RESULTS FOR THE 2007 GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE
WINNER:PRIZE:$1500
Waiting for Goya SANDY FITTS, VIC
HIGHLY COMMENDED:PRIZE:$150
The Sea Corpse GENEVIEVE OSBORNE, NSW
Pitch Dark in Puerto Mantel JOHN GRIFFIN, SA
90: Things to tell you: day 193 LOUISE OXLEY, TAS
2007 GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE JUDGES’ REPORTJUDGES: JENNIFER STRAUSS AND MIKE LADD
After the first read-through of the 246 entries we found ten per cent were still contenders. Many of these were publishable. The other ninety per cent dropped out for various reasons. Some suffered from clichéd tropes and clunky rhymes. “Thee” and “thine” made unwelcome returns, as though simply employing these words created poetry. Quite a few others had promising moments but couldn't sustain them; others were technically competent but lacked vitality in language or theme. There were many dull and passive poems about decline, ageing and mortality. Sure, these are eternal subjects, but they need to be handled with more than standard poetic resignation. It becomes a grey default mode that does poetry no service. More poems about love and sex would have been welcome and we also wanted to see more poems with political or social clout.
The winning poem “Waiting for Goya” by Sandy Fitts (VIC)is a powerful and complex exploration of the relevance of Goya's art, sprung from 'a mad age of faith and war', to our own time as well as, through the locating of its presence in a German art gallery, to Nazi Germany. The poem's meditative quality has a dramatic and argumentative energy that springs partly from the locating of the speaker in a specific place and moment (waiting in a queue for an exhibition) and partly from the projection of an unseen interlocutor, an alter ego, against whose scepticism the 'I' of the poem must defend engagement with the art and the ideas that it provokes. The resulting tonal balance between the colloquial and the rhetorical matches the tension in the poem’s movement between an apparent naturalness of speech flow across lines that are highly formalised in length.
We also Highly Commend three entries:
“The Sea Corpse” by Genevieve Osborne (NSW)is a formally deft poem with an original theme – the decision not to retrieve a body seen floating in the sea 'between the Marquesas and Cocos Island'. The consequent sea-change of the corpse into something rich and strange in the protagonist's mind may have a starting point in Shakespeare, but its curiously compelling mixture of the attractive and the queasy is quite distinctive. Like the body, the poem haunted us afterwards.
The fragmented and oblique narrative of a killing in “Pitch Dark in Puerto Mantel” by John Griffin (SA) emerges in an inventive sequence of twelve short sections. These sharply detailed and somewhat dream-like impressionist glimpses of place, time and people are rather like the 'sly peep' of passing headlights in the first stanza: they both inspect and illuminate an imagined place and a half-hidden event.
“90:Things to tell you: day 193” by Louise Oxley (TAS) is a pastoral love poem in which overt gentleness of tone and detail is threaded with longing, with the tension of an allusion to something in the past that has required forgiveness for the absent and awaited lover, and with a remembered incident in which death was the result of the disentanglement of two tiger-snakes knotted together in the fierceness of mating.
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