Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3134 you were invited to submit a poem featuring one of T.S. Eliot’s practical cats getting to grips with the modern world.   Your 21st-century reincarnations of Eliot’s felines (the poems were originally published in 1939 and inspired by the poet’s four-year-old godson, who invented the words ‘pollicle’ for dogs and ‘jellicle’ for cats) were terrific. Alas long lines mean space for fewer winners and some fine Macavitys narrowly missed the cut (take a bow, Nick Syrett, David Shields and Hamish Wilson). I was sorry, too, not to have had room for Bill Greenwell’s Jellicles and Brian Allgar’s Growltiger, the Tory Cat.   This week’s top cats are printed below and pocket £35 each.

In Competition No. 3133 you were invited to provide a passage about food written in the style of a well-known author. Douglas G. Brown’s ‘Observation on a Vegetable That Was Probably Unknown to Ogden Nash’ struck a chord: ‘Kale consumed raw/ Gets stuck in one’s craw;/ But kale, marinated,/ Is still overrated’. Nick Syrett and Martyn Hurst also stood out, as did Nick MacKinnon’s Shelley on molecular gastronomy — ‘My name is Heston Blumenthal, chef of chefs./ Look on my pud, ye hungry, and despair!’ — and Katie Mallett’s updating of Betjeman’s ‘Vers de Sociéte’. They were only narrowly outflanked by the winners, printed below, who each snaffle £25. ‘A peach just beautifully is!

In Competition No. 3130 you were invited to add to Sam Leith’s lines about Boris Johnson, written in the metre of Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’: ‘Mayor of London Boris Johnson/ Much admired the lady’s pole-dance/ Mentored well her start-up business…’ Though Longfellow has long fallen out of fashion, in his day he was a poet celebrity, imitated by Baudelaire, parodied by Lewis Carroll and outselling Browning and Tennyson (he was also the first American to be honoured with a marble bust in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey). The poet J.D.

In Competition No. 3129 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘’Twas the Night Before Brexit’. That seasonal classic ‘A Visit From St Nicholas’, more usually known as ‘The Night Before Christmas’, was published anonymously in 1823 and written by Clement Clarke Moore — or at least he claimed it was. The family of the gentleman-poet Henry Livingston Jr later contended that he was the author, and the controversy rumbles on. Space is short so I will use what remains to thank you all, veterans and newcomers alike, for your terrifically witty and well-made entries over the past 12 months. I look forward to many more in the year ahead.   This week’s prizewinners, printed below, earn £30 apiece. Merry Christmas!

In Competition No. 3128 you were invited to submit letters to Santa written in the style of the author of your choice.   I failed to track down examples of real letters from well-known writers to Old Nick (although both Mark Twain and Tolkien penned letters to their children from Father Christmas). But this was more than compensated for by the terrific standard of entries: step forward, David Silverman, channelling Dan Brown: ‘Dear Santa, I know who you are, buddy! And I can prove it! You’re an anagram of SATAN!

In Competition No. 3127 you were invited to submit Shakespeare’s newly discovered ‘Woeful ballad to his mistress’ eyebrows’, as referred to by Jaques in As You Like It (‘And then the lover,/ Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad/ Made to his mistress’ eyebrow…’). For the purposes of this challenge, a ballad could be any sort of poem (most of you wrote sonnets) and anachronisms were allowed. The prizewinners, in another fiercely contested week, take £20.   What blessing crowns thy outward loveliness? A coiffed, enrapturing head of sable hair That blazes rank above the common press. Yet there is hair invisible elsewhere.

In Competition No. 3126 you were invited to rearrange the letters of the names of poets (e.g. Basho: ‘has B.O.’) and submit a poem of that title in the style of the poet concerned.   The inspiration for this challenge was the puzzle writer and editor Francis Heaney’s wonderful Holy Tango of Literature, which includes such delights as William Shakespeare’s ‘Is a sperm like a whale?’, Dorothy Parker’s ‘Dreary Hot Pork’ and William Carlos Williams’s ‘I will alarm Islamic owls’.