Winners 2025

Vilma Bharatan had a scientific education and is a classically trained artist, who for the past three decades has been working with people to improve their health through food choices and homeopathy.

Liz Kendall studied literature and worked in an art gallery and an independent bookshop while establishing her career in Shiatsu, massage, and Tai Chi Qigong. She is a published poet with work in several anthologies and journals.

Appreciating how their different academic backgrounds complement each other led them to work together to explore their shared interest in food and the natural world.

Meet Us and Eat Us is the essence, an elixir, of years of research and thought, and of long discussions over many meals together.

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For press and media:

Press release – click here. (For immediate release)

Dave Lewis – 07890 888585
John Evans – 07733 043451

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Judges Comments:

Taplash Meditations – Napier Marten

The publication of Taplash Meditations announces the arrival of an important new voice in contemporary British poetry. The book opens with a very insightful introduction by ex-journalist and author, Jamie Reid. It has three sections. The first, ‘Rusty Nail Dawn’ contains poems written in the USA, Vietnam, Ireland and England. The second, ‘Rage And Chocolate’ has poems written in Scotland, and the third, ‘Let Us Drink Hibiscus’, comprises poems written in Mexico.

Celebrated artist Johnny Bull provides a sequence of beautiful illustrations to accompany the poems.

It is a wonderful collection. Napier Marten has the potential to be counted among other poets in these isles who have redefined what poetry can be. Blake, Shelley, Yeats, Hopkins and Thomas remain at the core, joined by the modernists like Bunting, Gascoyne, Graham, Moore and postmodernists such as MacSweeney, Torrance, and Prynne.

That much overused term ‘sense of place’ doesn’t begin to capture Napier Marten’s relationship with the landscapes he inhabits. His connection to them is intense, visceral, and charged with feeling. These are not merely physical settings but landscapes of the soul—places that evoke a spiritual, even religious, response, as the writer and the land become one.

His inner journeys are as important as the outer ones. In his opening poem ‘A Cabin In Connecticut’, Marten sets out his stall:

In this house is strong Medicine,
Clapperboard and creaking,
Tree girt oasis, small, in sky blue,
Crow guarded, buzzard-eyed and chipmunk.

The imagery is stunning. All the senses are engaged, and the lyrical power of his work is evident. Later in the same poem, he produces these two striking lines:

We are enriched, blessed and beautiful,
Softened beyond knowing.

They capture the essence of his vision in just a handful of words—few writers could achieve this.

In his poems ‘Dogs’ and ‘Whale’ Napier Marten shows his love and affection for all animals. ‘Dogs’ is so sensitively observed, honest and open. While ‘Whale’ is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing about an animal (I dislike the term ‘nature writing’) I have ever read.

Here it is in its entirety:

From epochs before memory
De profundis
Came a voice above voices  —

Whale.

She speaks soft words to Creation
Of Oneness binding
This Universe beyond bound.
She is unique in life without fear.
Speak too in soft words
That we may take heed.
When we do
All shall be well.

Powerful and majestic words for such powerful and majestic animals—yet again, so delicately and sensitively drawn.

What I also admire about Napier Marten’s work are those increasingly rare traits—sincerity and authenticity. He relates experiences that are real and deeply personal to him—not taken from books or second-hand accounts. It is in the detail.

Taplash Meditations also contains two poems about Curlews. Now, while I am also passionate about birds and have written about them extensively, I am particularly fond of Curlews. I grew up in the south Wales Valleys coalfields, and to escape, I headed to the mountains. Fortunately, on the mountain behind my house, a pair of Curlews nested every year. I was besotted by them and from spring to the end of summer, I would spend as much time as I could in their company.

