Dr Rosie Jackson – Judge’s report
Category A, poets with no previous collections or pamphlets.
This was extremely difficult to call. Each one was well unified around an interesting theme, they all showed dexterity with language and form, a willingness to explore ideas and to experiment. Really hard to choose, the top two had only a hair’s breadth between them.
1st place: Isabelle Thompson
Uncompromising and striking pieces about cosmonauts, poems that taught me things I didn’t know, poems about flight and change and the cost of aspiration. Daring playing with form and rhyme schemes, prose poem, well-wrought sonnet, mirror poem, letters etc. Unified around the theme of exploring space. Some stand-out lines – ‘The beauty of loneliness does not last long’… ‘I will be whole again in my undoing. ’ Very impressive. I think it will make a really interesting and unusual pamphlet. The reason I chose this, very narrowly, over the second place was that, while unified in theme, each poem had a slightly different angle, and the human level was moving, deeply felt, memorable and awakening.
Close 2nd place: Lizzie Ballagher
‘All else smudged away but water’… and it really is. There is almost no sign of a narrator even, the element of water has completely taken over. The language is lush, delightful, varied, careful, living, loving, Hopkins-esque. Really beautiful lyrical and romantic poems celebrating water; although not much is made explicitly of climate change, there’s an awe and awareness of the power of water that gives a sense of deep time, of geological change, of human life played out against these huge natural forces. The huge sweep and the tiny detailed noticing, set against each other, in different locations, are magnificent. (I suggest that it may need a stronger title than the one suggested at the start). The only reason this got pipped at the post was the lack of variety… each one is exquisitely descriptive, perfect in that, but although the scenes/locations changed, they were all essentially in the same voice, doing a very similar thing. But the language is utterly seductive and delicious and this definitely deserves to be in print.
Diana Sanders
Unified by the theme of music and its place in a love relationship. The poem ‘Music’, that gives the sequence its wonderful title, Acrobat of Light, is very beautiful. Lovely poems, some playing with form. It’s very hard to write about music, it is so intangible, and these are soft, tender, evocative. ‘Touch’ is especially moving. Another strong contender.
Liz England
All inspired by birds and birdsong. Some fabulous lines such as ‘the rooks toss black splinters of sound’ . Lovely observation and details. It was a shame that some of the final lines sometimes let down the poems down, though, by falling into predictability. This sequence has real potential.
Kieran Setright
Interesting broken forms, fractured thoughts. Dramatically capture the mood and tone of a mind in peril. Some disturbing moments and moods are powerfully caught – eg in ‘Moonwalking,’ and Beckett Ward in ‘the man who lived in a book’ – and the forms are daring, risk-taking. But though there is much to admire here, I am just not sure the voice would appeal to a wide audience, it’s very contained in its own dark vision.
Category B, poets with previous collections or pamphlets published.
1st place: Tina Cole
This was the undisputed and outstanding winner. A superb sequence of poems, utterly brilliant in their conception and delivery. Original, varied in style, yet all of a piece and beautifully sustained and unified in their underlying vision, voice and imagination. I would be very proud to have written this.
The poems take the figure of Alice in Wonderland, and borrow from that work some of its well-known scenes and idioms, but with a unique slant of using this as a lens for filtering personal and often fractured female experience. I only realised at the end that there is no first person (a welcome relief after the fashion for so much confessional poetry), yet the 3rd person feels very revealing, and the use of pronouns has clearly been deeply considered (the poem starting ‘Along the way the I that was me turned italic’ is a brilliant example of this.)
The rich metaphors are surreal and astonishing throughout, visually rich and always apt; nothing feels contrived; the opening out onto wide female issues gives it a subtle feminist handle; the use of Paula Rego’s art in some of the poems (ekphrastic poems with a difference) as a source of imagery, perspective and inspiration is a perfect mirror for the poet’s own way of seeing, taking it deeper and further. There is ample passion, humour, wit, craft, imagination, here and some startling, disturbing, thought-provoking angles onto things.
I absolutely loved and admired this sequence, and can’t wait to see it published and have it on my shelves. (It really needs a fabulous colourful and surreal cover that brings together all the stunning motifs. One of Rego’s paintings would be ideal!)
Wendy Klein
Memorable spiky (and mostly short-lined) poems about growing up as a girl in the post-war period, the undercurrents of sexploitation, Kennedy’s death, typing school, pop music, and lovely specific details that evoke the period and the differences between the treatment of boys and girls. I loved the hard-hitting energy, as in ‘War Dance’, and the voice and tone throughout: feisty, protesting, not wanting to be confined.
Sam Szanto
These are powerful visceral poems about female experience, especially of birth and motherhood. Painfully raw in places, they can be hard to read. They’re unified by that theme, unrelenting in telling it how it is. Family, siblings, children, abortion, caesarean delivery, inhabiting a female body … those themes are closely, dramatically explored in forms that vary from a poem modelled on Sharon Olds to villanelle and anaphora, showing a willingness and confidence to work with craft and shape. Unified, intense, carefully done.
