Editorial

Abstract

Welcome to the Winter 2010 issue of English – whether you are encountering the journal for the first time or returning as a long-established reader. In this final issue of the year, the focus is on poetry, which features in its own right and as the subject of articles discussing poetic texts in a variety of forms across a wide chronological range. We begin with some of the most recent examples of British poetic writing: the winning poems from the 2010 English Association Fellows’ Poetry Prize. As Gregory Woods, one of the judges of this year's competition, observes in the course of his fascinating and outspoken introductory remarks about the entries and the process of adjudicating them, the best poems ‘robustly gave the lie to pessimistic arguments that poetry has nothing left to do in a culture of online prose and reality TV’. The most ‘brilliant achievement’ of the competition, as Woods points out, was that the first and second prizes went to the same poet, Lynne Wycherley, for ‘Shape-Shifter’ and ‘Night on the Moor’. These two remarkable poems are included in this issue, along with the winner of the third prize, Gill McEvoy's ‘Solving the Mystery of the Club-winged Manakin's Song’. These powerfully enquiring lyrics, each in its own way celebrating an encounter with the mystery of the natural world, are eloquent testimony to Woods's assertion that there are ‘huge numbers of good poets’ at work in contemporary Britain, ‘still alive and kicking’. As he goes on to comment: ‘If anything is dead, it is not our poets or poetry, but reviewing procedures and the knock-on effects of the wider culture's obsession with celebrities at the expense of true variety and quality’. If you have an opinion to share on this or any other aspect of the cultural debate engendered by the contents of this issue of English, please feel free to contact us at englishjournal@bangor.ac.uk.