TOP 10 AWARD WINNING

POEMS OF THE WORLD

Prepared by: Glydeel C. Portugal

BSEd- ENG4A
NATIONAL POETRY COMPETITION
 It is an annual poetry prize established in 1978
in the United Kingdom.
 It is run by the UK-based Poetry Society.
 It accepts entries from all over the world, with
over 10,000 poems being submitted to the
competition each year.
 1. “Timer”
by Tony Harrison
Year: 1980
 Award: First Price
 Timer
by Tony Harrison
Gold survives the fire that’s hot
enough
to make you ashes in a standard urn.
An envelope of course official buff
contains your wedding ring that
wouldn’t burn.
Dad told me I’d to tell at St. James’s
the ring should go in the incinerator.
That “eternity” inscribed with both
their names is
his surety that they’d be together,
“later”.
I signed for the parcelled clothing as
the son,
the cardy, apron, pants, bra, dress-
The clerk phoned down, 6- 8- 8- 3- 1?
Has she still her ring on? (Slight
pause) Yes!
It’s on my warm palm now, your
burnished ring!
I feel your ashes, head, arms,
breasts, womb, legs,
sift through its circle slowly, like that
thing
you used to let me watch to time the
eggs.
 2. “Bernard and Cerinthe”
by Linda France
Year: 2013
 Award: First Price

 Cerinthe major
‘Purpurascens’

 Also called as
“honeywort”
 Bernard and Cerinthe
by Linda France
If a flower is always a velvet curtain articulate the malleability of wax;
onto some peepshow he never opens, the bruise of bracts, petals, purple

shrimps; seeds plump as buttocks,

it’s a shock to find himself, sheltering tucked out of harm’s way, cocos-de-mer
from the storm in a greenhouse,
washed up off Curieuse or Silhouette.
seduced by a leaf blushing blue But being Bernard, he’s dumbstruck,
at the tips, begging to be stroked.
a buffoon in front of a saloon honey
He’s caught in the unfamiliar ruffle high-kicking the can-can. Can’t-can’t.
of knickerbockers or petticoat, a scent
He attempts to cool himself, thinking
about seahorses, Hippocampus erectus,
of terror, vanilla musk. If he were
not himself, he’d let his trembling lips listening to the rain refusing to stop,
soft against the steamed-up glass.
3. “The Opened Field”
by Dom Bury
•Year: 2017
• Award: First Price
 The Opened Field
by Dom Bury
Six boys, a calf’s tongue each, one task — Iron to the skin until at last their legs give.
to gulp each slick muscle down in turn, Four boys step out across an empty field,
to swallow each vein whole and not give each small child waiting for a name,
back a word, a sign, our mothers’ names. our own name to be called, the next task
The scab stripped off, the ritual learned — ours to own, ours to slice into, to turn
five boys step out across an empty field. each blade, to shear off skin until we learnt

Five boys step out across an empty field The weight of it. One by one we learnt
to find a fire already made, the task the force our bodies hold, the subtle give
to dock then brand a single lamb. We learnt our own hands have, how not to turn
fast how to hold, then cut, then turn our gaze. Three boys stand in a frozen field —
each tail away, to print in them our names — each child stripped and hosed, the next task
our ownership. We dock, we brand, give not to read the wind but learn the names
 The Opened Field
by Dom Bury
We have for snow, each name That what the land gives it must then learn
we have given to the world. To then to turn back into soil. One child, a name its
unlearn task
ourselves, the self, this is — the hardest to steal. Five boys turn from an empty field.
task.
To have nothing left. No thing but heat to
give.
Two boys step out across an empty field.
Still waiting for the call, waiting for our
turn,
Waiting to become, to dig, to turn
at last our hands into the soil then name
the weakest as an offering — the field
opened to a grave, my last chore not to
learn
the ground but taste it closed. I don’t give
back a word, surprise I am the task —
4. “Night Errand”
by Eric Berlin
Year: 2015
 Award: First Price
 Night Errand
by Eric Berlin
O, Great Northern Mall, you dwindling oracle in home essentials as I roam through Sears,
of upstate New York, your colossal lot seeking assistance. I know you’re here.

