The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2008

Kearan Williams

Kearan Williams is the winner of the 2008 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, which is awarded annually to the best poem published in Poetry Review by a poet who has not yet had a collection published. Williams’ poem ‘Chill’, published in the Summer 2008 edition, was chosen by celebrated poet Peter Porter, who described her contemporary take on Horace’s ‘Ode 1.XI’, as “abrupt, noisy and very jaunty”.
Williams began writing poetry in 1990 after attending workshops run by Jo Shapcott. “Then family and work life got busier, and the poetry reading and writing slipped away. I started writing, reading and thinking about poetry again in 2006,” she said. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Wales, The Rialto and Critical Quarterly, and she has been a Bridport prizewinner.


Peter Porter writes: Kearan Williams’s 'Chill' is an audacious modernising of Horace’s Ode I.XI, the notorious ‘carpe diem’. Notorious because it is a reef on which a whole fleet of translators have wrecked, usually spectacularly. As an all-too-fallible taker-up of Latin myself, I admire this version immoderately. Of course, it’s anachronised, but is done with such lightness and skill as to be almost as good as Louis MacNeice’s reworking of Ode I.IV, ‘Solvitur acris hiems’. Abrupt, noisy and very jaunty. After all, Horace was not all decorum: he knew a lot about hard options.

The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize was established in memory of Geoffrey Dearmer, at 103 the Society’s oldest member. It is awarded, through the generosity of the Dearmer family, to honour this noted World War One poet and Society member. Poetry Review is extremely grateful to the Dearmer family and to Peter Porter.

Kearan Williams

Chill

After Horace, Odes 1.XI
 
Sweetheart, horoscopes never say: Leo. Check the tyre pressure,
or you’ll plunge off the cliff road tomorrow. Cancer. It’s got you.
Don’t fight it. Goodbye. Let’s just live our lives. If this is our last winter, that’s fine.
Down in the bay, the sea is endlessly crashed out on pebbles.
 
Come inside from the cold and the shore’s ceaseless grinding. Open another bottle. Let it breathe. Prune time hard back
to this moment. Hear me shushing you. Relax. It is now
and that matters. Be warm. Shut the window. Hold me. Here.
 

Lost Language

The last time we tried to talk:
a crackle in her voice like applewood
sparking. I think she’s trying to say something.
Her eyes, when they lifted, incredibly
grey, as her speech powdered
down like falling snow.
                                                Outside,
on the A-road, haulage and logistics.
Probably too late. Fading. Indistinct.
Now, at the end, intimate, withheld,
our lost conversations
heap and spoil at the graveside.
 

Funambule

My life so far, suddenly taut with it,
the chill bluster of history blowing through my clothes.
Stretched between the masted boats of my birth and death
are ropes, wires, and along them come
a troupe of women, their parasols dancing,
a ginger-hoofed horse with its cart of provisions,
wheel on wire, wire and wheel.
Listen! The tiny bells of hecklers; the waft of carrion, rotting fruit,
the damp and mould flowering in my bones.
But there are fireworks, acrobats and supermarket trolleys.
My life is playing out as a sultan’s senlik,
and the air is filled with the twang of cold music.