Mingled Voices 4 -The International Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology 2019

MINGLED VOICES 4 is an anthology of one hundred and twenty-four poems, the work of sixty-nine poets, selected from those which were entered in the fourth annual international competition for the International Proverse Poetry Prize in 2019.



The International Proverse Poetry Prize was jointly founded in 2016 by Dr Gillian Bickley and Dr Verner Bickley MBE, in association with the annual international Proverse Prize for unpublished book-length fiction, non-fiction or poetry, submitted in English, which they also founded, in 2008.



Poems could be submitted on any subject or topic, chosen by each poet, or on the subject chosen for 2019 by the Administrators, “Plastic”. There was a free choice of interpretation, form and style.



Poems were submitted from around the world by writers with a variety of previous writing experience.



Brief biographies of those whose work is represented in Mingled Voices 4 are included in the anthology as well as author’s background notes on their work.

Mingled Voices 4 is an unusually powerful collection of works unfolding an engagement with space and time that is highly topical and arresting... a diverse collection, featuring poetry that is innovative and passionate in its engagement with significant challenges facing contemporary societies. It is well worth the read.

 

—Charles Lowe, PhD, Associate Dean / Associate Professor, Director of English Language and Literature Studies Programme,Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, United International College (UIC), Zuhai, China.

 

The word, ‘Plastic’ implies both the destructiveness of contemporary capitalist throw-away culture whose impact we are only just discovering, but also the ability to mould, to shape. It was Coleridge in Biographia Literaria who created the word ‘the esemplastic’ out of the Greek to describe the power of the imagination: for Coleridge, the great Romantic poet, the imagination was the indispensable force for the creation of poetry, poetry being what comes out of nothing, like the Creation. The voices in this anthology describe experience, sometimes very fully; they are also aware of the power of poetry to shape experience (as in the winning piece, ‘Waiting for Ulysses’), and of the power of music to shape eroticism, as in Ahmed Elbeshlawy’s ‘The Message of the Music’, which comments ironically on the idealism which Coleridge’s idea of the esemplastic power of the imagination presupposes.

 

—Jeremy Tambling, PhD, teaches as Professor of English at SWAP University Warsaw, and used to be Professor of Comparative Literature in Hong Kong, and Professor of Literature at Manchester before retiring.