Below are the prize-winning poems for the TASTE Poetry Competition. Congratulations to all the winners and thank you for submitting your work to our competition!
First prize winner:
Smriti Verma – ‘My favourite thing to write about’
Judges’ comments: We all chose this poem as a possible frontrunner and, when it was read aloud in our judges’ meeting (as were all the shortlisted poems) the effect was mesmerising. We knew at once we had found our winner. What gripped our imaginations from the start was the way the poem questions concepts of ‘good taste’ when applied to its subject, and plays with tonality and paradox to engage directly with the reader and make the most of the writer’s brilliantly subversive approach to the theme of the competition. The title is disingenuous, suggesting a child’s writing exercise or a quick prompt from a creative writing workshop. In contrast, what follows are 20 lines in constant motion whose breath-taking control of hiatus draws the reader’s mind down through the poem, couplet by couplet, to follow the subtlety of its reasoning, while its close attention to rhythm and musicality makes it a joy to listen to, as well as to read – and re-read. Appropriately, its closing lines allude to a painting by an equally passionate female creator, Georgia O’Keefe. Like the red of the artist’s watercolour paint, this poem, and the bold ideas it posits, are ‘unwilling to be bound to the paper’.
Smriti Verma grew up in Delhi, India and has been writing for the past ten years. Her poetry and fiction has appeared in VIBE, The Alipore Post, VAYAVYA, The Adroit Journal, Coldnoon and B O D Y, among others. She is an alumni of the Kolam Writer’s Workshop and has recently been delving into autofiction. Currently, she is a DPhil Student in English at University of Oxford, where she works on women’s life-writing, feminist activism and the contemporary novel. She works as a Poetry Editor for Inklette and for The Ideate Review. Her work can be found on smritiverma.tumblr.com.
Second prize winner:
Estelle Price – ‘A last meal with my father’
Judges’ comments: Appropriately enough for a poem that deals with the slow process of how we grow through the experience of loss, our awareness of the full power and accomplishment of this poem grew over time, as it made its way through the judging process. It’s a vivid, painterly portrait of grief for a father, whose essence as a person, and social background, is conjured up through deft attention to detail. It demonstrates how the great themes of life are often best approached through a focus on the everyday; it also shows a clear understanding of poetic craft, with its use of strong verbs (‘stashed’, ‘burdened’, ‘slouched’, ‘bleached’), its skillful line breaks, and its subtle weaving through of religious imagery. It moves backwards and forwards through time in a way that feels wholly relatable, as ‘a word flips memory’. It also feels profoundly true at an emotional level, in the way it describes how another, smaller death is the one that finally sets the daughter’s tears flowing. Reading this poem out loud on the day we met to decide our winners, we arrived at the final stanza, with its opening word ‘choked’ – and that’s what we were too.
Estelle Price writes from a feminist perspective on her East End past. She won the 2023 Welshpool Poetry Competition, the 2023 Mairtín Crawford Award, the 2021 Welsh Poetry Competition and the 2018 Book of Kells Prize. She was published in 2022 by Nine Arches Press in Primers 6. Her poetry has been long-listed twice in the National Poetry Competition and placed/listed in the Bridport, Welshpool, London Magazine and other competitions. Poems have left home for Poetry Wales, 14 Lines, Alchemy Spoon, the Stony Thursday Book and Bathmagg. Before she was a poet she was a lawyer, classicist and charity worker.
Third prize winner:
John Gallas – ‘ábhar blas (a matter of taste sonnet)’
Judges’ comments: “Adherence to a strict form, as Wendy Cope once said, is often at the heart of a good comic poem. Maybe she would also agree that the best comic poems manage to communicate something of gravitas. While this is a poem about resisting the urge to judge a person by their outward appearance, its surface is apparently casual, its presentation, conversational, yet all within the confines of a skillfully crafted sonnet with perfect end rhymes. Look more closely still and you will observe how the poet plays with language and etymology – as in Trixie Blout, which, whilst simply meaning a shirt, closer enquiry reveals the origin of blout to be earlier than 1522, perhaps borrowed from the Dutch, or early Scandinavian. This a poem of great verve, depth and skill. It is highly deserving of its award of 3rd prize.”
John Gallas is an Aotearoa/NZ poet of 33 books, mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Project Poet (see poems on www.saxonship.org), Orkney St Magnus Festival Poet, Fellow of the English Association, librettist and translator. New book out in October (see www.carcanet.co.uk), Billy ‘Nibs’ Buckshot: The Complete Works. www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk