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A poem about language, love, and processing distressing world events has won this year’s £5,000 National Poetry Competition. The Gathering by Partridge Boswell was picked from more than 21,000 entries by poets in 113 countries.
The poem came from Boswell’s attempt to make sense of global suffering, state violence and war. He describes how he “followed the media for a long while, writing elegies, parodies and rants” to make sense of his “discomfort and disbelief”, and the emotional burden this entails.
“We were blown away by this poem, and we couldn’t resist returning to it again and again, each reading yielding more insights into its ambition, the emotional stakes and philosophical perspicacity of its ideas,” the judges said of The Gathering.
“The speaker reflects on the tensions of personal grief against the backdrop of state violence in Gaza and elsewhere,” they added. “How do we maintain language’s potency amid the anaesthetising relentlessness of the news cycle? How do we resist false narratives, eclipsed histories?”
Boswell is the author of the Fool for Poetry prize-winning chapbook Levis Corner House and the Grolier prize-winning collection Some Far Country. He is also the co-founder of the Bookstock literary festival in Vermont.
“For this poem to receive such recognition is a humbling and massively ‘affirming flame’ in a dark winter,” Boswell said. He wins £5,000 for his first prize poem. Nine other winners were also named, including runner-up Damen O’Brien for his poem Axe (winning £3,000) and third prize winner Zoe Dorado for Badminton (winning £2,000). The top three poems will be published in the spring 2026 issue of the Poetry Society’s journal, The Poetry Review.
Seven commended poets, each winning £500, were Jim O’Brien, Kate Wakeling, Alex Mankowitz, Mark Fiddes, Jane Ord, Jade Angeles Fitton and Lindsey Forster-Holland. All the poems were read anonymously by a judging panel comprising Susannah Dickey, Ian Duhig and Denise Saul.
The competition was founded in 1978, and past winners include Carol Ann Duffy, Sinéad Morrissey, James Berry and Tony Harrison. Last year, Fiona Larkin won the award for Absence Has a Grammar, inspired by her experience missing her son after he moved from the UK to Australia.
The next competition will open in June.
The Gathering
Above my meditating head, a record herd of god’s tiny cows
grazes on the blank page of ceiling. How they slipped in via
crevices, god only knows. Yet another testament to a seamed
world where cracks widen and swallow our hungers whole.
A thousand or so volunteering for the next lower case i,
period, ellipsis or umlaut… interrogating the bare expanse
upside-down, a pair here and there posing as colons—
brave pacifists of summer’s coda, ensuring exclamation
and question won’t end in pointless machete and scythe.
Losing count of gaunt warmer days, all placidly repair
to a colorless gulag of ceiling pristine as the sky after 9/11
or Gandhi’s mind, banished of muddy boots. Foraging air,
do they miss their dirt and grass? Diapaused in stark sterile
contrast to the fermenting carnival of sweet decay coloring
autumn’s kaleidoscope a glass pane away… did they cross
the border with families and dreams intact ahead of a killing
frost? How we continue to innocently decimate each other
and blame gravity, god knows. God who drifts now nowhere
and everywhere again, sleeping in the churches of our cars,
insisting every story still ends in love and ones that don’t
are so starved they’ve lost their appetite for what feeds a soul
on its famished flight from an Gorta mór to the salted shore
of Gaza. The honey water you set on a sill last year, they
drowned in. No, seasons can’t be sweetened with intention
yet in a week when summer’s still putting up high numbers
and two friends leave by their own design, it seems an illicit ill-
timed conceit to reckon a wish to euthanize with a will to survive—
while conducting a threnody for yet another ending / impending
genocide of life, truth, hope or love plying the complicit silence
of a bedroom where sleep’s erasure can’t hide the heinous crime
of negligence or revise a rehashed history that passes as news.
Their bright robes shine incarnadine, a congregation reciting
in unison psalms and proverbs of limbo. You whistle a living
wake as tacit prayer gestates to hunger-strike. Exploring safe,
prosaic pages of snow, they procrastinate then power down.
Black iotas cluster in corners, gathering a geometry to trace
the contour of your starving heart—the ravenous reticence
that remains of language when language fails and meaning’s
odometer is broken, when punctuation alone hovers aloft—
stars we can finally reach, once love’s last light is spoken.
