Occurrence
BY THEOPHILUS KWEK
Oxford University, ’16
2016 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Runner-Up
6.35 p.m. on 23rd November, 2015: the victim was struck on the face with a metal rod by men in an unidentified car, on Oriel Square, breaking his glasses. No assailant could be traced.
Nothing much then, now nearly unseen –
a cut beneath the eye. A bruise, fading
to skin, frown and furrow, fine print. How
soon the body grieves, forgives how easily
it gives. Already these marks are marks
of other things. Sleepless lines that mar
an early frost. Fields turned for planting,
sandstone shorn against the river’s brink.
A fishhook’s incline, the doubling pitch
of flight like a whaler’s reckoning. In
the hollow of a bridge the water leaves
no scar, only trembling. A sound gone
as if from a whipped bowstring, between
where the arrow flies and, at each end,
thread spliced so as to pucker wood: the eyes.
Ventnor
BY THEOPHILUS KWEK
Oxford University, ’16
2016 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Runner-Up
Isle of Wight
i.
Here is the sea. Here are cliffs at the edge
of the sea, and on them houses in lines
like battlements. Here are churches designed
to hold at bay the sea’s smaller gods, yards
of stone and flowers, shops shuttered from storms.
Here are walls with warm doors, curtains, parks
that are all swings and stairs. Roads, wet thatch,
grit like frost on paths. Geese in a swarm.
ii.
The mist appears at four in the afternoon,
builds into fog, fills the cove’s raw room.
In the small of the island a knot of wind
wears the vanishing roofs like a glove,
mars brick to water as cloud sweeps inland
heavy with light, unseeable
except for ghosts in the sand, and the trees
whose shadows touch outside the locked buildings.
iii.
We pick our way along the steep outcrop
as old pavement falls away to the sea –
here is no place for disbelief. Far below
the tide is a thing of beauty, and the distance,
like the smell of salt, a salve. What is faith?
Through the blackthorn, grass
that despite all covers
the ridge. In its knees and ankles the path
holds grace sufficient for our small dangers.
Meridian
BY THEOPHILUS KWEK
Oxford University, ’16
2016 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Runner-Up
Royal Observatory, Greenwich
Thinking it inconceivable
for an untimely world to number
polar days, long monsoons
from this hill, this noon
I came one morning to find
Wren’s building, its dull line
a hammered fact on the fell
as if the continental shelves
were not, against permanence
locked in their slow dance
nor soft earth waltzing underfoot.
I found nothing more plain, or more odd
than all the clocks wound
to shifting stone, save for how
given these months, even vowels
had begun turning with the hours
as on one spoke, and in this zone
ticked double-time to my own,
showing a gift for complexity
or perhaps complicity
that made both spell and sentence
of words I knew to make sense in.
As if there were only so long
before time and tongue
tuned by love, newly here
loaned words to fill a borrowed year.
These poems are careful and taut, though they yield brilliant moments of winding syntactical power. Mooring man in the natural world, these poems look closely at language, time, belief. Big subjects, yes, but always grounded in wonderfully precise imagery. “Occurrence” examines invisible wounds after trauma, couching them in metaphor. “Already these marks are marks / of other things.” It is these other things—rendered through the fine imagination of the poet—one returns to, returns for. When witness fails, when what is visible fades, poetry can give language back to the body, to experience.
–Corey Van Landingham, 2016 Adroit Prize for Poetry Judge
