POETRY WINNERS
PLAY TIME POEMS
Alison Chisholm is delighted with the playfulness and skill in the entries for WM’s Childhood Games peotry competition
Alison Chisholm
Whatever the circumstances in which we are brought up, the one experience that seems common to all children is the joy in playing games. Games of all sorts were celebrated in the poems entered in the competition that gave everyone a chance to turn the clock back and return to the delights of childhood.
Everything from the formality of playing a boxed game sitting around the table to wild adventures through woodlands or bombsites was recorded, and hopefully poets took as much pleasure from recalling happy days as they did from constructing the poems that emerged.
Without a doubt, marbles topped the popularity stakes, and the ownership of special marbles was contested bitterly in a few of the entries. Adventure games, from the wild west to space travel, were recalled, as well as skipping, clapping, and throwand-catch in the schoolyard, football in the street, and all manner of imaginative scenarios were set in dens, tents and wendy houses.
The mix of nostalgia and shared memories produced fascinating poems. Every one had something to offer in the narrative, and nothing could be set aside on the grounds of uninteresting content.
Sadly, a lot of clever ideas foundered because of problems with the poems’ construction. Some pieces were aiming for a rhymed, metrical presentation, but dodgy metre and rhyme-led or inverted material weakened the effect. Others had problems with punctuation, where a number of entries were crafted into what could have been cohesive, grammatical sentences – except that they lacked punctuation. Others were full of unnecessary, randomly placed commas.