Featured Poem

Winner of The Poetry Society's Stanza Poetry Competition 2018 on the theme of 'Tradition', judged by Penelope Shuttle. Penelope: The structure of this poem is strong as iron. A foreboding sense of constraint powers it forward, exemplified by the iron of the scold’s bridle. It speaks to us of the misogyny that has bullied and humiliated women into submission and silence for centuries, and implies throughout that this repression continues by other means today. This poem glances productively at the MeToo movement, without ever dipping into polemic. There is a nuanced pun in the very term ‘scold’s bridle’, ie: = ‘bridal’, which this poem also offers us. To silence a person is to censor them, to control them, to deny their identity. The poem holds all these implications in an iron grasp. There’s not a wasted word. The poem is direct, unambiguous, shocking. The writer also includes another telling pun in the opening line; the phrase ‘that mother’s tongue’ also contains within it ‘mother-tongue’ and refers us, perhaps, to marginal languages, and the life experiences held within them, now endangered by the bigger languages (English, Mandarin, Spanish). We learn to speak, by and large, from our mothering. Our mothers give us our mother tongue, the gift of language. This poem sprang living and bold from the page. It inhabits the remit of the theme, ‘tradition’, to its fullest richest extent. Richard: I have four daughters and as a man you’re very conscious of how women make their way in the world. I have a strong background in history and I’m very aware of how women are muzzled metaphorically as well as literally.