JULIA COPUS is top of the poetry pops after securing the prize every poet wants to win.

Julia, 33, of Shear Brow, Blackburn, landed first prize and £5,000 in the National Poetry Competition with her entry Breaking the Rule.

She said: "It's an amazing feeling to have won this prize. As a writer you don't have a workplace or colleagues in the way most people do, so this is like a pat on the back and a bonus in the pay packet. It's really encouraging.

"I know everyone says it, but I really didn't think I had a chance of winning. I almost didn't send the winning poem with my entry as I didn't think it was the 'type' of poem that wins competitions.

She is poised for more fame locally as plans are being made to engrave some of her work on a bronze sculpture being made for Fleming Square by artist Stephen Broadbent.

"Blackburn definitely features a lot in my work, and I have written a radio play about a nine-year-old girl from Blackburn," Julia said.

"I started writing poetry when I was 23 after reading a biography of Sylvia Plath and some of her poems. I realised how powerful poetry was.

"My ideas come from everywhere and the poems are largely about flux and movement. I have a fear of staying still, of atrophy, which definitely comes across."

The winning poem was taken from Julia's second book, In Defence of Adultery, published in February.

The National Poetry Society contest is judged anonymously, so the panel, which included writers Simon Armitage and Hugo Williams, had no idea who she was.

They decided her entry had bucketfuls of the "read it again factor -- an essential criteria for any winning poem." The society, which is backed by Arts Council and private funding, was founded in 1909 and exists to help poets and poetry thrive in Britain today.

The National Poetry Competition's 1997 winner, York's Neil Rollinson, said it was the award "that poets want to win."

Julia, who was born in London and lived in Durham before moving to Blackburn seven years ago with her husband Charles Barrow, has also attracted praise from the Arts Council of England and the BBC. Her first book, The Shuttered Eye, was published in 1995 by Bloodaxe Books, the largest poetry publisher in Britain.

Second prize in the contest went to Birmingham-based David Hart for Then in the 20th Century, with Matthew Caley, author of Low-maintenance Roof-garden in third place. Julia's radio play about Blackburn girl, Eenie Meenie Macka Racka, will be broadcast on Radio Four in September.

The Art of Signing

There are ways among the stone and shadow

of our cloisters to transgress the Rule. We speak

in signs: a language with no syntax.

For the sign of bread you make a circle

with your thumbs and index fingers - like a belt

that presses silk against a woman's waist.

For the sign of an eel squeeze each hand tight

as one who grasps a cord of hair to kiss

that one mouth only in the frantic din

of the ale-house where we used to dance,

and later outside with the grainy dusk

unloading a sough of foot-falls in my ear,

our four feet shuffling together

and in time across the quiet earth.

The rhythm of my days goes slower now:

matins and lauds, vespers and compline.

For the sign of silence put a finger

to the dry muscle of your mouth,

the darkness that's inside it. Keep it there.