The Opened Field by Dom Bury
Devon-based poet Dom Bury‘s poem won the 2017 National Poetry Competition sponsored by the UK Poetry Society, and the judges said:
The darkly allegoric winning poem surrounds six boys in a field enacting a disturbing coming-of-age ritual, and is told with a driving rhythm and mantra-like repetitions. The poem interrogates themes of unchecked masculinity, exploring our destructive relationship with each other and with the natural world. The barbaric impulses enacted are interwoven to offer us a sombre and precisely wrought ecological and social fable for our times.
This film interpretation by Helmie Stil takes, perhaps unavoidably, a somewhat illustrative tack while remaining suggestive and allusive in all the right ways, so that the poem doesn’t feel pinned down, as it easily could have felt with a more conventional approach.
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
