Dawn Gorman believes poetry should be everywhere - puts it on beermats, uses it to
work with people with memory loss, facilitates writing workshops, organises poetry
events and runs international poetry competitions. She is widely published, and has
performed in New York, Paris, London - and lots of smaller places in between.

“Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket;
you put your life into it and make something out of that.” Mary Oliver

Bradford on Avon Fringe Festival Poetry Competition 2011

First

Peter Wyton,

Silverback Snack

Second

Stephen Payne,

O.S.

Third

Graham Burchell,

Drifting

Shortlisted Entry

Bev Hewlett,

Belongings

Claire Coleman,

Recipe

BA15 Postcode Area Special Award

Bob Steel,

The Mirror

Silverback Snack

by Peter Wyton

At this contemplative hour of evening
there is something of the artist's model about him,
a portrait painter's dream of cooperativeness,
form and features utterly immobile,
upright on his freshly prepared sleeping place,
enveloped in bent branches and foliage.
It has been an exacting day, marathon
of unhurried knuckle-walking around the boundaries
of his domain, a peremptory lesson imposed
upon a presumptuous black-backed adolescent,
a discreet visit paid to an accommodating female,
the customary seven course vegetarian banquet
laid on by the fruit tree franchise consumed.
Now is the opportunity for cerebration,
when his feathered friends have assured him
there is not a predator within a ten mile radius,
and his family fully understand that he must be given,
for their better welfare, a particularly wide berth.
Ruminations of some depth must be mulled over,
matters of leadership accorded close cogitation.
He is not to be disturbed while the light holds.
Only once, in this pongoid think-tank-cum-happy-hour,
does he move a muscle, when an injudicious grub
seeks sanctuary in a cadaverous nostril.
His finger and thumb extract the intruder, his grave eyes
scrutinise the fat morsel. Three thousand miles to the north,
no gourmet in Europe's culinary jungle places an olive
more delicately onto his tongue, nor smacks his lips
at the aftertaste with greater satisfaction.

Judge's Comments - Dawn Gorman

This poem, unusual in its close-up, David Attenborough-esque observations of a day-in-the-life of one particular gorilla, was a winner for me not because it is a very fine, unsentimental painting in words - though it certainly is - but because, in spite of the way the poet plays with our longings to see the animal in terms of our own lives (the "seven course vegetarian banquet laid on by the fruit tree franchise", "think-tank-cum-happy-hour") our anthropomorphism is thrown cleanly and adeptly back at us in our squeamish reaction to the gorilla's lip-smacking at the grub he finds up his nose, and eats... Bravo.