The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2005

Andrew Bailey

Poetry Review is pleased to announce that the 2005 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize has been awarded to Andrew Bailey for 'From the Cave Painting' (PR 95:1). This year's judge, the distinguished poet, literary biographer and translator Elaine Feinstein, said that 'From the Cave Painting' "seems to realize an imagined past while having a sad resonance for our own age". She also enjoyed Andrew's accompanying poem 'Lodestar, Polestar, i.m. Peter Redgrove'. Feinstein adjudged Valeria Melchioretto, "a very close contender […] whose poem ('Finding Myself in a Pair of Fisheyes', PR 95:3) is both linguistically ingenious and uneasily disturbing". Melchioretto is Highly Commended. The annual Geoffrey Dearmer Prize is awarded to a new poet, who has not yet produced a full collection, for work published during the year in Poetry Review. The Prize is awarded through the generosity of the Dearmer family to honour the noted World War One poet and Society member. Poetry Review is very grateful to the donors and to Elaine Feinstein.

From the Cave Painting

Forgive the shoddy crafting – I have little time, here too the new have come,

their plates of clay, their tiny tools, their zeal to show us how. Too many

learn these marks that capture only sound, whose bison is two grunts,

two grunts, they will not feed on that. Remember where the language lies;

 

not in the words, but what they reach. Read this and recall;

will their sparrow-scratches bring rain, nurse crops from their husks,

bring fire from smoking hay? Will it last? It may be that language will sustain,

but I fear that we instead will pass, our hands the last to be language-stained.

 

If you read both language and their scritches do not read this; let the truth die

rather than be tamed to their spindling marks. If you believe, you can find us

in the cave in which the first mouth was first drawn, first drew breath.