Partridge Boswell has won the Poetry Society’s £5,000 National Poetry Competition with his poem ‘The Gathering’. It was described by judges Denise Saul, Ian Duhig and Susannah Dickey as “an ever more expansive interrogation of language and morality … The speaker  reflects on the tensions of personal grief against the backdrop of state violence in Gaza and elsewhere – how do we maintain language’s potency amidst the anaesthetising relentlessness of the news cycle? How do we resist false narratives, eclipsed histories?”

The judging panel selected the winning poem from over 21,250 entered into the competition from nearly 9,600 poets in 113 countries. All the poems were read anonymously by the judges.  

Partridge Boswell has won Ireland’s Fool for Poetry prize for his chapbook Levis Corner House, and the US Grolier prize for his collection Some Far Country. He is the co-founder of Bookstock literary festival in Vermont, US, and teaches at Vallum Society for  Education in Arts & Letters in Montreal. He tours widely with the band Los Lorcas.  

He said of his win: “Funny how this works: one minute, I’m spacing out, staring at the ceiling. Next, I’m on a flight  to London … to gather no less, around poetry’s communal fire. What can I say? For this poem to receive such recognition is a humbling and massively ‘affirming flame’ in a dark winter. That our hopes, hungers, and pleas for connection are heard not merely as echoes but a shared resonance, renews my faith in human love.” 

He talked to the Poetry Society’s Poetry News about what drew him to the themes in his winning poem: “Some hungers feed us while others devour us. I followed the media for a long while, writing  elegies, parodies and rants to unpack my discomfort and disbelief, until the psychic toll became too great. To extend that Icarus analogy, the themes we are drawn to as poets are indeed flames. Writing poetry allows us to get a bit closer to them, to even harness and transfer some of that heat and light to others, but there’s always the risk of getting too close, of not keeping the flame in perspective. I found I was not attending to the world I love.”

Australian poet Damen O’Brien won the £3,000 second prize for his poem ‘Axe’, and Zoe Dorado, form California, won third prize and £2,000 for ‘Badminton’. The seven commended poets winning £500 each were: Jim McElroy (‘Coming of Age’); Kate Wakeling (‘The Visitors’); Alex Mankowitz (‘Descension’); Mark Fiddes (‘Year of the Crayfish’); Jane Ord (‘Tender  Hands’); Jade Angeles Fitton (‘SAMO’); and Lindsey Forster-Holland (‘Balloon, Bird, Fine Art’). You can find all the winning and commended poems here.  

These are the poets that made the longlist: 

Mara Adamitz Scrupe / Jasmin Allenspach / Angeliki Ampelogianni / Sophia Argyris / Tom Bailey / Dorothy Baird / Debmalya Bandyopadhyay / Robbie Barlow / Shaun Barr / Liam Bates / Clíodhna Bhreatnach / Giacomo Boffi / Jacques Borg Barthet / Jemma Borg / Benedict Braddock / Marc Brightside / Carole Bromley / Jessica Brown / Michael Brown / J.J. Carey / Roberto Salvador Cenciarelli / Stephen Chappell / Christine Chiang / Lauren Colley / Jade Cuttle / Ruby Davies /Abbie Day / Amaylia Dewis / Kym Deyn / Kt Dorfman / James Dowling O’Sullivan / Luke Dunne / Helen Eastman / Eric Egan / TL Evans/ Ezra James Fiddimore / Toby Fitch / Tessa Foley / Naomi Foyle / MM Gabriel / William Gee / Aysar Ghassan / Sara Jane Gray / Jonathan Greenhause / george graves / Matthew Griffiths / Peter Hamilton / Susannah Hart / Estelle Hawkins / Tabitha Hayward / John Heath / Jane Houston / Tina Huang / Sharan Hunjan / Patryk Imielski / Yasmin Inkersole / Rosie Jackson / Dennis Johnstone / Susan Kambalu / Perla Kantarjian / Stephen Keeler / Nin Kenning / Joseph Kidney / Isabella King / Carolene Kurien / Ian Lavery / Esther Lay / Wes Lee / Joseph Long / Michelle Lovric / Safa Maryam / Robert Maslen / Ian McDonough / Paul McMahon / Eliza Mood / Ross Moore / Fawzia Muradali Kane / Jess Murrain / Alicia Myers / Sam Nielsen / Nat Norland / Anne Osbourn / Thomas Pearson / Natalie Perman / Sarah Persson / Kristal Phillips / Alisha Riley / Jacqui Ritchie / Richard Robbins / Christina Rosie / Pedro Juarez Rosello / Ruby Russell Pierce / Richard Robbins / Charlotte Salkind / Joshua Sang / Jane Satterfield / Ian Seed / Allen Shadow / William Skelton / Oli Isaac Smith / Shannon Smith-Meekings / Andy Soutter / Caroline Stancer / Matthew Hedley Stoppard / Sean Swallow / Treby Swingler / Leilani Taneus-Miller / Ken Taylor / Valerie Valente / Caroline Walling / Scarlett Ward / Susan Wheeler / Rod Whitworth / Alice Willitts / Amaury Wonderling / Dragan Wilms / Susan Wood / Gareth Writer-Davies.

 

THE GATHERING

by Partridge Boswell

 

Above my meditating head, a record herd of god’s tiny cows  

grazes on the blank page of ceiling. How they slipped in via  

crevices, god only knows. Yet another testament to a seamed  

world where cracks widen and swallow our hungers whole. 

 

A thousand or so volunteering for the next lower case i,  

period, ellipsis or umlaut… interrogating the bare expanse  

upside-down, a pair here and there posing as colons — 

brave pacifists of summer’s coda, ensuring exclamation 

 

and question won’t end in pointless machete and scythe. 

Losing count of gaunt warmer days, all placidly repair 

to a colorless gulag of ceiling pristine as the sky after 9/11  

or Gandhi’s mind, banished of muddy boots. Foraging air, 

 

do they miss their dirt and grass? Diapaused in stark sterile  

contrast to the fermenting carnival of sweet decay coloring  

autumn’s kaleidoscope a glass pane away… did they cross  

the border with families and dreams intact ahead of a killing 

 

frost? How we continue to innocently decimate each other  

and blame gravity, god knows. God who drifts now nowhere  

and everywhere again, sleeping in the churches of our cars,  

insisting every story still ends in love and ones that don’t 

 

are so starved they’ve lost their appetite for what feeds a soul  

on its famished flight from an Gorta mór to the salted shore  

of Gaza. The honey water you set on a sill last year, they  

drowned in. No, seasons can’t be sweetened with intention 

 

yet in a week when summer’s still putting up high numbers  

and two friends leave by their own design, it seems an illicit ill 

timed conceit to reckon a wish to euthanize with  a will to survive —

while conducting a threnody for yet another ending / impending 

 

genocide of life, truth, hope or love plying the complicit silence  

of a bedroom where sleep’s erasure can’t hide the heinous crime  

of negligence or revise a rehashed history that passes as news. 

Their bright robes shine incarnadine, a congregation reciting 

 

in unison psalms and proverbs of limbo. You whistle a living  

wake as tacit prayer gestates to hunger-strike. Exploring safe,  

prosaic pages of snow, they procrastinate then power down.  

Black iotas cluster in corners, gathering a geometry to trace 

 

the contour of your starving heart — the ravenous reticence  

that remains of language when language fails and meaning’s  

odometer is broken, when punctuation alone hovers aloft — 

stars we can finally reach, once love’s last light is spoken.