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'The Nightmare' runner-up in the Poetry Society's Geoffrey Dearmer Prize



"There were well over sixty poems eligible for the 2012 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, all from strong emerging voices curated by a variety of different editors, which has made for an especially rich field from which to have to pick particular flowers. Of the many poems I read and returned to again and again, five left enduring imprints no matter how often I re-read them - imaginatively, musically, in terms of the authority and associative power with which they explored the worlds they dramatised. They were Nicholas Laughlin's complex and thought-provoking 'Reading History', Candy Neubert's delicately building, quietly explosive 'ways to leave', Richard Scott's sensuous, highly charged 'Maz', Ben Wilkinson's 'The Nightmare' with its compelling fusion of the visionary and the real, and finally Kayo Chingonyi's winning poems from 'calling a spade a spade'."

- from Jane Draycott's judge's report.


The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize is awarded anually to the best Poetry Review poem written by a poet who doesn't yet have a full collection. It is funded through the generosity of the Dearmer family in honour of the poet Geoffrey Dearmer, who was a Poetry Society member.