By Lindesay Irvine
Friday April 11, 2008


An unpublished poet has joined 11 of Britain's most celebrated writers to conclude the Arts Council's year-long sequence of poems commissioned to mark the bicentenary of Britain's Abolition of the Slave Trade Act.

Polly Atkin entered an open competition last year to round off a series of poems commissioned from the likes of Helen Dunmore, Hugo Williams, Iain Sinclair and Benjamin Zephaniah. Some 250 entries were judged by Antonia Byatt, Arts Council England's literature director, Fiona Sampson, editor of Poetry Review and the poet Fred d'Aguiar, who also contributed a poem of his own to the sequence.

Atkin's winning poem, Seven Nights of Uncreation, follows the harrowing story of somebody pressed into slavery and shipped abroad to a life of alien bondage.

"I started writing my poem with the aim of exploring enslavement in modern day life, but found myself turning to images and accounts of the transatlantic slave trade ... which is surely one of the nightmares of humanity," Atkin said.

"Wondering how we could wake up from that is where the poem came from."

Antonia Byatt said of Seven Nights of Uncreation, which also won a £500 prize: "The winning poem is superb - it never simplifies the subject and its use of language and metaphor weaves a textured and very moving piece."

Byatt said poetry helped tackle difficult issues. "Each poet made a unique and valuable contribution to our understanding of enslavement. Together the poems give us a rich way of exploring the subject through a range of voices and understandings," she added.

Atkin, who is based in Cumbria, is currently researching the construction of meaning around place for a PhD in English and Sociology. Her first pamphlet of poetry, Bone Song, is available later this spring.

A book containing all 12 poems in the Arts Council's sequence, alongside specially commissioned artwork, is due to be published by Enitharmon Editions in 2009. In the meantime, you can read Polly Atkin's poem below, and all the poems can be found on the Arts Council's website.

Seven Nights of Uncreation

Award Winning Poem by Polly Adkin... On the first night I woke up deep underwater, dry as a fish-bone in the belly of a ship, the heavy silence below the water-line punctured by crackings like timbers or bones smashing to splinters on unseen rocks. I was blind, trapped. Utterly lost. On the second a glimmer of pinkish light showed pillars rising from lengthening sides to meet in the curve of the ceiling like arches. Something within me could tell without asking that these were the ribs of a monstrous creature, the platform I stood on, its lung. On the third night the taste of the dark was different; I felt right at once I was deep underground with the weight of the wet earth driving me down, the metallic blood-tang of hewn rock in my mouth and a prescient knowledge I'd never get out. I was buried, the cave was a tomb. By the fourth night of this I was wary of dreams, the days between blinking, plagued by impressions I did not recall from the nights' haunting visions, but knew from their otherness they were the same. I arrived just like home on a wide open plain, but the wind spoke in alien tongues. On the fifth night I rose to the ridge of a hill, my eyes fixed by chance to a passage below, where a sad slow procession wound its way north into shadow, hung over the land like a hawk. I felt it important to watch, but the wind and the rain relieved me of sight. On the six night I fell into nothing. Nothing smothered me, crushing and crowding around, everywhere, blankness rubbing me out inch by inch, until I was nothing. I stuttered, coughed when I tried to speak. When I tried to scream I was mute. The seventh night was a night of rest. I crouched awake til the birds' dawn chorus, hearing them singing to hours of darkness, thinking I'm them; I am just like the birds, tricked into ludicrous song by illusion, tricked to believe in the false dawn light. On the dawn of the eighth day I unlocked my limbs, and stepped into a new life.

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