GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2009: THE JUDGES' REPORT
Sarah Day and Tim Thorne, October 2009
General comments:
When you’re reading 230 poems, the ones which make it to the long short-list have any of a couple of things in their favour. Either they are using language in interesting ways or they are saying something interesting. The ones which make it to the short short-list are generally doing both of those things and to a fairly sophisticated degree.
There were about 18 poems which one or other of us, or both, thought worth short-listing, that is, just a little under 10% of the entries. This is probably about standard for such a competition. It was much easier to separate these from the bulk of entries than it was to discriminate among them. The winner, the two which we have highly commended and perhaps three or four others contained some excellent writing. The winning entry, we believe, had more of it, and more consistently. Sensible advice to anyone contemplating entering this or any other major poetry award would be to read repeatedly the poems we have selected and look at why they succeed. Listen to the cadences of the language, contemplate the depth of meaning and emotion and, above all, look at the integration of form and content.
Comments on the Winning Poem:
- ‘A Letter on Youth Homelessness’ by Michael Robinson, WA
The winning work combines the traditional elements of poetry: formal rhythm, cadence and rhyme with contemporary urban preoccupations. Form, sound and idea are working together powerfully in this reflection on our civilisation and the fears and hopes which it engenders. The judges liked its musicality and particularly liked the ending: the allusion to the integrity and the solace which small things can bring.
This poem uses an excellent and probably unique variation of the ten-line stanza. Most such forms are very difficult to use convincingly, especially if one is avoiding the light, somewhat arch, bantering tone of say, Byron at his most playful. This poem holds a serious tone by force of its diction, its varied sentence lengths and the precision with which it matches insight to expression. It thoroughly deserves to win because it combines serious social concern with keen perception of both the beauty and the ugliness of the physical world, all presented in a masterfully controlled formal context.
Comments on the Highly Commended Poems:
- ‘White Noise’ by Brett Dionysius, Qld
This sonnet sequence is replete with evocative images from an unidentified narrated past. From the opening description of the black and white Astor television warming up, ‘its inner tubes flaming like gas giants’ and the pink flesh of salted beef ‘steaming like a rim of sun-rise’, images multiply and refract to create a poem about memory. The disembodied quality of the narrative voice, combined with the clarity and steady accumulation of the images, created the tone and ultimately , the success of this poem.
It is a delightful work in an area we are more likely to associate with film or the novel than with poetry. Its vivid evocation of childhood is sustained by an accretion of images, visual, tactile and aural. Ultimately, like most evocations of childhood and adolescence, it is really about what it means to be an adult. From the opening conceit comparing the woman cooking midday dinner with the astronauts landing on the moon, to the final metaphor of the river bank crumbling as hopes crumble, the contribution of the imagery to the total meaning is consistent and relentless.
- ‘The Shoot, Greece 1970’by Ron Pretty, NSW
We liked the unusual nature of this poem. It is written in free verse and operates as a slide show, the narrator instructing an imagined audience on the images before them which begin in Athens and tell the story of the military coup and final years of the Greek civil war. Punctuated by the Flick of each new frame, this poem tells a story and it tells it well.
It works because the poet has chosen a point of view which is just removed enough, as a tourist, a xenos (cleverly, the only Greek word used is the one for foreigner,) to act as a filter for the passions and the evidence of violence. Rather than an attempt at co-opting a story from another culture, another history, this uses the slide show as a Brechtian distancing device, resulting in a poem which does not collapse under the weight of so much emotion.