Winners of the TLS poetry competition

The winners are announced here and once again I am bewildered. What am I missing here?

The winner and runners-up were chosen by a ballot of readers (always open to manipulation), from a shortlist of twelve poems drawn up by Mick Imlah, the Poetry editor of the TLS, and Alice Quinn, Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America and formerly Poetry editor of the New Yorker, and printed anonymously on October 24.

The 2008 TLS Poetry Competition has been won by Susan Rich, of Seattle, WA, for her poem “Different Places To Pray”. She receives $4,000.

Rich has worked on the staff of Amnesty International, as an electoral supervisor in Bosnia, and as a human rights trainer in Gaza. She has lived in Niger, West Africa, where she worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer, later moving to South Africa to teach at the University of Cape Town on a Fulbright Fellowship. She has won both the PEN USA Poetry Award and the Peace Corps Writers Poetry Award for The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the world (White Pine Press, 2000).

In second place came Peter Saunders, of Chatham, MA, with “Cape Cottage in Winter”. Saunders’s books include Ask Any Frog (Stepping Stone Press, 2000), and Heartbeat of New England (Tiger Moon Press, 2000). He receives $1,500.

In third place, winning £500, came Paul Groves, of Osbaston, Monmouth, Wales, with “The Hug”. Groves, who won the competition last year, has published three full collections of poems, the most recent of them Eros and Thanatos (Seren, 1999). Fourth prize, worth $500, went to Joseph Fasano, of Goshen, NY, for “Chester”. Fasano also recently won the Rattle Poetry Prize.

See the link to read the poems.