The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize
Lucie Mckee
The winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2004 was Lucie McKee, for her poem "Green Bananas", which was published in Poetry Review 93:4 (Winter 2003/4).
The judge, poet Andrew McNeillie, said: "Lucie McKee's 'Green Bananas' is for me just the best of the poems in the frame this time. It finds and speaks, without striving for effect, the full range of its subject, both visually (or poetically), and politically: and that's no easy feat, but achieved here by the early application of a little duct tape. This subject is no painting, as it might be, but a photograph, from 'a republic built on green / bananas'." Andrew also especially admired, among the other short-listed poems, "the bravura and excesses" of Daljit Nagra's 'Look We Have Coming to Dover', published in Poetry Review (93:4).
Green Bananas
not a very elegant basket,
though it has a, more or less, graceful
handle (repaired with duct tape)
arced over a curved base. Still, it could be
a painting, duct tape and all, to show
how life really is, to show that green
bananas will lie down anywhere,
splayed out from a stem, broken
off from a huge bunch, chopped out
of a republic built on green
bananas. As I write, the fruit yellows
in the sour February light, and is entirely
the most beautiful thing I've seen
all day: green, with yellow wipes, black
nosed as a stuffed bear. Somewhere
there is sun enough to spring
these bananas to life, though they
were hacked down in their very prime
for me in my sunless, northern
kitchen. What other communion do
I need than with these gold-
turning green bananas, and with all
the hands and feet that laid them
in this basket. Here is our photograph.
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