The judges of the 2004 Christopher Tower Poetry Competition were Frank Ormsby, Jon Stallworthy, and Peter McDonald. Read on to find out more about these poets and to see examples of their work.

Frank Ormsby

Frank Ormsby was born in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh. His three collections of poems, including The Ghost Train (1995), are all published by Gallery Press. He has also edited The Collected Poems of John Hewitt and numerous anthologies, including A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Troubles, and, most recently, The Hip Flask: Short Poems from Ireland. He was an editor of The Honest Ulsterman magazine for twenty years, and in 2002 he received the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for poetry. He has been Head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution since 1975.

THE BUILDER

Even at fifty you were in demand,
three hayfields of your handiwork on show
each summer where your father’s farm sloped
to the main road. So often we watched you step

into that rough circle. Your arms swept
round the prongs of dangerous pitchforks.
You seemed to embrace entire meadows,
patting them like aprons about your knees.

As you rose on your own foundation, people waved
from bus windows. The more you spread and trod,
above head-height, above hedge-height, the further we
had to step back not to lose sight of you.

You never looked like falling. Braced at the top,
you fielded the two hay-ropes, threw them back
nonchalantly between your legs
and prepared to return to the earth.

No memory now to match this; you gather your skirts
and slide with a girlish flourish
down the rick face,
land like a gymnast among our outstretched arms.

Jon Stallworthy

Jon Stallworthy’s books include two critical studies of Yeats’s poetry, The Penguin Book of Love Poetry, The Oxford Book of War Poetry, editions of Wilfred Owen’s Complete Poems and Fragments and War Poems, and two biographies: Wilfred Owen (which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W H Smith Literary Award, and the E M Forster Award) and Louis MacNeice (which won the Southern Arts Literary Prize). Most recently, he has published Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems and Singing School, ‘the autobiography we would like all poets to write’ (Oxford Today). Having been a Professor of English Literature at Cornell and Oxford, he is now a Senior Research Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

THE ALMOND TREE
Jonathan: 1965

I

All the way to the hospital
The lights were green as peppermints.
Trees of black iron broke into leaf
ahead of me, as if
I were the lucky prince
in an enchanted wood
summoning summer with my whistle,
banishing winter with a nod.

Swung by the road from bend to bend,
I was aware that blood was running
down through the delta of my wrist
and under arches
of bright bone. Centuries,
continents it had crossed;
from an undisclosed beginning
spiralling to an unmapped end.

II

Crossing (at sixty) Magdalen Bridge
Let it be a son, a son, said
the man in the driving mirror,
Let it be a son. The tower
held up its hand: the college
bells shook their blessings on his head.

III

I parked in an almond’s
shadow blossom, for the tree
was waving, waving at me
upstairs with a child’s hands.

IV

Up
the spinal stair
and at the top
along
a bone-white corridor
the blood tide swung
me swung me to a room
whose walls shuddered
with the shuddering womb.
Under the sheet
wave after wave, wave
after wave beat
on the bone coast,
bringing ashore – whom?
New-
minted, my bright farthing!
Coined by our love, stamped
With our images, how you
Enrich us! Both
you make one. Welcome
to your white sheet,
my best poem.

V

At seven-thirty
the visitors’ bell
scissored the calm
of the corridors.
The doctor walked with
to the slicing doors.
His hand is upon my arm,
his voice – I have to tell
you – set another bell
beating in my head:
your son is a Mongol
the doctor said.

VI

How easily the word went in –
clean as a bullet
leaving no mark on the skin,
stopping the heart within it.

This was my first death.
The ‘I ‘ ascending on a slow
Last thermal breath
studied the man below

as a pilot treading air might
the buckled shell of his plane –
boot, glove and helmet
feeling no pain

from the snapped wires’ radiant ends.
Looking down from a thousand feet
I held four walls in the lens
of an eye; wall, window, the street

a torrent of windscreens, my own
car under its almond tree,
and the almond waving me down.
I wrestled against gravity,

but light was melting and the gulf
cracked open. Unfamiliar
the body of my late self
I carried to the car.

VII

The hospital – its heavy freight
lashed down ship-shape ward over ward –
steamed into night with some on board
soon to be lost if the desperate

charts were known. Others would come
altered to land or find the land
altered. At their voyage’s end
some would be added to, some

diminished. In a numbered cot
my son sailed from me; never to come
ashore into my kingdom
speaking my language. Better not

look that way. The almond tree
was beautiful in labour. Blood-
dark, quickening, bud after bud
split, flower after flower shook free.

On the darkening wind a pale
face floated. Out of reach. Only when
the buds, all the buds were broken
would the tree be in full sail.

In labour the tree was becoming
itself. I, too, rooted in earth
and ringed by darkness, from the death
of myself saw myself blossoming,

wrenched from the caul of my thirty
years’ growing, fathered by my son,
unkindly in a kind season
by love shattered and set free.

Peter McDonald