Competition | 18 October 2008

In Competition No. 2566 you were invited to submit a poem in which the initial letters of each line, read down the page, reproduce the first.

Many of your entries struck a grimly topical note with key lines such as ‘Greed driven swine’ and ‘Gordon Brown is mad’. Others turned their attention to the natural world, but here too the tone remained downbeat and melancholic: ‘So autumn closes in’; ‘The falling leaves’; you get the idea. I was cheered, though, by some of the quirkier openings; in particular, Celeste Francis’s intriguing ‘I’d give you a kidney’ and Martin Elster’s ‘Fido chased a doe’.

The assignment was too easy for clever clogs Bill Greenwell whose double paracrostic appears in the victorious line-up, printed below. Bill and his co-winners get £25 apiece while the bonus fiver goes to David Silverman, who brought a tear to my eye.