Competition 3398 invited you to submit a poem about snooker as the world champion-ship was under way. The entries poured in! There were many excellent poems in both camps (snooker being either the best or the most boring thing ever). Among others, Anna Cox, D.A. Prince, Nick Syrett, Kavanagh Millard, Ralph Goldswain and Helen Baty deserve a nod, as does Philip Riseborough:
A one-four-seven
What heaven, what heaven!
The £25 voucher prizes go to those below.
When TV’s snooker balls were grey
Ted Lowe would help us follow play
with, ‘First he’ll take that easy green
(mid-grey, near pocket, centre-screen).
But that could leave him very tight
behind the red (third ball from right).
Though after that he should be able
to screw the cue ball round the table
and line it up to pot the black
(the dark grey ball beside the pack).
Then final red (though grey for you),
And tempting blue (though that’s grey too).
Next, chalk the cue and find a way
to pot the colours grey by grey
till colour TV brings the day
when coloured balls replace the grey.’Martin Parker
Here’s praise for my green baize test card
Which saved the BBC,
Displacing News with balls and cues
So economically.
Godspeed to the hours it swallowed,
Frame on thrilling frame;
Waistcoats, bow ties, steady hands and eyes
At a vital table game.
Heap praise on my green baize test card:
It’s the black ball I’d to pot
Sotto voce talk and much use of chalk,
No script or paid-for plot.
Once its audience had topped soap opera
I ascended the Top Floor,
With a bright, bright future underwrit by snooker
With its million views to draw.Adrian Fry
In mathematics, angles rule;
It’s just the same in snooker:
You square the old hypotenuse,
Then hit the big bazooka!
It used to be a quiet game,
Where Ray would stroke the pockets,
But now it’s full of razzmatazz,
And pros with names like ‘Rocket’.
They stalk the table, suck their teeth,
In car-mechanic style,
Then chalk the cue and take the rest,
And ponder for a while…
But then they’re prone across the baize,
With knee at forty-five;
They blast the ball with side and stun:
The Championship’s alive!Nicholas Lee
Euclid! Thou should’st be living at this hour:
O’Sullivan hath need of thee anew.
He’s lost his geometric superpower,
His angles are all tangled and askew,
His cue-balls misaligning by degrees,
His angles of reflection all awry.
The pressure’s bringing Ronnie to his knees.
His breaks, so paltry, almost make him cry.
Now every shot is skidding out of kilter –
But could it be the world is out of joint?
What’s snookering the earth’s phantasmal filter?
Reality’s been stretched to breaking point –
The earth’s magnetic ley lines have been switched:
The Crucible has clearly been bewitched.David Silverman
His life has been this rectangle of baize
Forever, almost – since those truant days
When snooker halls taught him much more than school.
He learned to ease a cue, to make a cool
Assessment of what’s possible within
Newton’s constraints of angle, speed, and spin.
He challenged champions; with the force of youth
He told established masters the hard truth
Their day was done. A two-decade career
Of hard-fought struggle has now brought him here,
To Sheffield, where he sits impassive while
A young slick player with an edgy style
Pots red, black, red, black with eye-boggling ease,
Like an automaton. Suddenly he sees
The end of things approaching. Yes, at last
The future’s come for him, too. He’s the past.George Simmers
What is the pink doing with the disturbance of the black?
Ash on a velvet cushion
As bold Tiresias takes a long brown to the middle
Against the anaesthetic afternoon.
Red upon colour. Colour on red.
All reds and no colours;
If there were colours, there would be reds.
Ball upon balls. Balls. All balls.
And if you came this way… If you came,
Clutching the long rest and carrying much chalk,
You would see something more appalling than
Ronnie O’Sullivan striding towards you
Or Judd Trump hiding behind you:
You would see beer in a handful of mugs.
Time present and time past
Are both contained in time snooker.Revd Dr Peter Mullen (T.S. Eliot Plays Snooker)
Before colour TV, back in the day,
We huddled round the set to watch Pot Grey.
Snooker in monochrome? Who would have thought it,
Ludicrous idea but still we bought it.
‘For those of you viewing this in black and white,
The blue is behind the green.’ He’s always right,
We’d murmur in compliant acquiescence,
In awe of the players’ sangfroid, poise and presence,
Not to mention, dare one say, the derrières
Of focused teenage waistcoat millionaires;
The strategies deployed for every shot,
Their silent satisfaction at each pot.
Ars longa, snooker brevis: such, our woe –
O my Thorburn and my Reardon, long ago!Mike Morrison
No. 3401: MARVELLING
‘My vegetable love should grow…’. You’re invited to include these words in a poem of your own (16 lines max). Please send entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by 21 May.
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