West Cumbrian poet Martyn Halsall has won the annual Jack Clemo Memorial Prize – for the third time. The prize is worth £100 and comes with a specially commissioned sculpture that the winner keeps – rather like the FA Cup – for the next twelve months.

The prize was inaugurated and is administered by the Arts Centre Group in memory of the blind, deaf Cornish poet Jack Clemo (1916-1994). Clemo’s extraordinary life and insights made him one of the most interesting and intriguing of British poets. His work combined an uncompromising Christian mysticism with stark images of the Cornish China Clay area.

Jack Clemo was a member of Arts Centre Group for many years. When he died the decision was made to establish an annual poetry competition in his memory. A bequest from Clemo’s estate enabled the Group to commission the trophy sculpture from fellow member Iain Cotton, made from Cornish stone.

The Arts Centre Group is a non-denominational Christian organisation that exists “to support artists in every arts discipline to be fully Christian and fully professional” by “enabling and empowering members to grapple with issues of faith and spirituality. For the artist who regularly engages with moral issues and questions of integrity it provides a forum of safety from which to explore and debate.”

Martyn Halsall’s winning poem, The Haiku Masters, is about the tsunami disaster in Japan and imagines a woman making repeated visits from a rescue shelter to try to locate the site of her home.

It alternates quatrains, used to narrate the story, with haiku that she writes in response to what is happening to her – in a sense, the haiku ‘illustrate’ the narrative and the combination of forms is ambitious and innovative.

The Haiku Masters

Even the map had been washed away, even
the ground plan, all roads had become dredged memories after
the wave broke in, after the snow. Now
there was just the same chaos as before the world began.

           I followed footsteps
           of Basho and Chiyo-Ni,
           the haiku masters.

She had walked over the mountains to where
was once home. She had called out her mother’s name.
She had come to collect some things, that kimono, a rice bowl,
the photographs. She called out a neighbour’s name.

           Walk: five, seven, five
           syllables, like the white stork
           searching for the Spring.

She thought this might be the road. She called out
the name of the house, the same invocation as when
the priest came, and scattered rice and sake,
left the house blessed, and incense gentling in the evening.

           I waited till dusk
           gathered, like invisible
           ones, the house heard, once.

She turned, following the flashlight back
to the temporary shelter. She had left her mother’s name,
her neighbour’s name in the damp wind, on a page
torn from her notebook, wedged by a brick, on a beam.

           Nothing defined no
           things the house held fast. Nothing
           was all that was left.

She came again and again, wearing out
two pairs of shoes, to check the lists and pictures
that had replaced her newspaper, the lists and pictures
at the mortuary, to check the map, find her home.

           The day I found home
           a wind blew from the dark sea,
           calling out its name.

A bulldozer appeared, shifted aside beams,
stone, broken glass. With the rice bowl and puddle water
she worked all day rinsing through debris to discover,
for the times to come, the drowned book about the haiku masters:

           I let pages dry
           starch white in the April wind.
           I wrote new worlds there.

Read more poems by Martyn Halsall >>

A former Guardian journalist, Martyn Halsall works as a communications adviser for the Church of England and is poetry editor of The Third Way magazine.

Lancaster Litfest published a selection of his poetry in the Flax anthology Fingerprints and Other Traces (Flax 005), and have just published his Walk in Faith in Walking in Circles (Flax029).

This sequence is an audio tour of Lancaster’s religious life through landmark faith buildings and people, real or imaginary. It begins by imagining a medieval monk preparing to call his community to prayer and ends today, in a mosque, with Lancaster’s Islamic community and their times of prayer. In between we encounter victims of the witch trials and the controversial early days of Lancaster’s Quaker community.

Re-Visiting Namibia was recently published in our series The Weekly Poem, and more poems can be found in No.49 of the Poetry Kit’s Caught in the Net e-zine.

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