3rd Prize – Lynn Roberts with:

Canaletto – The stonemason’s yard

He’s gone backstage: the carefully composed
and sunlit postcard scenes that buy his bread
are stacked against the wall, his steel rule closed
inside his desk; those rules which fill his head
all left behind... he does not need a grid
of perspectival lines to build this image
here; it’s more like work his father did –
backcloths and theatre flats – but here abrim
with bustling life and business; all the stuff
that goes on in the background suddenly
front stage, and you see Venice in the rough –
beneath the swan the webbed reality
that powers the floating dream; the marble slough
of sheds on stilts that ride the astonished sea.