A djudicating Writing Magazine’s competition for narrative poetry meant engaging with a huge range of interpretations of just what constitutes a narrative poem. Essentially, poems that had a story to tell were the serious contenders. The many entries that glanced at a situation but didn’t take it along a story route were less successful on this occasion.
The stories were of families in crises of varying types, from a missed bus to a bereavement. They were also of ghosts, fairies and mermaids, of historical facts and mythological re-tellings. By far the most popular theme was pirates, and there was a fair amount of swashbuckling leaping from the pages. The best stories in poetry left the reader tingling and provoked the same feeling you get when you are approaching the end of a good novel – you can’t wait for the denouement, but you don’t want the pleasure of reading to end.