The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2000

Anna Wigley

Judge Maura Dooley writes: When I agreed to judge the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize I had no idea I would find it as difficult as it proved to be. These poets, each with a manuscript ready to be a book, struck me as inventive, capable, memorable and durable and each was wildly different from the next.

All of these poets were ready to publish first collections and the poet who has reached this point of expectation and fulfilment will never again face a moment quite like it. All of a poet's life up till then is poured into the shape of that first book. So I was lucky enough to be reading a group of rich, intelligent, imaginative poems by a group of talented writers whose first collections will be well worth waiting for.

Anna Wigley brings a crystalline gaze to bear on the natural world. Her best poems detail, in a sophisticated but probably unfashionable way, the changing light on landscape, the movement of the seasons, the particular habits of particular birds. All these things are summoned with a sharpness of language, with vivid and passionate images which linger in the mind and through this carefully delineated world she shows us the bigger picture.

Beloved Daughter

The crows that perch on her stone
are older than she was.
Their caws go over
her scant twenty inches.

What would she have made
of this maze of graves?
She would have recognised silence,
rain, gently amniotic,
and tiny muffled thuds.

And the air would have stirred
some memory of being wheeled,
just once, outdoors.

But greenness and birds,
and trees like living houses,
and the sky (not even handled
with a word)

- these she now lies under
like her last home,
though she did not stay
long enough to meet them,
and knew neither feather nor stone. 
 

Moss

I had never seen the colour green
until the Long Mynd moss
lay at my feet in a cold rain,
burning;

as if some temperamental goddess
had turned out her jewel-box
here, on this stubbled heath

then set fire to the lot.
And this was what was left:

the just-cooling embers and coals
still on their necklace-strings,
curling like miniature constellations
in a fern-and-heather heaven.


Shortlist: John Stammers, Ivy Garlitz, Martha Kapos, Greta Stoddart, Jonathan Trietel.