NPD - An evening of word mastery and celebration

Celine, Evelyn, Dan, Jackie, Peter and Louis.

despite the awful weather we had lots of people turn out for the annual National Poetry Day Celebration where we award our competition winners and treat ourselves to some glorious poetry written by the creative imagination of our community of poets.

All of the poems entered can be found here on the website.

This year the theme set by the NPD founders, the Forward Arts Foundation, was 'PLAY', so we invited singer, song writer and guitarist, Chris Keats to play for us at the event as well as act as one of our judges. Our second judge was Oenone Thomas, last year's poet in residence for the Cuckmere Pilgrim Path. Both judges were impressed with the standard of entries and found coming to a conclusion over the final three difficult, but we got to the event with three winners in each category and a list of highly commended.

The over 18s winners started our evening of poetry with Peter, Jackie and Dan sharing their winning entries and demonstrating just how high the standard of entries were. Some beautiful lines 'Children are red dots on a school field, animated poppies blown by wind and play' from Peter set the high bar for the evening. Jackie's lines fell like silk on our ears with 'sing to twig and wing, your notes tight as blossom' and from Dan the energy of his words came through his reading, 'It’s an occupation, rehearsal, an education, a re-training'.

The under 18s winner Celine, was a little nervous to read but finally agreed to take her place on the stage whilst Pam read the poem on her behalf. Evelyn gave a stunning recital of the chaos of performance and Louis impressively overcame his stutter to read his acrostic poem loudly and clearly to a very appreciative audience.

Our commended poets were invited to read their entries in the second half and we ended our evening with Chris Keats encouraging our audience to sing along with his song on PLAY.

It was indeed a splendid evening.