Winners of W.H. Auden Poetry Prize announced

The prize is awarded by the Governing Body in Michaelmas term each year for a piece of creative writing in English following a competition advertised the previous Trinity Term, and is judged by the Tutors in English. Under the terms of the benefaction, the prize is open to any undergraduate reading for any Final Honour School.

The two winners of the 2022 W.H. Auden Poetry Prize have kindly given permission to reproduce their entries.

Tatiana Quintavalle

Family Holiday

Some people are like lobsters; 
Not animals to be afraid of, per se, 
But twitching with angry whiskers.

Once I chopped off the tip of my thumb - 
Blood everywhere - sink red - 
Worth it for an excuse 
To escape the kitchen, sneak a cigarette.

Is hiding cowardly 
If hiding is watching a horizon, 
Feeding the gap between my toes and the sea-bed, 
Little splashes hushing the beach? 
The blue is startling and I’m only here for a moment.

Besides, I can’t get anywhere anyway. 
Soon sunset, showers, supper, 
No one saying much, 
All of us a part of this thing we don’t know what to do with.

Marianne Doherty

A Grief for Art Ó Laoghaire

Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire is an 18th century Irish-language wife’s lament, commemorating a husband murdered by an Anglo-Irish official.

First voice, from outside:

I clapped once and quickly

Then set to running madly

With all that I had in me

To find you dead before me.

Crumpled by a stump of gorse.

No Pope and no bishop,

No clergy, no priest

Poured prayer onto you, yet –

A wasted, wrinkled woman

Pasted her sad cloak’s edge

Where your blood-river rushed.

And I did not care to clean it

But gulped it from my palms.

My only steadfast love!

Stand up and stop your fooling.

Come home at once with me –

That I might fell an ox,

That I might summon much company,

That we might spark out in a song,

That I might find you in our bed;

There, under white and shining sheets,

Under soft and speckled quilts

I would raise your native heat

And banish that earlier frost.

[FIRST VOICE fades.]

Second voice, inside:

…the sound of running       cross the plain.

Insanely, I–      I feel insane;

running                                    running                                    running

still to find you                                cold before me

I know the plant you chose

a yellow unforgiving thing

and I just want to say:

nobody prayed for you, save me

An old woman –      not the maiden type –

dabbed at you with her coat. Sceptically.

running                                    running                                    running

still to find you                           gone before me

I drank from you, then as before.

It seemed quite natural in the warm 4 o’clock air.

Darling, you have played out on the road so long

It’s raining

[Briefly, the sound of rain.]