of frost-heaved spaces so vacant I could cut For this window crank I brought, you show me
straight through while blinking and keep my a muted wall of TVs where Jeff Goldblum
eyes
picks his way through the splintered remains
shut, I’ve come like the flies that give up the of a dinosaur crate. There must be fifty
ghost
at the papered fronts of your defunct stores, of him, hunching over mud to inspect
the three-toed prints. I almost didn’t
through the food court where napkins, unused
to touch, are packed too tight to be dispensed, come in here at all, driving the opposite
of victory laps, and waiting as I hoped
past the pimpled kid manning the register
who stares at the buttons and wipes his palms. for the red to leave my eyes, but my urgency
smacked of your nothingness. I did it again –
If I press my eyes until checkers rise
from the dark – that’s how the overheads I screamed at the woman I love, and in front
glower
of our one-year-old, who covered his ears.
 RHYSLING AWARD
 Is an annual award given for the best science fiction, fantasy or
horror poem of the year.

 Unlike most literary awards, which are named for the creator of
the award, the subject of the award, or a noted member of the
field, the Rhyslings are named for a character in a science fiction
story: the blind poet Rhysling, in Robert A. Heinlein’s short
story The Green Hills of Earth

 The award is given in two categories:

1. "Best Long Poem”- for works of 50 or more lines
2. "Best Short Poem“- for works of 49 or fewer lines.
 5. “In Computers”
By Alan P. Lightman
 Year: 1983
 Award: Best Short Poem Winner
 In Computers
by Alan P. Lightman
In the magnets of computers will be stored

Blend of sunset over wheat fields.

Low thunder of gazelle.
Light, sweet wind on high ground.
Vacuum stillness spreading from a thick snowfall.

Men will sit in rooms

upon the smooth, scrubbed earth
or stand in tunnels on the moon
and instruct themselves in how it was.
Nothing will be lost.
Nothing will be lost.
 PULITZER PRIZE
 It is an award for achievements
in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, literature,
and musical composition in the United States.
 It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of American
(Hungarian-born) Joseph Pulitzer who had made his fortune as a
newspaper publisher, and is administered by Columbia University
in New York City.
 Prizes are awarded yearly in twenty-one categories.
 In twenty of the categories, each winner receives a certificate and
a US$15,000 cash award (raised from $10,000 in 2017).
 6. “Different Hours”
by Stephen Dunn
 Year: 2001
 Award: Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry
 Different Hours
by Stephen Dunn
 Stephen Dunn, in his startling and graceful eleventh
collection often set in southern New Jersey where he
makes his home, continues to find his subjects in the
dailiness of life, at the same time expanding his vision to a
darker emotional landscape. The mysteries of Eros and
Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the
face of diminishment--these are the undercurrent of Dunn's
new work.
 Dunn explores the "different hours," not only of one's life,
but also of the larger historical and philosophical life
beyond the personal, and brilliantly succeeds in getting at
and plumbing our elusive realities.
 7. “The Waking”
by Theodore Roethke
 Year: 1954
 Award: Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry
 The Waking
by Theodore Roethke
I wake to sleep, and take my waking
slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to
know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are
you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly
there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us
how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding
stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should
know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking
slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
 8. “The Dolphin”
by Robert Lowell
 Year: 1974
 Award: Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry
 The Dolphin
by Robert Lowell
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself–
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting
my eyes have seen what my hand did.
 9. “The Wild Iris”
by Louise Gluck
 Year: 1993
 Award: Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry
 The Wild Iris
by Louise Gluck
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call
death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the
pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear,
being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff
earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again:
whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.
10. “Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016”
by Frank Bidart

Year: 2018
 Award: Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry
Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016
by Frank Bidart
 "Half-light" encompasses all of Bidart’s previous books, and
also includes a new collection, "Thirst," in which the poet
austerely surveys his life, laying it plain for us before
venturing into something new and unknown. Here Bidart
finds himself a "Creature coterminous with thirst," still
longing, still searching in himself, one of the "queers of the
universe.“

 Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart’s

"Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016" are radical
confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally
renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.
THE END 