Foyle Young Poets 2024
I’ve been working with The Poetry Society since 2010 on their annual Foyle Young Poets Competition. It’s always a very welcome job in early January to design the anthology cover for the previous year’s winners and the poster for the launch of the competition in March, when applications open online and posters are sent out to secondary schools up and down the country. The design for the poster always follows on from the anthology, the design of which is inspired by the title - a line taken from the previous year’s winning poems. ‘The Roots Belong To You’ being this years title was taken from Nabhia Ali’s commended poem;
tuesday 10:30 pm (in the parking lot beside the field)
i
cut purple fingers dusty white perennials the smell of hay and flesh blood ribboned fingernails strain of wind and sea tuesday 10:30 pm / skin a champagne gold and you are laughing / bent over like a pastel greeting card soft bitten nails the colour of autumn’s fallen eggshells / i am a ‘60s girl / the fingernails a saucy copper blue kind feet propped up on the dashboard like you always told me not to you / with your white head the colour of a soft curdled dandelion drinking in perennials through the rolled down window / grandmother tells you never to pick a plant / how even the roots belong to you like nights at the lake but / obedience is never a thing you succumb to politely sitting there / watching you cradle the soft droopy head in your palms i think what a good father you’d be / like how you kept it there so tenderly even though you knew that it was failing
ii
listen to yourself / know this is a memory you’ll never forget how i wish we were home i wish we were sober i wish we were in the kitchen telling my brother shit about fairies living in teacups i wish we were more useful i wish we were more us but just for the moment i find / myself looking at you thinking how i want always to be like this / hands awkwardly distant in the little red car / susurrus of the wind and sea / in the perfectly circular world its sky like a swallowed wet handkerchief in the cool green earth / each of us making furtive comments on our own imperfections; love if we didn’t have to open our eyes we’d never wake up to the world so beautiful and raw and yearning aching / for our undivided love
Read all the winning poems in the 2024 Anthology here.
All previous year’s designs have been produced digitally, but this year with the agreement of The Poetry Society I decided to make a linocut to achieve the richness, texture and colour overlays that I just cannot replicate well enough in digital form. There was a little bit of post-production work to do as the anthology and poster need to work in slighly different ways and include different information. Obviously a much more labourious and time consuming process than just creating a digital image, but worth every minute to produce the artwork with some soul and personality.
Some pictures below documenting the process.
Some examples below of previous years anthology cover designs.
