2010 Poetry Competition results

Thank you for all your entries into our recent poetry competition. As ever, we were very impressed with the wealth of talent out there! We thoroughly enjoyed reading your poems, which covered an incredibly wide variety of subject matter.

We chose a long short-list, then took that down to a short short-list....and then it got really difficult! Reading to ourselves, reading out loud, discussing, casting our votes and finally emerging with the top three winners standing out from the others, but all three were very close.

In first place is Woodbury Fair by Dawn Lawrence of Stalbridge, Dorset.

Second place goes to Writing by Linda Fawke of Winnersh, Berkshire and third place to The Uninvited Guest by Pamela Trudie Hodge of Plymouth, Devon.

The top prize includes having the poem interpreted into a piece of artwork by Ted Elms, an extremely accomplished artist and writer, who is a member of Poole Writers' Circle. Once this has been completed by Ted and presented to Dawn, then we will put a copy on this website so that you can all enjoy it.

We also commend these poems which got through to the final short-list:

Strange Divide, by Martyn Caira of Abergavenny

Water Reflections by Clive McLaren of Hoylake

Hope by Tania Yeatman of Sturminster Marshall

On a Sunday Afternoon by Paula Stevens of Lytchett Matravers

Many congratulations to you all.

We have decided that rather than create a small anthology this time, we are going to wait until after the next couple of competitions and then make up a much larger anthology with winners and short-listed entries from all the competitions. We may also put in some of our own work. Although we do not allow ourselves to enter our 'open' competitions, we do have internal competitions, often on the same topics, so this will give us an opportunity to feature our winning entries too. I hope you like this idea of longer anthologies published less often.

In the meantime, I am sure you are keen to read the current winners' poems so here they are.