Sussex student's poetry prize

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Sarah Wardle, a DPhil student in HUMS, has won the 1999 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize - Poetry Review's award for new poet of the year. She received the prize and gave a reading at the Poetry Cafe in London on Wednesday (17 November). The annual prize was instigated in 1997 in honour of the WWI poet and the Poetry Society's oldest member, Geoffrey Dearmer.

Sarah submitted 15 poems for the competition. Sheenagh Pugh, who was this year's judge, said: ' The control of form was impressive, as was the humour and lack of self-obsession ... more important still is the fact that the language lives, it's sparky and feisty; it always runs rather than plodding and now and then ... it flies.'

Sarah gained a first in English at Sussex, after which she took an MA, and has recently started her doctorate on form and tradition in contemporary poetry. In the future she plans to combine teaching with writing.

Arcadia is one of Sarah's winning poems, which was also published in the Times Literary Supplement this summer.

Arcadia

As if a country kitchen were where we sat
and you wore a smock, and I an apron,
as I rocked a newborn asleep in his cot,
while through the door came laughter from
our other children,

and this table, instead of papers and books,
held a jug of ale and a weekly wage,
while the scent of baked ham spread as it cooked,
and with one hand I stirred in onion and sage,

I caught you lift your straggling thoughts over a fence,
your face framed offguard, gazing fields away,
as you herded your words into a sentence,
your eyes brown and deep as the soil's clay.

Sarah Wardle