Congratulations to the Poets Union Poetry Prize winner ANDREW SLATTERY

Judges’ report for the Poets’ Union Poetry Prize 2010:
Judges: Martin Langford and joanne burns

Winner: Toads Andrew Slattery

This finely constructed and measured poem of 6 line stanzas reanimates the memory of a 1970s summer set at a lakeside swimming site, visited by children and their parents. The poet creates a vivid, almost palpable theatre of teenage energy and liminal sexual awakening. The physical and social behaviours of the boys and girls are evoked through the poet’s impressive use of language – through image, sound, and word texture. The language is both pictorial and down to earth, rather than decorative or ornate. Images of water creatures and other species amplify the sense of natural being and vitality. The poet’s eye also scrutinises the mother figures – tired, intoxicated, and well past girlhood myths of romantic love – but relaxed and accepting. In the final stanza the poet emphasises the power of procreational desire, and rites of passage/the life cycle whereby the teenage girl becomes the woman/mother. The poem’s ending almost startles with its bare, sudden matter of factness –

‘It’s an old story;
the story of replacement.’

The poem is noteworthy for the handling of the tension between the narrator’s anxiety and the impersonal march of generation; the speed with which the author moves from one idea to the next (‘They said pick the dorky one/who detaches the front legs/ from the grasshoppers – /he’ll have a steady touch/ that could unpick your delicate stitch.’); the quietly unnerving defamiliarisations of the everyday (‘When you make up a good baby,/ other people will want one too.’); and the freshness of the imagery.

Shortlisted/Commended:
N.B Poems are listed alphabetically, not in order of merit.

8 X 10 colour enlargements $16.50 Cate Kennedy

This poem is forthright and unsettling. It is formally framed by a narrator/witness who feels compelled to recount a series of events at the occasion of a rural photography competition prize-giving. This account presents as a form of exemplum. The poem foregrounds the reticence and stoicism of a drought affected farmer and his wife who wins second prize; it engages with the rules of judgement in such a competition; it leaves the image of the wife’s other ‘disqualified’ photograph of her children in a moment of wonder impressed on the reader’s psyche.
The judges praised the author’s capacity to isolate a resonant subject – one all artists think about – the impact or otherwise of their work, and to bring it into focus through the woman’s isolation and her marginal relation to the art-world. They noted how the author’s respect for the dignity of her behaviour is reflected by the poem’s restrained language – though quietly pointed in such phrases as her ‘economical smile’, or, the winning photo’s ‘colours juiced with Photoshop’. Overall, the poem honours the gestures of art through the rectitude of the wife, despite the injustice of the award ceremony, and art’s uncertain status in the society of the poem.

Family Lines Anton Mischewski

This lyrical incantation, dedicated to Ali Cobby-Eckermann, is a poem of ‘presence’, articulated by a voice that follows and investigates lines of genealogy and history through an indigenous [and colonial] perspective – that emphasises the power of lines of nature, writing, and song. The voice that sings through ‘Family Lines’ evokes an unbroken spirit of survival.
The judges praised the thoroughness with which the poet draws the link between the travails of Indigenous and poetic voices: both, the author suggests, are disenfranchised within this society; both participate in interrupted genealogies – Indigenous people because of their losses and dislocations after the invasion, and poets, by implication, because their place in society is not secure. Both voices, however, can access their genealogies – by rediscovering family links on the one hand, or through the intertextualities of cultural inheritance on the other; and both can draw strength from the presences of the natural world – whether as totemic kin, or as ‘lines’ of inspiration.

Pages Andrew Slattery

This poem, centred on an intimate romantic relationship, impresses with its surprising and shifting or mobile imagery; and with its curiosity, perceptiveness, and caution. While there is an eschewing of the naïve in the poem ( ‘..plussing and minussing our acumens / and our hearts.’) the poem charms with its trophes. A distinctive contemporary love poem.
The judges praised the complex voice which moves within interesting parameters: between the knowing (‘The heart repeats itself like a sleepy gong,/ summoning nothing to nothing’), the child-like (‘when the sky fills with white planets/ and the fishermen sleep in their nets.’), and the meditative (‘We are peninsulas/ and capes and moves and counter-moves’). As with Toads, they noted the confident handling of both general and specific language, and the ease of movement between them. Finally, they liked the way the poem dealt with the difficult issue of where to position the author in love poems – too distant and one can sound safe and cynical; too close, and one does not create a public space for the reader to enter as well.

Pull Brett Dionysius

A sustained and polished sonnet sequence which tracks the development, in the second half of the 20th century, of a boy’s sexual life and romantic aspirations through the deployment of the conceit of space exploration and travel and its history, and through an awareness of cosmic forces. The poem’s title offers a wry pun on the poem’s trajectory.
The judges praised its playful use of imagery (‘White scales glistening like an albino anaconda’; ‘Rockets fell away on cue like his early love life’); its inventive and self-deprecating humour; and the way it was also able to inflect to a more unsettling tone, as it paused for solitary moments in the yard at the incinerator, or as the narrator waited out the long hours before his parents came home.

The Gap Meg Mooney

A lively, insightful, generous, and often comic poem in 4 parts, centred on various aspects of life in the Alice Springs region. The Gap as the title suggests offers differences in the Indigenous and white viewpoints, consciousness. The poem’s political perspective is infused with a bright, quotidian texture.
It asserts perspectives which are not commonly found in the spread of Australian cultural possibilities: the pleasures and benefits of the creek camps, the stuffiness and overcrowding of houses, the stores’ neglect for their shopping trolleys. There is a confidence and sense of counter-assertion in the way the narrator feels sorry for the white kids who cannot read the lay of the creek: this is the opposite direction to that in which cross-cultural ‘pity’ normally flows. Overall, The Gap performs one of the important traditional tasks of verse: to insist on a point of view which is otherwise neglected or discounted.

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