Bristol Poetry Prize 2018 Results
1st Place: Dominic Fisher
Hardware Visitations (after Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California)
2nd Place: Tom Sastry Underground
3rd Place: Laura Potts Yesterday’s Child
Judge: Helen Ivory
Judge's Statement: It was a pleasure to judge The Bristol Poetry Prize. It is always a big responsibility to judge prizes – especially when you are sole judge. You are frightened that you will miss something so read everything very carefully, alert to the fact that there are so many ways to write a poem. With some, it’s clear from the beginning how the poem is going to end and that the writer knew pretty much what they were going to say when they sat down to write. These poems, I tend to put aside after first reading. With others, there is the excitement of not knowing where the poem is going, and sometimes the added bonus of not knowing how the poem got to where it ended up. There is a kind of poetic sleight-of-hand at work – poet as magician - which made me put these types of poem in my ‘read again’. pile.