Horse, Marble, Wax: The Mould and the Metaphor in this Month's POTM Selection
Presenting April's POEM's OF THE MONTH. The thread between all selected poems is breaking; a horse / from the status quo / the rules a heart /marble into statue. It takes OOMPH to break open, or from.
This article features the winning and shortlisted poems from Aprils’s Poem of the Month.
THE WINNING POEM
Tina Will Choose You a Horse
Vanessa Lampert
Vanessa Lampert's Tina Will Choose You a Horse is the worthy winner of this month's Verve Poem of the Month. Lampert commits fully to the metaphor, and the metaphor commits fully back. Tina is the equestrian guide, the astrologer, the wise woman who knows what you need better than you do, and the poem canters with real oomph through her authority. Particular images dazzle and then deliberately withhold — "the way sunlight polishes its bottom" is pure desire, and the poem knows it, which is exactly why Tina says look away. We find ourselves in the year of the horse, under Tina's guidance, where the astro chart and the paddock are one and the same. The human at the centre of this poem hasn't had a good run. They cannot choose their own companion; they are dazzled by the wrong things, by long eyelashes and jaunty ears, by what glitters rather than what fits. There is breaking here too — the breaking of the wrong horse, and the more tender breaking open of Tina's witnessing of loneliness. Trot along behind her. Reader, you will.
THE SHORTLIST
Galatea- Jane Burn
Isle of Tiles - Charlotte McDermott
Nadine showed me a picture - Angela Cleland
handsaw heart - Priyanka Sutaria
resistance - S Reeson
The Verve Poem of the Month Shortlist
What binds this shortlist together is the act of moulding, the shaping, breaking, and reforming of the human. Jane Burn’s Galatea is itself a concrete poem, its form enacting its subject: a block of marble, a myth, almost ice-cream cold, chipped and sculpted from the very pillar of the page. Pygmalion’s hammer falls in the white space, and line breaks thanks to the poems own architecture. Here a woman is chipped from man’s gaze with stone, into a statue of desire — “he spread his palms across my flesh / fondled me smooth” — and the horror winces through the chip.
Charlotte McDermott’s Isle of Tiles breaks the rule entirely. Where Galatea is still and monumental, this piece gallops with couplets and rhythm you can hear in your ear as you read it. Read this one aloud (in fact, read all of them aloud; poetry is supposed to be heard). It captures the OOMPH of the theme for the month, and that innate in children: that B&Q roam, that contained galloping through aisles with no aim but joy. It makes me as a reader question when and how are we broken into adulthood, corralled into walking whats laid out for us, with one aim in mind?
Angela Cleland’s Nadine Showed Me a Picture answers that question with unflinching precision. This is a horror story, and this is a thing that happens. The child in the newspaper, features melted like wax, becomes a mirror the speaker cannot look away from — “I had a father / a father with paraffin”. We’ve moved from childhood joy in McDermott’s poem toward childhood trauma here. The human mould melts under broken behaviour, and what is extraordinary is how Cleland holds both fragility and strength in the same white space; the unspeakable sentence the speaker cannot say to her father sitting there, italic, alone on the page.
Priyanka Sutaria’s handsaw heart offers something different: not a breaking, but a becoming. The heron does break on the water, yes, but the heart splits open into a lotus flower, over and over through renewal. The heart here is patient, not broken. The heron doesn’t flutter; it beats and swoops like a majestic hum, and the poem holds that same unhurried quality.
S Reeson’s resistance breaks from the political status quo with sharp, controlled fury. Another bird appears, not a heron, but a parrot, squawking beliefs that aren’t its own, that so doesn’t fully understand. “it’s not the person more the concept,” the parrot sings, and the poem refuses to let that stand. This is a shortlist full of things that are done to people — carved, melted, corralled, set alight — and resistance is the poem that turns and says: they don’t get to own me.
Winning Poem
Vanessa Lampert
Tina Will Choose You a Horse
Because she knows how to choose a horse
Tina will choose a horse for you.
Regarding a hypothetical horse
Tina might say, this horse is a crib-biter
and a box-walker. This is not your horse.
When Tina says this is not your horse
you must trust her. When Tina walks away
from a horse you must walk away too.
You know nothing about horses.
When Tina says this horse is a Virgo
with a Taurus moon and mercury retrograde,
this is not your horse, look away
from its long eyelashes, jaunty ears
and the way sunlight polishes its bottom.
Channel Tina saying this is not your horse.
You must allow Tina to find you
something more scopey, a scopey horse,
an easy keeper, a horse more rideable
for the rider. When Tina says
this horse is an unhappy hacker, a weaver,
a tied up maintenance horse with windgall,
you must listen. Tina sees your loneliness.
Trot along behind her. Tina will choose you
a horse whether you want a horse or not.
Shortlisted Poems
Jane Burn
Charlotte McDermott
Isle of Tiles
I adored visiting B&Q with my parents,
running down bath-lined corridors
with shower-covered walls,
hiding in dollhouse displays, kitchen models,
taps for days, door handles and wood panels,
towels and flannels, screws and fixtures,
tools and mixtures, toilet seats
in every style, pivoting down the aisle of tiles,
square samples of ceramic cut and filed,
fired and dried, solid and see-through,
but no worker or guardian saw through me,
taking fistfuls of every colour,
jamming them into my child-pockets,
bulging and splitting at the seams,
clinging to a quadrilateral sea of glass dreams,
confessing after years of keeping,
holding onto them to this present day,
but the tiles were free anyway,
carrying my cornered guilt through
gardens of pillow and plant, blue pouch
brimming with childish treasure,
the secret was mine for so long I forgot
how to share, the pleasure of stealing tiles
too much to bear, too sickly, too sharp,
too much memory to let go of.
Angela Cleland
Priyanka Sutaria
handsaw heart
the heron in my chest lake is an elegant
bird-beast, its zigzag pulse squawking
in my zigzag neck. in the ticking wetland
still life, hear its spear bill sibilance.
observe the cryptic hunter’s pose, the wide -
winged spread of a medieval collar playing
shadow games against the water’s glaring.
in that sumptuous split second between lull
and strike, when the mind is one with the thrum
drum blubbering, before the heart is reborn
as a lotus flower, it is possible to see what is
approaching, or that which no longer exists.
S Reeson
Thank you for reading,
H x
NEWS.
We’ve got an online reading event of the winning poets from our POEM OF THE FESTIVAL competition on May 10th.
POTM OPENS AGAIN TOMORROW - MAY 1st!
OUR ONLINE poetry only bookshop is filled with the books we know you love and contains books from all our favourite publishers!
Books on How to Write Poetry, Exciting forthcoming books, Imported titles and of course our VERVE Poetry Press books!
Any profits from book sales from this site goes straight to support our many community projects and of course will help us bring back our festival in 2027. Have a browse - we know you’ll enjoy it!
Thank you for reading poets. We are so very grateful for your continued support. As a CIC, VERVE Poetry Festival relies on funding to keep our work open and accessible. Subscribing, if within reach, supports this.