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Angela
Cheyne
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100 Poets of the Year Award
2004
1st Prize Winner of £3,000
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100 Poets of 2004 Prize Winners
List 
I first decided at the age of thirteen that I wanted to be a poet. The former ‘Mermaid Cafe’ at Porth near Newquay in Cornwall, was the fount that saw the engendering, at seventeen of my first writings.
From the age of nineteen to twenty-one I travelled extensively in Europe. I wrote about my first love and the countryside of France and Spain.
At twenty-four, at the height of the Vietnam War in 1965, I wrote and published my ‘Peasants Plan’. I became interested in world politics and writing, producing and directing for the theatre at the British Drama League until thirty.
In the same year, I changed my name by legal declaration from Mei-Ling Angela Chen to my present name.
I took early retirement from the Arts Council of England in 2000.
This
is Angela’s £3,000 winning poem Urban Scene:
Urban
Scene
London wiped its eye
And the glistening roofs of the metropolis
Shone like new-rubbed brass from a zealous hand.
A pigeon stalked on the shiny tarmac of a housing estate
Arching its back and pecking in a murky pool of water.
The stalls in the street market festooned their wares
Under rain-splattered polythene, and a Bengali child
Was crying behind a curtained door.
London blinked
And the sun came out behind a city block
And beamed on the face of a typist late for work.
Someone rang the bell and the bus lumbered to a stop
And a shaft of light met the surge of passengers
Streaming into the roar of traffic;
And a feather drifted down.
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