The Poem of the Month for July 2022, selected by 2022 Anthology Editors, Veronica and David Cookson, is Workshop by Louise Nicholas. The commended poems for July are symmetry by Geoff Atkin and Liquid Golden Days by Fred Willet.
Workshop
Louise Nicholas
This isn’t the room where TS Eliot watched the women
come and go as they brought him tea, the post, a sheaf
of readers’ reports. It isn’t the room from which he launched
Hughes and Plath, stamped out Orwell like a spot fire
in dry grass. Nor is the roof above this room the one
on which he took his turn on fire watch during the Blitz,
the red glow of a Woodbine keeping pace with his footsteps
back and forth. In this room that took the place of that room,
twelve people have gathered to read and write poetry.
Among us are university students and retired teachers,
a singer-songwriter, and three little maids sent by Hallmark
Cards to ratchet up their rhymes. Here, our tutors will teach us
to wait without hope, see the beginning in the end, and steal
our pick of antiquity from the British Museum next door
by hiding it within the confines of a ten-line poem. They’ll talk
of Michelangelo’s drawings, his close observation and faithful
rendering; of writing the truth with a Dickinsonian slant.
In this room during lunch, the three little maids will twitter
their girlish glee as with sidelong eyes they watch the singer-
songwriter, thinner than victory, dare to eat a peach. And
in this room at workshop’s end when I ask the singer-songwriter
where I might see her perform, she’ll pull back the curtain
of her hair, spin the globe, and smile… So, from this room,
I’ll take her name and hide it within the confines of Poetry
Notebook No 17. Then I’ll give it to my son, whose discovery
that his mum spent three days in a room with PJ Harvey
whom he and millions of others had only ever seen
on a screen or pin-prick stage, will hoist me into unimagined
heights of cool and leave TS Eliot whimpering to Orwell
(in a letter framed on the wall in the room that wasn’t)
that his farm needed more public-spirited pigs.
symmetry
Geoff Atkin
i was despondent
in childhood
over suffocation
of eagerness
unwelcome
discipline
& unyielding
boundaries
the uncertainty
principles
& so
i wasn’t surprised
by failure
but
i did not anticipate
love
Liquid Golden Days
Fred Willett
The beach. The heat. It burns my feet.
I hop and hobble ‘cross the sand.
The ocean water cool and deep,
balm to summers bright burning brand.
The blazing light that stings your eyes,
the endless stretch of liquid gold,
the call of kids, the buzz of flies,
the melting ice cream. Sticky. Cold.
You love the beach, you take the chance,
you bathe in heat, you drift away,
till lobster red, sand in your pants
you pack your car and end the day.
What siren song, what fatal lure
could operate to draw you here,
to burn you, fill your crack with sand,
but ensure you come again next year.