What is a sonnet? People outside the poetry world expect us to have clear definitions or accepted authorities to answer such questions, but we know better. As rhyme, iambic pentameter and a square outline on the page have each been challenged in their turn, “Sonnet or Not” was always a canny response to the fluid ambiguity lapping around the footings of this form.

How long is a line in a sonnet? In these entries it ranged from one letter to nineteen words, so it was clear from the start that criteria would need to be flexible. I borrowed from previous judges the ambition of forming a shortlist which would celebrate the form’s variety, by showing the different things that sonnets – or not-sonnets - can do.

In this year’s entry the formal variety was matched by the spectrum of subject matter. Lockdown has taught us to value birds and gardens even more, and there was a lot of divorce, dementia and death. Young love and politics, not so much. But the range was dazzling, from model railways to Vesuvius, Dickens to araldite.

There was no early moment when I thought “that’s the one.” Poems appealed for very different reasons, and as I revisited the final thirty, day after day, I shuffled my order of preference, saw qualities I’d missed earlier, and was less convinced by effects which had impressed me in an earlier reading.

I often think that judges get it wrong, and there’s no reason why this adjudication should be any different. Poetry competitions depend on hunch and personal feeling, however much those are offset by repeated readings, giving poems the chance to change the judge’s mind. In 2020 two sonnets were entered for this competition and not placed, but a few weeks later won first and third prize in the Guernsey competition, Poems on the Move. So here’s some reassurance, for the judge as well as for competitors: there’s always Guernsey.

But the judge’s job is to judge, so here goes. I have commended nine poems, which are not listed in rank order. This is about celebration, and each of these poems contributes something different to a smorgasbord of pleasure.

Snow could have been a routine piece of natural description, but it’s a tough, specific address, packed with close observation.

Annunciation takes the quiet act of reading, and transforms it into a spiritual experience. Also, as someone who’s tried many different ways of dividing up a sonnet, I love this sandwich of 3:8:3.

Jeanne, Visions, Trousers, Flames – that’s what I call a title. The story’s familiar, so the treatment has to add something new, give us a voice we can believe in - “Please, no more saints.”

An English Man: It’s not hard to find reflections on masculinity, but I thought this was an original and subtle approach, with a humane twist at the end.

Moonlight Sonata: I liked the unobtrusive use of a traditional rhyming pattern, so that the poem foregrounds the steady, lulling progression, and the sympathetic revelation of the relationship between teacher and pupil.
Noah: There were a number of powerful responses to climate change here, but what particularly struck me about this one was the compact power of the imagery in lines 6-9.

Garrulus Glandarius: Lockdown has driven a massive increase in bird poems, about which I know very little – but I was won over here by the richness of imagery and detail, the refusal to accept any limits to the range of reference which might be invoked in visualising this performance.

Spinneret shows how much you can get into fourteen lines. There’s a developing story, about a girl becoming a woman and suffering massive loss, but that’s supported by a subtly co-ordinated network of imagery, leading to a vivid, tense conclusion.

Walk in the Park takes a joke and turns it into a poem, developing the thoughts, the detail, the imagery “as I go deeper into the darkness.”

Being Bathsheba, my choice for third place, has crept up on me. It wasn’t in my original top three, but I was increasingly impressed with its progressive variation in tone, and skilful movement between a range of images – from Rembrandt through consultation and personal fantasy to floral growth – all at the service of a poem which is powerfully personal.

I like Uplift, my choice for second place, because it’s a poem I could never write. (Poet judges aren’t always looking for their own reflection). As with Emily Dickinson the lines are short and much of the language is deceptively plain, but the way it moves is exquisite, and it has the ability to penetrate to the core of experience – “the part of me that’s bird.”

In first place I’ve chosen Ghost Talking. This could be by Thomas Hardy, except that it’s totally contemporary. That repeated “boy” mixes affection and reproof in a way that’s intriguing, and at first mystifying. The layering of the details of mourning is careful and convincing, almost pedestrian – what’s so special about sitting with a glass of whisky? – until that hammer blow of the last five words, which drives you back to read the whole thing again. One final taste of pleasure, to cap a month in which I’ve been lucky enough to gorge on a poetic feast.