lockdown

each week just for a sight of him,

she laid a still-warm Challah swathed in tissue

on her son’s doorstep, stood back and waited.

Smiled and left as he knelt down to take it.

As she cut the loaf the miracle of wheat

was in it. She thinks of wild emmer

its thirty thousand years of cultivation,

of her grandmother slicing a small cob thinly.

Realises how close loaf is to love.

This was a poem which felt like it could be read in multiple ways and on different levels: as one woman baking, as a journey of a humble food staple through time, as a balm in a world of war and pain, as a story of tradition, as a meditation on lockdown. The ‘she’ of each stanza seemed to be both one person and a representation of the divine feminine simultaneously. There was an emotional depth and nurturing power to the poem. I liked the rich sound of the unexpected, unfamiliar words: hilaf, quern, barbakan, challah, and the way the poem captured a simple, relatable moment of the pandemic across cultures, placing it within a rich skein of centuries of history. The final line brought me up short.

2nd Prize

“Ghost writing” P A Erskine

For Anne

I saw a barn owl yesterday at dusk

float up beyond the oak and write itself

first against twilight yew hedge, white on black

then lazy looping script on ink wash sky

I read its body too as text, dark flecks

on parchment feathers, code scanned from field slope

where, you’d know, I’ve often seen spring hares -

you loved to hear of those. So now I think to write

to tell you of the owl, this rare, elusive flight,

till memory twists. Owl then as manuscript,

sending itself, ghost writer to ghost,

drifting towards the valley, posting into the dark

This was a poem evoking loss and the way it hits a mourner anew. The concreteness of the triggering image of the barn owl as a text or manuscript was powerful, and the metaphor carried through the whole poem from the bird ‘writing itself’ against a twilight sky with its ‘parchment feathers’ to the final ‘posting’ in the dark. The tell-tale conditional ‘you’d know’, with its colloquial tone and future tense captured the closeness of the speaker to the departed and foregrounded the loss that was encapsulated so devastatingly in the final line. 

Best unpublished poet

“15.02 to London Victoria”             Meerabai Kings

Four empty-ish carriages

I wonder what business everybody else has

en route to London

on a Tuesday afternoon in November

My favourite stretch is coming up               

Acre upon acre of smooth green

the river lazily cutting through pasture

A postcard from England

Flocks of woolly cartoon sheep

perfect, friendly-looking oaks

The same trees my grandmother gazed upon

on her way to London

She wouldn’t make it onto a train now

The distant Jack-and-the-Beanstalk-castle

How many poems have been written in this valley?

How many more will be written

from the 15:02 to London Victoria?

An egret stoops herself  beside the river

My mother would scold me if I hunched so

My phone lights up

speak of the devil

hi mum

I’m on the train

Victoria

Just gone by the castle

Tomorrow

Hello-  can you hear me?

The story of a train journey, which encompasses three generations: the speaker, their mother and their grandmother. Two moments, in particular, were powerful: the almost throwaway ‘she wouldn’t make it onto a train now’ in the second stanza, and the final line, ‘Can you hear me?’ which referenced interference on the phone line, but hinted at something more profound. 

Highly commended poems written by

Alan Bush

Chris Hardy

Camilla Lambert

Commended Poems

Jill Munro – 2 poems

Camilla Lambert

Audrey Lee

Claire Pankhurst

Chanctonbury Cup Competition 2026

Judge, Ted Gooda’s Report

Primarily, I was looking for poems that, once I’d ‘met’ them, I knew I wanted to spend a bit more time with, because of their connection with an emotional truth. 

Richard Hugo, in The Triggering Town suggests that poets should abandon strict factual accuracy to focus on emotional truth, using a specific ‘triggering’ location or object to unlock personal, associative language. He argues for prioritizing the ‘generated subject’, or where the poem leads, over the initial inspiration. A number of the poems I read contained beautiful, carefully-crafted descriptions, but they didn’t necessarily take the reader much beyond that. The poems who achieved this movement between a triggering idea and wider theme most successfully often seemed to arrive there through the power of ambiguity; the kind of ambiguity that invites the reader to find something fresh each time they return to the poem.

Structure is an important part of what poetry is, for me; and what differentiates it most clearly from other forms of writing. I am fascinated by how poets make use of the intrinsic ‘poemy-ness’ of a poem. It might be an interesting choice of form or meter, or use of white space. And I’m always in the market for a killer line break. I was also interested in poems which demanded to be spoken out loud, where sound patterns and echoes shouted themselves off the page.

