Poemosaurus Rex Challenge Winners

Hard to conceive, now, how extraordinary it would have been to find the bones of those terrible lizards in the earth — in a time before humans had conceived of anything other than a Great Chain of Being, a static creation. Yet long after Darwin they still have a hold over us, these creatures which are the ancestors of sparrows and seagulls. All hail the dinosaur! They are at once real and mythic, objects of science and objects of wonder, exhibitions in museums and children’s toys. No wonder Vocal Creators responded with such a variety of work to our Poemosaurus prompt.

Congratulations to Dr Jason Benskin with Echoes of Prehistory — his poem brings together a sense of the passage of time, the grandeur of these ancient beasts and their meaning to small child. We particularly loved the description of that “primeval expanse of carpet”, bringing together the human world and the world of triceratops and pterodactyl.

Second place goes to Sandra Tena Cole for The Victorian Dinosaur Shopping Centre, which brings us to London’s Crystal Palace. There, the first statuary replicas of dinosaurs were created in the mid 19th-century — they’re there still, you can go and visit them. Sandra brings them to life, somewhere between the imagined, the historical and the real, with verve and humor. The dinosaurs speak: We “went to the cinema before we remembered that it hadn't been invented yet.” Lovely.

And a big hand to all our runners up. Fans of Kazuo Ishiguro will admire the wordplay in the title of Remains to Display by Vic Mousseau; the poem itself has a strange tenderness and a skeleton kept in a museum expresses itself. Penny Fuller’s Indigo is a free-verse poem that explores the space between observer and observed, and considers what we can ever really know in liberating language. Christy Munson’s Vexed hovers over metaphor: a poem about a dinosaur, it turns out, can also be a poem about love. No surprise that with dinosaurs the possibilities are, well, huge.

You can check out the full list of winners HERE and learn about our current challenges below: