Viva Brighton Issue #81 November 2019

BITS AND BOOKS
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HOME
CREATIVE FUTURE WRITERS’ AWARD
The Creative Future Writers’
Anthology is fast becoming a
fixture of literary life in Brighton.
The anthology collects the
winning entries from the Writers’
Award Competition, which invites
submissions from those who lack
opportunities due to mental health
issues, disability, health or social
circumstance. The awards come
under six headings – Platinum
through Bronze to Commended
– and comprise packages with mentorships,
retreats, Faber Academy and Poetry
School courses, and various books. There’s also a
swanky launch in London, and a chance to meet
judges and fellow winners.
Matt Freidson, Deputy Director of Creative
Future, outlines this year’s theme: ‘For 2019 we
asked: what does ‘home’ mean?’ Out of over
a thousand entries the winning pieces in their
various categories are evenly divided between
poetry and prose pieces, with a section of work
from this year’s judges at the back of the book.
The standard is high. Gary Evans’ Hefted is
about a farmworker trying to get a ewe that’s
lost her new-born lamb to accept another ewe’s
lamb: ‘A rejected lamb’s only got a couple of
hours.’ The language hurtles along: ‘Moka
pot gurgles. Coffee’s done. Fetch Bunk and
McNulty from the barn.’ The race against time,
the brutality of the farm, are brilliantly done.
Iqbal Hussain’s piece opens: ‘I was fourteen
years old when my parents sold me into slavery.’
This is the plight of the narrator’s mother, and
what follows is a classic portrait of an immigrant
family, held together by a matriarch who resents
her early marriage, but not her
family: ‘But look what I have now.
I am the wealthiest woman in the
world.’ Susan Hunter Downer’s
piece also explores estrangement
in The Space Between Words: ‘I were
a woman once… I’m a rain cloud
now.’ The device of woman-into-cloud
allows Downer to convey
with poetry and grim humour
life in a ‘hostile environment’. I
was also impressed by Michelle
Perkins’ The Out, whose narrator’s
alienation is conveyed in a striking idiolect of
her own: ‘People all about and I an unseen.’
This unorthodox syntax is skillfully sustained
throughout the piece to moving effect.
The poets are equally powerful. Sallyanne Rock
uses the structure of a recipe to contrast domestic
abuse with the contentment of home cooking
in You Are Not Nigella Lawson: ‘Soften onions in
oil on a low flame.../Reflect on the last time you
felt scared.’ Natalia Theodoridou creates a little
road movie of migration whose title is a little
poem in itself: ‘After the Backdrop of Pale Men,
Under the Fake Rain, After We Left For Good.’
Sally Davis’s poem In my imaginary house, I’d have
imaginary parents is a series of striking images
that ends on the most beautiful image of all.
And Lauren Robinson offers a prayer every poet
will recognise: ‘Moon Be My Mother’.
But what order, you might be asking, do these
pieces come in? Which are the Platinum, Gold
Silver entries? Reader, you’ll have to buy the
book to find out.
John O’Donoghue
Home, Creative Future, £6 creativefuture.org.uk
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