Will Kemp
I really enjoyed these poems, they show restraint, insight, little everyday epiphanies, against a backdrop of growing awareness of climate change, work, loss, trashed landscapes, everyday life – a kind of Larkin-esque voice in places, ‘So much of life is bad luck,/timing, having to accept/the way things are..’ Personal life is in the background, but nonetheless there. These are modest, unpretentious, observant, sensitive, wry, poems.
Tom Bryan
Moving poignant poems about the loss of a loved wife. ‘Still Life’ is a beautiful heart-felt evocation of the things he misses about her, a lovely, unusual list poem. I get a strong sense of the woman’s presence, and the tragedy of her decline and eventual demise. The unifying thread here is love, and attendant grief, loss, and celebration of a life and relationship.
Daphne Milne
A deeply felt sequence of poems about memories, especially about a lost son. I loved the use of memory boxes, (and the idea of them building a wall), I wondered if a whole pamphlet could be constructed around these. Most of the poems start really well, but some lose their way at the end and, in my opinion, need a little more work. There are some very powerful images dotted through e.g ‘Thirty years on our baby/would be lamppost tall…’
David Mark Williams
Ambitious poems that aim for large, far-reaching intellectual ideas and theories. There’s an ominous sense of thing being out of control, as if trying to capture the planet’s demise, and yet underneath an awareness of new life potentially burgeoning. What I missed in these poems was an anchor to the personal; they aim for such huge ideas, they veer rather towards generalisation and abstraction, and while there is room for this in poetry (as in the weaving of science and philosophy in the work of Jane Hirshfield, say), I would have liked more personal presence too. Where the ordinary comes in, the images are powerful, as in ‘We’d gone as silent as chairs,’ or advising us to leave a day empty, ‘Don’t fill its pockets with little lumps of consolation.’ I wanted more of this ordinariness. But full of ideas and reach.
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September 10th –
We received over 60 entries for this year’s Poetry Space Prize and will be announcing the winners in the next two weeks.
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This is the second year of our poetry pamphlet competition and I am delighted to announce that award winning poet, Rosie Jackson will read the shortlisted entries and select the winners.
The deadline has now passed and the competition is closed.
ROSIE JACKSON lives in Teignmouth, Devon. Widely published, she has won many awards and competitions, including 1st prize Red Shed 2025, Highly Commended Kathryn Bevis 2025,
finalist Mslexia 2025, Commended in the Troubadour, 2024, finalist in the National, 2022. Her most recent collection is Love Leans over the Table (Two Rivers Press, 2023). Other works include Light Makes it Easy (2022), Aloneness is a Many-headed Bird (with Dawn Gorman, 2020), Two Girls and a Beehive: Poems about Stanley Spencer and Hilda Carline (with Graham Burchell, 2020), The Glass Mother: A Memoir (2016). A Hawthornden fellow in 2017 and nominated for the Pushcart prize 2021, Rosie has judged various competitions, including Mere, Teignmouth and Poetry Space. Jane Hirshfield calls her work ‘gorgeously original’. www.rosiejackson.org.uk
Guidelines for entrants:
This is an competition with two categories:
A – for poets who would like to have their first pamphlet collection published.
B- for established poets with collections already – pamphlet or full, looking to publish a new pamphlet collection
Guidelines:
- Please submit 10 poems of up to 30-40 lines each. We shall be looking for common threads within these poems rather than a totally random selection of your work.
- Poems must be your own work, not previously published in a collection of your own, and not AI produced. They may have been short or long listed in competitions or previously published in magazines or journals as long as you have retained copyright.
- Please send by e – mail as a word attachment with poems all in one document
- No names or identifying marks on the individual poems please. The ten poem submission will be read anonymously.
- Please include a cover sheet with your full details : name, contact telephone or mobile number, e-mail, titles of poems.
- Please mark your entry Category A or B
- e-mail as a word attachment to susan@poetryspace.co.uk
The fee to enter is £10 . This is a reading fee. Poetry Space operates as a not for personal social enterprise. All profits are used to publish more books and help widen participation in poetry. Editor, Susan Jane Sims runs a free online poetry group and a free writing for wellbeing group. As a fellow of The Royal Society of Arts she is committed to creating projects that encourage creativity within communities.
The editor of Poetry Space, Susan Jane Sims, will read all entries anonymously and create a shortlist. Rosie Jackson will read the shortlisted entries in each category anonymously and select winners. see Rosie’s details below.
The winners will be invited to submit a longer manuscript for pamphlet publication and will receive £100 each plus 25 complimentary copies of their collection when published.
Poetry Space Prize will open for entries on April 30th and close on July 31st, 2025