Salford lecturer wins international poetry competition

Antony’s portfolio of four poems won the Manchester Poetry Competition – a biennial event sponsored by Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy and organised by Manchester Metropolitan University for an international audience.

Judges Ian Duhig, Frances Leviston and Adam O’Riordan selected a shortlist of six poets from the 1,500 entrants before announcing Antony as the final winner at a gala event in Manchester on Friday 19 October.

Announcing the winner, chair of judges Adam O’Riordan said: “In the end the selection of the winner felt very clear and natural and unanimous. We admired the dynamic intense musicality of the winning poems, the poet's evident relish for the vocabulary they were employing, how well the tone was controlled, and the ease with which the poems moved between the contemporary and the historical.”

Antony, who lives in south Manchester and works in the School of Humanities, Languages & Social Sciences, said: “I was delighted to win because the other shortlisted poems were excellent. I hope this achievement is read as a sign of the quality of the creative writing team as a whole at Salford.”

Antony’s winning poems:

 

The Siege of Minorca

Europe ripples around this island

with Egyptian vultures, patient as the siege

of Fort Sant Felip, where I, John Murray –

our future as thin as Minorcan garrigue –

muster Lepanto and Xorigeur gin.

After Canavall and Canavant factions in Maó,

the road was paved with Kane’s wine and seed

until the lynching of Admiral Byng

pour encourager les autres. Now the red globe

is a bleb on cannon exits to the sea

and our former deep water anchorage.

The stone curlew’s reptilian eye catches

and holm oak, dwarf palm and carob

withhold their sap. My dream fevers

are of sepia, fresas and gambas

where anchovies torture the headland.

The bee-eater bubbles its pruuk

among barrack graves open from dawn ’til dusk.

The Tramuntana buffets with spicy wind

as clouds patch our mud. Nights draw meteorites.

Dim torches cast my death in momentary snow.

 

Libya

Economies brake on the crude prices,

the complicity of Libyan oil:

meet me at the reception of the water point,

the pump kid fuelled with Masarati dreams

where clouds form like afterthoughts above the logs,

coal and petroleum spirit. The office,

spick as a PIN, attends your balance and rewards.

Tubes anticipate the wireless pumps:

the nozzle pipe sucks air to a vacuum

before the clip click, fills with the corpses

of fossils compressed with mud and sun

then heated and cracked in refineries

to grades of kerosene and diesel pumped

for invisible trucks that fuel the night.

Liberty Street

Macey’s citified sprinklers cool models

working bikinis for your future jeans

while hawkers flog disaster off Broadway

with bites of images consuming the event

where the past is sky and prime estate:

these memorials’ signature pools

are now clearly visible but do

not bring soil, cell cultures or snails

into Liberty Street. KERB YOUR DOG.

Hardhats snapple in annuated footprints.

No bushel experience here: the Staten lights

recede the ferry with its wake gulls past

Kioshk, Pagganck and Little Oyster

to an Island scrap-yard where the towers end

in a transferred zero of melted steel

and workers’ tears. The bridge cinches the Heights.

In Bodies, full-on organs are preserved

in disturbing Chinese polymer-nerves.

Corporate headquarters shadow walkers

and Wall Street stiffens its Buttonwood lip.

Libeskind’s wedge of light may yet not flood

pieces of high-heel shoes, a pair of metal,

as clear as the night is long. Span

the cables that spider the lattice to Ambrose

and Peking piers, the handshake

of Brooklyn. WE KNOW IT’S CALLED RUSH HOUR

but it is unlawful to cross the solid line

into understanding under NO STANDING.

Uptown, a trio of bald blue clowns

stretches the limits of performance art.

The Natural History of Cockroaches

Jul 9^th, 1755

Gleads kite the Saxon meers and marching hoopoes breed

but streams yield nothing but bull’s head or miller’s thumb;

the teams of ducks, widgeons, and multitudes of teal;

owls like dogs that hide what they cannot eat.

Three gross-beaks in my fields in the dead season,

shot with my dreams of swallows on the Isle of Wight

instead of cock snipes piping and humming to seed.

I have had yet no opportunity of procuring mice.

Aug 1^st, 1759

I pass the trappers and thrusters with loaded corves:

I had rather look than go in pulpits. I write

rain, ecstatic as a solo. The hood-mould

shows water on the bulwark’s central mullion

but the covert of eminence is truly beech,

most lovely of forest trees: glossy, pendulous,

beyond unmellow clay and crumbling black malm.

It seems the bees do not resent my large speaking trumpet.

Jul 14^th, 1789

The Saxon’s wolf-month: the floor sweats in wet weather

and when the lavants flood, corn will be expensive.

The blattae were almost subdued with fly-water,

surviving for weeks without heads. Tubbed and pickled

a fat porker, then culled some scummings for rushes.

Parties of ousels canton on the Sussex downs

and the goat-sucker or churn-owl jarrs on a bough

while the Bastille storms into history and Selbourne.