Hour Long Multi-Media Poem Wins Ted Hughes Prize for 2017

Ted Hughes Award judges Gillian Allnutt, Lemn Sissay and Sally Beamish have chosen Jay Bernard’s Surge: Side A (Speaking Volumes) as the latest winner of The Poetry Society’s prestigious prize.

Jay Bernard is from London and is the author of three poetry pamphlets: The Red and Yellow Nothing (Ink Sweat & Tears and Café Writers, 2016), English Breakfast (Math Paper Press, 2013), and Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (Tall Lighthouse, 2008). 

Surge: Side A is an hour long multi-media performance work.  It investigates the New Cross Fire of 1981, in which thirteen young black people lost their lives in a defining moment in Black British history. It was produced by Speaking Volumes and was performed at the Roundhouse, London, as part of The Last Word Festival 2017. 

Judge Sally Beamish said: “An intensely personal relating of the New Cross massacre; powerful, lyrical and communicated with extraordinary intimacy. I was particularly struck by their drawing of a parallel between the struggle for validation in the black British community, and the poet’s own clarification of identity by transforming their body through surgery. The performances are riveting and the poems are propelled by a strong internal momentum.”

From Surge: Side A by Jay Bernard

Surge 1 

I was so weak, I was sickened, 

I was grieved, I was sad, 

I was everything that’s bad – 

my voice became the glass

breaking in the heat 

I was so sickened and so grieved 

I was so weak – I called

and no-one seemed to call with me 

no-one seemed to know or see 

what I had seen –

I was so sickened and so grieved

and I said to the child I knew 

harboured in the fire – jump 

Yvonne, jump Paul, jump –

I said, I called – jump 

Yvonne, jump Paul, jump

– my voice it was so weak

– Paul, jump – 

so sickened and so grieved.