After a successful launch last winter, we’re now upon the second annual initiative to award the best poem published on The Milk House published during the year. Last year’s award helped bring attention to ten excellent poems and their poets, with Jonathan Humble’s “Masterclass” selected by Nicki Griffin for the Judge’s Choice, and “Sundays” by Ger Duffy winning the Reader’s Choice award by popular vote. You can listen to last year’s shortlisted poems here.
All poems published on The Milk House in 2023 were eligible. This year’s contest was judged by decorated Irish poet Patrick Deeley. He read the poems blind and took on the difficult task of shortlisting 10 poems. What follows are videos of each selection.
On December 28th, 2023 we’ll announce the Judge’s Choice for Best Poem 2023, as well as the Readers’ Choice award. Each winner will receive a 50€ gift certificate to Kennys Bookshop, an independent bookshop in Ireland.
The Readers Choice award will be determined by your votes. You can watch each video individually below, or enjoy them all at once with this Youtube playlist. Make your selection at the end of this page (you can vote once every 24 hours). Voting is open until December 27th, 2023 11:59pm GMT.
It would be appreciated if you would subscribe to The Milk House’s Youtube channel. It is a quick and simple act of support that allows us to give more exposure to our writers. You can also subscribe by clicking the logo in the top left corner of each video.
Thank you for taking the time to listen to these ten poems.
About the Judge
Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist and children’s writer. He grew up in a Callows or wetland meadow farmed by his mother in the east of County Galway, Ireland. He worked as a teacher and later as administrative principal of a primary school in Dublin. His poems have been published widely and he is the recipient of a number of awards, including The Dermot Healy International Poetry Prize, The Eilis Dillon Book of the Year Award for Children’s Literature, and the 2019 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award. His bestselling memoir, The Hurley Maker’s Son, was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Award in 2016. Keepsake, his eighth collection of poems with Dedalus Press, will appear in Spring 2024, with a collection of surreal verse entitled Beyond the White Deckchairs due from SurVision Books also in 2024. His pieces can be found here and here.
Best Poem 2023: The Shortlist
Patrick Deeley’s Comments on the Shortlisted Poems
When we read a poem possessed of the special elusive quality where words reach to a full three-dimensional completion or impression of startling achievement, we grow enriched. So many poems here bestow a sense of being fully in the ambit and experience of the poet. I was struck by the felicity with which these poems travel – in theme, in locale, in feeling, and indeed backwards and forwards through time. We are shown in multiple ways that though the land may be permanent, our ways of working it and of ‘existing’ with it are subject to change. I found in this Milk House selection finely crafted poems on a diverse range of subjects, and I relished all of them. Poems to do with women and men in their everyday lives, of significant events or experiences of childhood discerned through the lens of older age, of wild medicines and mild meditations on life and love, of machines old and modern, of farm accidents and tender elegies, of nature in its bounty and its stint.
(You can find Patrick’s individual comments on poems below each video.)
Granny Medicine by Kari Gunter-Seymour
Great word choice runs the length and depth of this poem, evoking the wise woman’s character as much as the landscape where she forages.
This Work is Done by Jonathan Humble
Pungent or even pugnacious in tone, the framing device of questions to do with various mythologies brings us into and through the poem in a fresh and appealing way.
My Mother Hoped for the Best by Margaret Galvin
A strong poem replete with images of ‘saving up’ as a kind of longing, of ‘epic commitment to thrift’ and of unmet expectations. Superb closing lines convey the disparity between the dream and the lived reality.
Tell it to Trees by Dr. Charles A. Stone
At once both mesmeric and meditative, this delightfully resonant poem has the additional strength of being a true original in what I might call its exposition not so much of sounds or hearings – though these are present too – but of listenings.
On My Love of Country Life by Sydney Lea
This poem manages at once to be both sharply urban and intensely pastoral. It gripped me from its opening line – “He ruminated, cigar in crippled jaw” – and carried me through the many registers and ‘ruminations’ of its altering landscape until the wonderfully uncanny ‘release’ at the end – of cattle and sheep feeding “as if narcotized, their mild jaws rolling”.
Around Troupsburg by Daril Bentley
An impressively crafted poem, tender and atmospheric, with strong, unsentimental imagery throughout.
House on Smith Road by Laura Grace Weldon
Wonderfully observed story of endurance and dilapidation, revelation made palpable through language that is unhurried, accurate.
Winnowing the Fields by Daril Bentley
This poem takes a very effective ‘turn’, from gentle and pastoral images to the ‘merciless flails’ of war, maintaining its lyricism and its beguiling rhythm from start to finish.
Child of the Large-Beaked Bird by Kari Gunter-Seymour
A poem which builds from seeming near playfulness at the outset to something of quiet and significant power.
Dead Farms in Northern New England
A very powerful poem, truly memorable, unblinking and relentless in its scrutiny – which is testament not just to the skill of the poet but to the sincerity with which justice is done to the stark and unsettling theme.
Vote for the Readers’ Choice
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