Images from The Rialto event in the CCI (Cambridge Conservation Initiative) Attenborough Building on Monday July 7. A celebration of the 2024/2025 Nature and Place Poetry Competition: CCI are partners with us in this competition, as are the RSPB, Birdlife International and the University of Leeds. Our thanks to the fifty or so folks who filled the room and to the further fifty folks who attended online.
We first heard from our judge this year, Helen Mort, who introduced the winning poets and their poems – Victoria Spires, ‘Deer Sighting, Late July’, Wendelin Law, ‘Crossing Fields’, and Rosamund Taylor, ‘Beryl’. Helen then read for us. Her reading, apart from the first poem, set in Cambridge, was of a new long poem that she has been working on. I don’t remember being present at a more powerful or remarkable reading. The poem definitely deserves a wider audience.
The winning poems, and the judge’s report, will be published in The Rialto 103, which I’m currently building. Particular thanks to Matt Howard for organising and running the competition and to John Fanshawe and the CCI staff for organising and running the event and the technical back-up. Thanks also to Mark Wormald and Pembroke College for hosting Helen.
Michael
Left to right – Helen Mort (our judge), Victoria Spires, Rosamund Taylor, Wendelin Law and Michael Mackmin.