So, in ‘Curlew II’ when Napier Marten writes:

Curlew I have found you…
My heart jumps to see your scape is here.
I know ‘exactly’ how he felt

Similarly, later in the poem, when he mentions the sadness he felt when the breeding season ended and the birds had flown away, I too shared that experience, down to the finer details:

While I…
All I see is the dent you made…

When Curlews build their ‘scrape’ (nest), the female will use her chest to press down the vegetation to create a shallow cup. When the birds left the area, I would still see the ‘dent’ on the ground where her body had been when incubating her eggs and fledging her chicks. Of course, the ‘dent’ also relates to the impact, the dent in someone’s life when something they love goes away.

Though most at home in the natural world, where his sensitivity to the living environment reaches its fullest expression, Napier Marten also engages deeply with the urban landscapes he encounters. He senses the alienation and pain of people who live among tower blocks instead of trees; in confined spaces where there once were fields; where there is no peace, and the little wildlife that remains feeds on the scraps from the takeaway cartons that litter the streets.

‘Winter’s Evening On The Streets’ opens with:

The Apple’s streets are paved with gum.
Salt, jutting slabs, grates:

A powerful image, which reminds me of the razor-sharp imagery of Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’.

Like a number of other contemporary poets, Marten also uses word clusters as a poetic device. He creates music out of words. Alliteration, assonance, and half-rhyme are added to the image for their visceral effect. The poem continues:

No prisoners taken.
In beaten slush speak tyres
Slicker-Slacker, Slicker Slacker
Sticky whisperings

Later, again in the same poem we get:

There’s plenty mink on Maddison,
B’ jewelled, gaudy where, below
Bright chocolate-filled window sits a dosser.

Notice the craftsmanship here, the deft touch. By removing the “of” between “plenty” and “mink” the author has almost transparently moved us to what Eliot described as “different voices”. We are now hearing the colloquial voice of a local—a person who describes someone down on their luck as a “dosser”.

He returns to his own voice in the next line and describes the person as:

Shaking, pleading, benighted, shaking.

This is a voice of empathy, and pity. In the natural world, sound is used for purposeful communication: warning, alarm, joy, happiness and it creates a certain harmony—sometimes there is also the peaceful silence of contentment. Further on in the poem, Marten contrasts this with the city—a place where there is no balance, only the sounds of lives in turmoil:

The undead of the Apple’s night
Hum and groan
To beats of living, moving, being.

Taken from my reverie,
Constant siren siren’s glissando:
Caterwauling firetrucks,
Trombone-accompanied
As cops whoop-whoop like mechanical gibbons
In forests of the urban jungle.
Ambulances blare ’em scare ’em
With urgent meter’s ticking even if the content isn’t.

He carries on highlighting the contrasts between the natural world and the urban in the same manner:

There are multitudes of missions made for each day,
Here live falsehoods that each action is history in making.
Food, food, cafe, food, nails, laundry, coffee, baubles,
Nails, booze, baubles, food, booze, drugs,
Block by block unchanging vanity.
Buildings for trees, snow blunting, bludgeoning edges,
Branchless, leafless, ever rising,
Hotchpotch hive existence,
Termites gouging out a tiny living, ants a’ rush
In elevator, cab, subway:
a nature of its kind

In the city life and endeavour is “Hotchpotch”, feeding only appetite and accumulation. In nature, such tireless activity ensures survival and renewal.

Marten is a disruptor. A poem may use logical frameworks but then they are disrupted.  Like Prynne, he intentionally uses fragmented sentence structure and other devices to find a place, a balance point, where conventional meaning is invited but not fully realised.

This ‘space’ allows for a new kind of interpretation, engaging the reader’s imagination and challenging conventional ways of thinking about language and reality

There is also a greater lyrical awareness. The words and their sounds, their musicality and cadence, take on more importance—often suggesting meaning beyond their literal interpretation.

Below is an extract from, ‘Pluscarden To Lethan’:

Made for passing moments of reflection,
A pull-in
Where collide Man and Nature.
So convenient for microwave and wrapper,
Bottles, bones, and builder’s taplash
And while about it
Bags of ullage and atrophy
To see ten thousand years of drip drip hereto.

