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Oxford–The Oxonian Review Poetry Competition culminated last week in the Wood Room at Pembroke College, where The Review staff joined judge David Williams and the shortlisted poets for a reading.

Competition winner William Harris presented his poem, Jakarta 5am:

Open the shutters for landing
and see the coast and pandan-leafed
interior slowly expanding
towards the edge of a relieved

horizon, pale with uncertainty.
There is a river (we had not
remembered) lined with shanty
towns whose iron roofs rot

in the sun. See how they cling
to the wet season when soon
the whole river will be gleaming
like a loosely sutured wound.

See how they nestle in each one
of its coils and simply submit
themselves to no more than a slum
and no thought of outlasting it.

Season after season I land
here, not knowing whose funeral
or wedding it’ll be, less and
less certain if we made it here at all.

Harris is reading for a degree in English literature and language at Hertford College, Oxford.

The Review congratulates him and the following shortlisted poets:

Alexis Foo
Edward Fortes
Elen Griffith
Alec Kray
Geoffrey Lim
Hannah Jane Parkinson
Dominic Riding
Henry Stead

Photographs courtesy of Sarah Leylo Puello.

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