The Brass Wall That Will Save England From Brexit

Creative treatment of politics wins award for Chiswick poet

A poem about Brexit has won top prize in a poetry competition for a Chiswick writer.

Konstandinos Mahoney of the Poetry Society's Barnes and Chiswick Stanza group is the winner of this year’s Stanza Competition for his poem ‘Dr Mirabilis and the Brass Wall That Will Save England’.

The theme for the poetry competition was 'walls'.

There were 337 poems from 210 poets received for this year’s Stanza Poetry Competition, and each was submitted anonymously. Judge Andy Croft read every one and he commented that the winning poem was ‘…an enjoyable original take on Brexit, somewhat improbably via Roger Bacon’.

"It’s a poem about illusions (‘wizardly’, ‘magician’, ‘marvels’, ‘dreamed’), theatrical gestures (‘cloaking puddles’), boastful nonsense (‘the mighty ring of Jove’) and self-defeating contradictions (the spell designed to stem the ‘Latin tide’ is in Latin, while the ‘England’ that must be defended is of course already home to ‘freckled Vikings’ and ‘the offspring of the Commonwealth’)"

Konstandinos Mahoney is a Greek, English-Irish Londoner living in Chiswick, but who spends a good deal of time abroad. He’s both poet and playwright. His plays have been staged in London and Hong Kong and broadcast on the BBC and worldwide.

He is rep for The Poetry Society's Barnes and Chiswick Stanza, teaches Creative Writing at Hong Kong University and blogs for the Asian Literary Review. He has recently made music videos of some of his poems, e.g. Hong Kong Bar Hop.

His poems have recently appeared in Live Canon's 154, New Poems for Christmas and their 2017 Anthology.

You can read all 13 winning poems on the Stanza Poetry Competition page, along with judge’s, and author’s, comments on the top three.

September 29, 2017