The moon rising ‘nicotine-stained and peaceable / into the fingers of the silver trees’, arid land freshly rained on ‘like a dark sticky biscuit’, and a cow’s head like a ‘rounded anvil’: these are images plucked from the winning and highly commended poems of Mark Tredinnick, Barry Hill and Andrew Slattery, respectively, from last year’s Newcastle Poetry Prize. Notice the bucolic theme – these top three poems are all, loosely speaking, narrative poems in pastoral settings. This is partly why this printed anthology of the prize’s shortlist has borrowed its name from the title of Tredinnick’s award-winning poem.
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