COMMENTS FROM CONTEST JUDGE MARIE KANE:

A note to all finalists:

You are to be congratulated on your excellent entries to the 2011 Sarah Mook Poetry Contest. What trouble I had this year in deciding the winners! Because your work was advanced on all levels, my efforts took a longer time than usual to make the final decision.

Know that your poems were read with care and attention to detail. I enjoyed every one of them!

Sincerely,
Marie Kane

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The first place poem in this age group displays a controlled voice and energy of language that express the poem's dramatic conflict. The journey awaiting the reader is one of both negative and positive feelings described by innovative and creative images. By the end of the poem, the poet has transformed the distasteful aspects of life into the positive, adroitly using the same imagery to do so.

The opening eight lines of the poem discuss aspects of being "discouraged" using highly original phrases. When the speaker "feels discouraged" skin is "eaten up with doubt" and the body "feels / as if it would melt / on the ground." Even if the speaker has strength, it "will come rushing out / in a pool of lava." I am taken with these graphic and rather painful images of being discouraged. The diction is expressive and vivid, and lends a realistic tone of distress to the poem. Who has not felt this kind of discouragement?

The speaker continues the expansion of discouragement in the next five lines. Now the speaker focuses on jealously where

envy crawls though my bones
laughing at my unfortunate experience.
It brags
of how foolish I am.

Envy's control is personified by the excellent word choice of "crawls," "laughing," and "brags."

Next, the speaker continues the stark description of being discouraged, or now "depressed," and its devastating effect. The speaker "let[s] go of all the tender pressure . . . / and pour[s] it out, / not in a sweet piece of candy, / but a bitter tasting unripe orange." Here the poem's description moves to taste - a sense rarely explored by student poets. This vivid and realistic imagery enables the reader to imagine depression and discouragement as a sharply sour taste by eating a "bitter unripe orange."

The next five lines conclude the section of the poem's dire feelings. Here, the speaker states that:

When I have negativity,
the world is flipped upside down,
and backwards.
My face changes
and positive is canceled out by negative.

Not only is the world "flipped," but it is also "backwards"; this proficiently expresses the feeling of a depressed state.

In the last twelve lines of the poem, the speaker explains what happens when the peacefulness expressed earlier in the poem as "tender pressure," has its say:

But peacefulness
is like a rose
sprouts in the spring
and adding [sic] color to a blank garden.

One would expect a poet in this age group to be more simplistic in descripting a rose; however, this poet uses the vivid word "sprout" and notes that the rose adds "color to a blank garden." I especially appreciate the word "blank" instead of 'empty' or 'bare' to describe the garden; this energy of language through adjectives and verbs is appreciated.

In the last lines of the poem, the heartache above is now changed because of this peacefulness. "The world is re-flipped" (thus the title) and the "pool of lava is pushed back / the bitter orange turns into a sweet candy." Here the writer cleverly repeats the same images as above, explaining how they have been transformed into something positive. Note the expressive way the poet ends the poem:

Positivity is uncancelled,
and envy crawls back
into its dark hole,
all from peacefulness.

The writer's vivid language, pacing of the poem, use of sudden reversal, and careful development of the situation make this a first place poem indeed.

Thank you for the privilege of reading your work.

Marie Kane
Final judge, Sarah Mook Poetry Contest