Winners 2008 : Third Prize

Summer School 2010

The 7th Tower Poetry Summer School (24-27 August) for young poets aged 18-23 will be held in Christ Church Oxford.

Poetry Matters

Poetry Matters is an exciting on-line poetry magazine which provides a fresh, dynamic perspective on poetry issues through a mix of news, reviews and comment.

Nina Bahadur

St Paul’s Girls’ School, London

Heat

It starts off straight.
You are well-mannered, a fish of a boy,
Cool in redbricked streets baked between lines
Marking us in and out.
In a choked café with tiled walls and the curtains closed you tell me
I like shapes of your legs in the dirt
And running circles round you
And your god honest heartbeat and that’s enough for me.
In black and breathless nights
I take your wrist, and I kiss, and the stars
Are just pedestrians and the frantic sun
A bystander in the grand scheme of things that is us.
We blaze on through the dust
And burn in every bright afternoon.

When the storm breaks the land learns to drink
And for blurred August weeks we’re sewn in by the rain.
When it’s all hung out to dry
Words drip from my lips, unsaid, I’m drowning,
And glass sunken in old windows makes the world
Seem a little stranger.

All autumn steam rises:
Washed out by the downpour, I let you go.
But there’s a pale reminder cross-legged on your lawn,
Your flickering morning memory, like light on scales,
Of gasping for air, of skin on sheets.

About Tower Poetry

Tower Poetry exists to encourage and challenge everyone who reads or writes poetry. Funded by a generous bequest to Christ Church, Oxford, by the late Christopher Tower, the aims of Tower Poetry are clear: to stimulate an enjoyment and critical appreciation of poetry, particularly among young people in education, and to challenge people to write their own poetry. Creative writing should be a central element in literary education, and learning about writing poetry can help students to think about ways of reading poetry.

Publications

Change Promises:
The Christopher Tower Poetry Prize Winners 2010 (Digital Edition)

The winning poems from the 2010 prize are brought together in this exclusive digital-only edition.