Napier Marten seeks harmony with the places he visits—sometimes finding turbulence and discord, other times discovering other people who, like him, are spiritually connected to the natural world they inhabit.

His poem ‘Masakatewarri’ is an incantation, a spell—the very sounds of the words have mystical properties. They invoke thoughts beyond reason, feelings beyond belief. It embraces the ancestral poems, songs and chants of indigenous peoples around the world who regard nature as a living, spiritual entity, which is part of a larger consciousness. They are intimately tied to the land, and their ceremonies are a source of spiritual well-being.

Below is the first section of the poem:

What of Aire
The transparent one,
Showing yourself in rippling waters,
Quivering leaves, bending boughs?

You lift wings of
Soaring birds, butterflies, bees and beetles.

Oceans rage and spin, frothing at your touch
In cleansing destruction.
Leaves run down your hiding river flow
For you are Light Water,
Seed carrier.

Take prayers and orisons,
Our service and offerings
To ears of Ancestors that they
Hear our pleas.

Taplash Meditations is filled with illustrations by the artist Johnny Bull. The images are sublime. He achieves the near-impossible—creating art that not only mirrors the themes and moods of the poems but stands as art of the highest order. Magical, mystical, captivating, and enchanting.

The precision, the symmetry in the lines of the ripples, rocks, trees, flowers, fields, furrows, mountains, skies, and clouds are perfection. The birds have not a feather missing. The colour tinting is exquisite. Everything fits together and harmonises. The illustration of the Egret is otherworldly. The Curlew illustrations are of course, my favourite, and remind me of Gould’s best work – the colabs he did with Richter and Wolf.

This is a world without scar or blemish. The beauty of creation before the fall; before humankind came along and ruined it all.

It seems apt that Johnny Bull chose to set his New York illustrations in what looks to be the 1920s–1930s—a period when it was at its most stylish. Big buildings, big cars, big hats and big coats.

Bull’s illustrations also adorn the front and back covers.

Everything that appears in this book has first been given a lot of careful thought: the design, the appearance, the choice of font and type of paper used. Even which company could be trusted to produce a book of this calibre—and Wales’ own, ‘Gomer Press’ should be congratulated for their contribution.

I love nature, and sometimes it loves me back. Napier Marten loves nature, and sometimes it loves him back.

This book of poems and illustrations is that love made manifest, and shared with us.

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Wheels Within Wheels – Jane Fuller

The author Jane Fuller has written an excellent introduction to her book. It mirrors the contents—vivid, concise, precise, not a word is wasted.

“Bikes. Like us, come in many shapes and sizes. Like us, they have quirks and vulnerabilities which may explain why we don’t ride around on Penny Farthings anymore, or why bike shops offer so many products claiming to smooth out bumpy rides.

If you visit Agnew Park in Stranraer on a Wednesday afternoon, you’ll see me riding my son around on a platform wheelchair bike provided by Wigtownshire Stuff Adapted Bike Project.

Cycling is synonymous with freedom, but for us it mirrors life’s constraints as we ride around the park, lap after lap. But there’s a hypnotic aspect to circling, a kind of meditative flow, and doing the same thing, at the same time, in the same place, makes you see it.

The loch, the town, the park, the people, the feeling of circling around life as if you’re getting nowhere but everywhere, all at the same time; this made the poems.”

Jane Fuller’s clever repetitions of key words and phrases are so deftly handled that the reader becomes drawn into the “circling”…the “meditative flow”…of “doing the same thing, at the same time, in the same place”. It is an immersive experience.

There are no titles for each poem, we are told that they occurred “Wednesday Afternoons, Agnew Park” and each is given a number. Below is an extract from ‘1’

Round and round, round and round,
making our own luck without the sun’s approval,
giggling so hard even swans gawp.

In the following two stanzas, Fuller begins to show us the power of her imagery:

We’re the blades of a wind turbine,
the sweep of an imperfect enso,
spiralling counterclockwise into ammonite
labyrinths.