Finally, I wanted to be struck by images that were surprising, perhaps because they were unexpected, or because they captured the essence of something barely understood. I was searching for the moment when you are brought up short, that makes you catch your breath. Emily Dickinson’s idea that, ‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’

I am (and try as I might, I can’t help it), put off by errors and inaccurate or unhelpful punctuation. In a competition, it is worth that final readt`1hrough to double-check before hitting send. 

Themes ranged widely. Many of the submissions, perhaps unsurprisingly, referenced local places. A number of poems entered a meta-dimension about poetry and the act of writing itself. The rise of AI and the impact of technology appeared as subject matter in a few poems. There were a good quantity of ekphrastic poems, inspired by or referencing other works of art. Others contained exploration of little moments of epiphany. Themes of grief and loss, relationships, and poems rooted in the natural world were prevalent.  

I hope that readers will enjoy the winning poems as much as I did. 

The Winning Poems + Ted Gooda’s Comments

Winner

Loaf Miriam Patrick

When she drew her first loaf from the stove

history was in it.  Hlaf.

Saxon women labouring at a quern stone,

wind moving over miles of wheatfields,

summer in their ripening.

As the loaf cooled, the world was in it.

Homes with well-spread tables.

Hungry children clamouring at aid trucks.

She queued for rye bread at the Barbakan

with women speaking of lost homelands.

She recalled how all through lockdown

each week just for a sight of him,

she laid a still-warm Challah swathed in tissue

on her son’s doorstep, stood back and waited.

Smiled and left as he knelt down to take it.

As she cut the loaf the miracle of wheat

was in it. She thinks of wild emmer

its thirty thousand years of cultivation,

of her grandmother slicing a small cob thinly.

Realises how close loaf is to love.

This was a poem which felt like it could be read in multiple ways and on different levels: as one woman baking, as a journey of a humble food staple through time, as a balm in a world of war and pain, as a story of tradition, as a meditation on lockdown. The ‘she’ of each stanza seemed to be both one person and a representation of the divine feminine simultaneously. There was an emotional depth and nurturing power to the poem. I liked the rich sound of the unexpected, unfamiliar words: hilaf, quern, barbakan, challah, and the way the poem captured a simple, relatable moment of the pandemic across cultures, placing it within a rich skein of centuries of history. The final line brought me up short.

2nd Prize

Ghost writingby P A Erskine

For Anne

I saw a barn owl yesterday at dusk

float up beyond the oak and write itself

first against twilight yew hedge, white on black

then lazy looping script on ink wash sky

I read its body too as text, dark flecks

on parchment feathers, code scanned from field slope

where, you’d know, I’ve often seen spring hares -

you loved to hear of those. So now I think to write

to tell you of the owl, this rare, elusive flight,

till memory twists. Owl then as manuscript,

sending itself, ghost writer to ghost,

drifting towards the valley, posting into the dark

This was a poem evoking loss and the way it hits a mourner anew. The concreteness of the triggering image of the barn owl as a text or manuscript was powerful, and the metaphor carried through the whole poem from the bird ‘writing itself’ against a twilight sky with its ‘parchment feathers’ to the final ‘posting’ in the dark. The tell-tale conditional ‘you’d know’, with its colloquial tone and future tense captured the closeness of the speaker to the departed and foregrounded the loss that was encapsulated so devastatingly in the final line. 

Best unpublished poet

15.02 to London Victoria             by Meerabai Kings

Four empty-ish carriages

I wonder what business everybody else has

en route to London

on a Tuesday afternoon in November

My favourite stretch is coming up               

Acre upon acre of smooth green

the river lazily cutting through pasture

A postcard from England

Flocks of woolly cartoon sheep

perfect, friendly-looking oaks

The same trees my grandmother gazed upon

on her way to London

She wouldn’t make it onto a train now

The distant Jack-and-the-Beanstalk-castle

How many poems have been written in this valley?

How many more will be written

from the 15:02 to London Victoria?

An egret stoops herself  beside the river

My mother would scold me if I hunched so

My phone lights up

speak of the devil

hi mum

I’m on the train

Victoria

Just gone by the castle

Tomorrow

Hello-  can you hear me?

The story of a train journey, which encompasses three generations: the speaker, their mother and their grandmother. Two moments, in particular, were powerful: the almost throwaway ‘she wouldn’t make it onto a train now’ in the second stanza, and the final line, ‘Can you hear me?’ which referenced interference on the phone line, but hinted at something more profound. 

Highly commended poems written by

Alan Bush

Chris Hardy

Camilla Lambert

Commended Poems

Jill Munro – 2 poems

Camilla Lambert

Audrey Lee

Claire Pankhurst