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      June 16, 2016Underneath a Car on the Highroad Between Abergavenny and BlaenarvonAlexander James

      Painting: “Castlerigg” by Catherine Edmunds. “Underneath a Car …” was written by Alexander James for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2016, and selected by Edmunds as the Artist’s Choice winner.
      The car broke down                 five miles from
      home,                                 no-one in sight.
      I stooped, cheek an                 inch from the wet
      earth                                     and craned to look
      underneath like                 I could spot the
      fault,                                 try to fix it.
      A snapped axle                 frames a blade of
      green                                 engulfed by rust
      verdant, rotting,                 speckled with cairns
      hurled                               by nameless gods
      in their gambles.                 Fronds shaggy, un-
      trimmed,                           giving way
      only to sheep,                         straggling, black eyes
      glazed,                                 watching with all
      the slack interest                 of those who have
      never                                 considered death.
      It’s the first time                 anyone has
      ever                                 seen this, I say
      to myself, before                 I begin to
      hike                                 down the cliff side.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the artist, Catherine Edmunds

      “The best poems took my painting as a prompt and sprang off in unexpected directions rather than simply describing in words what I had painted anyway. I know what I painted! I wanted to find out where it took you, the poet. The top ten took me all over the place, both geographically and emotionally, and I despaired of picking just one entry to win, but after dozens of reads, one poem emerged as the one I most looked forward to re-reading each time, and that felt like a perfectly valid reason for declaring it the winner. This poem transports Castlerigg from Cumbria to Wales and plonks it down underneath a car; then tells a gloriously vivid tale of what happened—and does so in a tight, poetic form that transports me straight to that Welsh hillside, along with its straggly slack-eyed sheep. I can smell the rain in this poem. It had to win.”

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