Winners of Haiku Competition Announced

Sylvie Cox, who is in her 2nd year studying for a BA in Communications and Modern Languages, is the winner of our E&CE Student Haiku Competition, with her haiku about a bager on campus. Congraulations Sylvie!

Silent campus sits

A badger crosses the way

Only my eyes saw

Forward prize-winning poet Will Harris said about the judging process: Haiku are doubly severed from their context. Not only have they travelled from one language into another, they’ve been taken out of the long, linked, communal poems they once formed a part of (admittedly, a long time ago). In the English language, they’ve made a new, distinct history. Haiku provide a way to subvert the expectations of English metred verse, to cut into it, drawing on the energy of the page’s blank space. All the shortlisted poems here do this. And the winning poems have a found a successful means to move away from linearity, from the speaking ‘I’ of narrative fiction, to evoke the desiccated jumbled time of ecological catastrophe. Each sound is dense as rock; nature is intimate, palpable as a burger and fries or a milkshake; syntax expresses thought and feeling commingled, layers ‘only my eyes saw’. A good haiku isn’t easy to digest. It stays in your system.

Second Place goes to: 

Michelle Fabienne Bieger - a PhD Student in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. 

Heatwave

roll over, unstick

sheets. A stubborn drop falls, brow

to bed. Missed alarm

Third Place goes to 

Jack David William Edwards - a third year studying single-honours English.

Tornado

A rock rides the wind,

Uncertain how it will land.

Eyes blue, turns skyward,

The shortlisted students are: 

Nell Hartney - a third year PhD student in the maths department, working in numerical weather prediction.

What will happen to

All our words, when the weather

They describe is gone?

Beth Maidment  

thick and wrong, just like 

milkshake through a paper straw-

this air suffocates.

Roberto Baccarini - a second year PhD student in European Politics.

A happy meal 

The Forest’s bane 

With burger and fries 

Nat Marshall -  a first year undergraduate studying BSc Geography.

Wrist scrapes and moss stains

Urban life seems doable

From atop a tree

Mercury Medhurst -  a 1st Year student studying English Literature, Creative Writing, and Latin Literature. 

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Emily Sara Rizzo - in her first year and studying English and Film & TV Studies.

Framing Disaster

Dye the pastures black;

An oil painting of doom,

Man-made masterpiece

Robin Wright - working towrds a Masters in Research in Biology.

I have never known,

Fire in water, floods in Rome,

I will never know.