Judge's Report
THE 1999 EXETER POETRY PRIZE

JUDGE: JO SHAPCOTT

The winning and commened entries from the 1999 Exeter Poetry Prize were selected by Jo Shapcott. She has published three prizewinning collections of poetry, "My Life Asleep" (OUP 1998) being shortlisted for the T.S. ELIOT Prize 1998. Her most recent work is entitled "Her Book", which contains Selected Poems.

She has held writing fellowships at the British Library, Cambridge, Harvard and on the Internet for the Poetry Society. She is the current Northern Arts Literary Fellow, based in Newcastle. She also spent three years as a lecturer at Rolle College, Exmouth, now part of the University of Plymouth.

Jo Shapcott

THE REPORT:

There are pains involved in judging any poetry competition - the one's you'd expect: eyestrain and the natural strong aversion to poetry which develops after reading so many poems in only a matter of days - but there are a surprising number of pleasures, too. The Exeter Competition brought with it the delicious flavour of place, of locality. There is a separate section for a Devon Winner (fourth prize) but, even without it, a poem from Devon would certainly have appeared among the prize winners and further evidence of this strength is the high number of Devon Poems which were awarded a place on their own merits in the anthology. I hope the prize-winning poems speak for themselves. I was delighted to find them.

The overall standard of entries was high. But if every competition has a particular colour or character, this one had a disturbingly high proportion of poems which owed something - or thought they did - to untethered surrealism or maybe simply whimsy. Is it just me, I ask? There were dog's heads in strange locations, people metamorphosing all over the place, and a billion extended dreamscapes. While it's certainly true to say that the thrill of poetry is that it can take you anywhere, reveal new truths, precipitate change, any poem needs to be firmly grounded in the world we know before launching the hapless reader into an alternative world. If the poem fails to touch the earth, intellect, spirit and heart - all four - then it has missed the mark. Read the collection and admire the prizewinners to see poems which are doing the business.

Jo Shapcott
Newcastle upon Tyne, 1999.

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