I mentioned in my last post that I won second and third place in the Oxford Brookes Wellbeing Poetry contest and then completely forgot to follow up with some photos.
The reading was fantastic. I was in really good poetic company that night and the small audience was very receptive to all of us. I had a great time reading in front of people for the first time in a few years and my legs only shook a teeny-tiny bit.
Here's what the judges had to say about my poems, which you can read here:
Amy Ellis achieved the remarkable feat of being placed both third and second, and with poems which are radically different from one another in subject matter and tone. Her third-placed poem, ‘The Secret Keeper’ was an intense, shocking piece which the judges admired for its uncompromising approach but also for its craft - the deft use of rhyme and half-rhyme to insinuate and then stun the reader with the full force of the violence being described. The poem is constructed with considerable skill, the beginnings and ends of lines designed to complement the vivid and dynamic imagery.
Amy’s second-placed poem, ‘Stirring’, by contrast, depicts the warmth of a relationship between - what seems to be - a grandmother and granddaughter. It reflects with great tenderness upon a private moment as the speaker looks into the kitchen to see an elderly woman carrying out the everyday action of cooking. She does so selflessly, almost defiantly, making something to please the granddaughter, but in that unguarded moment, revealing her own fragility and age, offering the reader a tension between the grandmother’s repetitive action, and the knowledge of her mortality.
And as promised, a few photos of me in a probably too-short dress reading my poems:
