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National Poetry Competition: Press Release , 26th March 2007 National Poetry Competition: Mike Barlow Profile Mike Barlow was winner of the National Poetry Competition 2006 with his poem The Third Wife. He has previously won First Prize in the Ledbury Poetry Competition 2005, and First prize in the Amnesty International Competition 2002. His first collection Living On The Difference was overall winner of the Poetry Business Competition 2004 and subsequently short-listed for the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize for Best First Collection in 2005. It has been described as a collection with ‘cumulative power, cohesion and a particular, individual voice’(Gillian Clarke). Reviews have referred to a ‘questing intelligence and… a refusal to accept or offer easy answers’(Acumen) and ‘free verse so weighed and paced it shows an elegance and care beyond any achieved by formal styles’(Dreamcatcher). His second collection, Another Place, will be published by Salt Publishing in October 2007. ‘Mike Barlow’s poetry inhabits a world of parallel lives, lurking presences, odd dreams, a place that is constantly mysterious and surprising. Technically assured, full of details observed with an artist’s eye, these are poems with an edge, able to alter the way you see things.’ Elizabeth Burns
Mike lives near Lancaster where, after a career as a probation officer, he now works and exhibits as a visual artist as well as writing. His poems are full of visual detail and draw on both rural and urban life, combining the fictional and autobiographical, often addressing the current of thoughts and emotions that underlie daily events—the undertow as it were—the sense of unease, edginess, transience. |
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