Grass ripples in Mexican waves as we pass,
the earth’s own smell sweetens the air.
Brown birds chant, Nowhere but here.

There is a music in the words. The imagery is so tight, it is Haiku-like, and could have been written by one of the early twentieth-century ‘Imagist’ poets.

If I had to compare the writing style to others,  I’d say it reads like something Dylan Thomas might have written for Under Milk Wood ‘if’ he had decided to write the book in collaboration with William Carlos Williams. The richness of lyrical language, coupled with beautifully sculpted images. Perfect.

This intoxicating style and rhythm repeats on every page—28 poems, for 28 Wednesdays. But there is nothing tired and repetitive about the writing. Turn the page and each new poem bursts onto the page with a new energy—while the hypnotic circling continues. A life cycle. A cycle of life.

‘2’ opens with:

It’s a big sky day on the loch,
blues drip-drop, metallic onto our frame.

While in the last three stanzas, we have:

Round and round, round and round,
giggling so hard even rooks gawp.

You’re a great seated chieftain
think-barking orders to the trembling poplars
through a dry chirping chain.

I lean forward to tickle your skin,
our laughter rises to meet the larks

All the senses are fully engaged on these journeys. The joy, the fun, the laughter is infectious.

Jane Fuller’s Wheels Within Wheels is a highly original and powerful collection—grounded in lived experience, full of beautiful imagery and honest detail. The weekly journeys on her bike adapted to carry her son in his wheelchair are a joy to read.

Only a very special person could have lived and written about the experiences captured in this wonderful gem of a book, and Jane Fuller is that person. Thank you for sharing this with us all.

The book has a narrative heart and a visual rhythm that feels cinematic. I would also strongly encourage Jane to explore adaptation possibilities—with the poet as voice-over, real-life characters from those journeys, this book could become a compelling short film. Poetry seldom bridges to visual media so naturally. I would also encourage her to contact BBC Radio 4’s The Verb. This wonderful story and her poetry deserve national exposure and recognition. If you need further help or advice on the above, please feel free to contact me directly.

I would also like to praise the illustrator, Kirsty MacDonald. The front cover is perfect. Like the poems, it made me smile and brought me joy— it also demonstrates that a book of very high quality can be produced on a modest budget.

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Meet Us and Eat Us – Vilma Bharatan and Liz Kendall

Within the very narrow confines of its brief, Meet Us and Eat Us achieves something genuinely impressive. Vilma Bharatan and Liz Kendall set out to fuse poetry, prose and fine-art photography in celebration of the world’s food plants, and the result is both educational and entertaining. The design and production are exceptional—a stunning, high-budget volume that invites readers to look and learn as they read.

The book could well be many readers’ first introduction to modern poetry, demonstrating how verse can be used in new ways to inform and captivate. That ability to reach beyond the usual poetry audience is one of its strengths.

What is perhaps most remarkable is how consistently the authors manage to balance instruction and imagination. The writing never feels mechanical; the poems retain warmth, humour and personality. The marriage of text and image creates a rhythm of its own—at times lyrical, at times playful—reminding us that poetry can speak through many forms.

Below is an example:

‘Parana pine – Araucaria angustifolia’

This popular pine has an uncertain future.
Affection and appetite are rivals in life.
One keeps me growing, cares for my homeland;
The other takes greedily, leaves tomorrow to chance.

In one hundred years I’ve lost most of my trees.
The forests I filled are now thinning too fast.
And what of the mammals and birds who rely
On my seeds in the winter, to keep them alive?

So give me some time and some space to recover,
Leave me to birds and to beasts for a while.
I can meet some demands but I balk at destruction.
Please solve this puzzle before too much time passes.

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The Children’s Poetry Award

In this, our first year, the award goes to Catherine Poarch, for her book, ‘Inside Elephant‘. She also receives a prize of £100.

To read more – click here.

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– John Evans, October 2025

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