The Norman Hidden Prize for Youth Members: Winning Poems 

      The Student of Philosophy Relives a Prior Incarnation
 
       after Larkin
 
       While this IV bag drips sugar to tumours,
somewhere, whistling, a ghostly Good Humor*
van gases its way past causeways in rain.
I have not, thank Christ, tasted weather for weeks.
Doctors, machines beep and chatter their rumours.
 
       Nurse, I fear my charts have been whitewashed:
you whisper too much. Is the disease scrawled in ink
too blue, too Puritan for a Polack’s son? Too bad rain
can’t cleanse me of that--no clinic ever could bear the waste
of good worry. Off-duty, my doctors slip silent into drink
and, having drunk, the poor labcoats in the rain
guess at heartfelt diagnoses. There’s a fever, here, a welt.
They jeer at the Comas. “Come back! Think!”
 
       My souvenirs: milk-teeth, colic, the American rainstick
I was granted by god still ripe and full- wet
with foreign mud.  Midwives have words:  guess ‘e kicked
too much, guess ‘e ran outta nerve. I’m a knick-
knack they nicked, a stain that’s been ebbing,
a pale, moulting animal, bald to the rain. 
 

*North American ice cream company that operated its own fleet of ice cream trucks until the late 1970s.
 

     By Sadie McCarney

                                              
Sadie McCarney lives and writes in the rural Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, Canada. A former member  of the Writing and Publishing department at Walnut Hill School, she has been writing most of her life but only took up verse in 2006.
In 2008, she was named a Commended Foyle Young Poet of the Year and a finalist for the Smith College Poetry Prize, while more recently she received the Leonard Milberg '53 Poetry Prize from Princeton University. Sadie came to write this poem after becoming obsessed with the cover image of Robert Pinsky's The Sounds of Poetry and constructing a new verse form based on its colour-coded lines. Among her favourite poets are Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Richard Hugo, W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, César Vallejo, and Derek Walcott, though she could never leave Virginia Woolf and Gabriel García Márquez for any of them. 
 

 
 
 for the bloody green Webcore racer
 
 
it’s rookie season march fourteenth a green

and grinning racer stands front wheel on
 
the finish line the rollout starts the scene
 
a witty peril first turn nearly gone

the clock is on. hear pedals clicking in.
 
the race begins.  approaching your first turn
 
tucked leaning drafting slicing wheels spin

a whirring roar – click clack! – the lactic burn
 
a crunch! your pedal strikes. an almost crash.

and down. you go. unreal. towards earth you dive
 
the hard wracks brains the air leaves boom boom FLASH
 
you’re speeding road to heaven still alive?
 
take flight. you’re not uptight. i promise you
 
you’re safe. in pavement’s soft embrace.  you flew.
 

       By Zach Berman

 

Zach Berman lives in San Francisco with his mom and cat, and next year will be a fourth year student at San Francisco University High School.  He found out about the Poetry Society last summer while attending courses at Moniack Mohr, an Arvon centre in Scotland. He enjoys absurdist poetry and the works of modern British poets.  Zach is a competitive cyclist, but much of the emotional inspiration for this poem was not from a bike race but from a crash.  Zack says “I was hit by a truck in October, and I have written a bit about that.  This is one of those poems.”

 

 Under 14 Winner:
 

           Dizziness
           
           The dizziness still rings
    off each side of my head.
    The car is shaken like an actor being revived
    as I try to wipe the drips
    of water off the windows.
    I hit the glass and a finger cracks.
 
           Familiar roads
    come, and pass
    while I wonder
    why my head
    keeps dropping
    so low.
 
           A sip of coke wakes my mouth for me.    
    Mum says something
    but reads my stare.
    Dad turns,
    says something and grins.
    I nod.
 
           The Obama-mobile
    reaches a bump
    and throws my brain
    back up and round again.
 
           We stop, the door slides opens,
    the sound of it rolling
    rumbles and echoes between my ears.
 
           I watch myself step into the ruthless heat.
    I feel my knees shudder and the luggage wheels
    move miles further from me.
    I’m just a spectator to a walkover.

         By Jed O'Conner

 

Jed O'Connor Lives in Aughton, Lancashire. Speaking about Dizziness he said, "I wrote the poem after I'd fainted in an airport in Trinidad and was then feeling very light headed. So it was very hot and I wasn't quite thinking right. I tried to write the poem to reflect that feeling of distance and dizziness."  

 

 

 

With thanks to judges:

JO SHAPCOTT 
Jo is the author of a number of acclaimed poetry collections, including My Life Asleep (1998) which won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection. She is also the President of the Poetry Society. 

LES ROBINSON
Les is the Director of the tall-lighthouse press, an independent poetry publisher which has recently featured a pilot series from poets under the age of 30. Les is a published poet and champion of young peoples’ poetry. 
 

This generous contribution to our centenary activities is made by Joyce Hidden, widow of distinguished Poetry Society Member Norman Hidden, and marks their enthusiasm for young peoples’ engagement with poetry. Norman Hidden devoted a lifetime’s energies to the Poetry Society and coordinated our diamond jubilee celebrations in 1969.

Contact Holly Hopkins
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