The 2015 Glen Phillips Poetry Prize

THE 2015 GLEN PHILLIPS POETRY PRIZE:

PRESIDENT’S COMMENTS

It is fitting that Shane McCauley has judged this competition. He is an established writer with eight books of poetry published, includingThe Drunken Elk and Trickster. He was awarded the Max Harris Prize in 2008 and the Poetry d'Amour award in 2014. He is acknowledged as an outstanding Western Australian poet and we are privileged to have him judge our last competition in our 20th Anniversary year.

It is always pleasing to see such a strong field of entries and to receive some from our younger community members. Poetry is an interesting genre as it takes many differing forms. For some of us, contemporary poetry can be challenging and appreciation takes time and effort. I want to thank Shane for showcasing awarded poems with considered comments that provide insight into their effectiveness.

Congratulations to all our award winning poets and thank you to all those who entered their poems for consideration. Please do continue to work on your ‘art’ and develop your skills in poetry writing.

A big thank you to all of our volunteers who make these competitions possible, in particular Gayle Malloy and Robyn Negus for co-ordinating and processing all of the entries and awards.

JUDGE’S REPORT

It is always a privilege and a mark of great trust to be asked to judge a poetry prize, and this year’s Glen Phillips Poetry Prize is no exception. There were 129 entries and the overall quality was extremely high. In fact, I can’t recall judging another competition in which I had such a long short-list, if you’ll forgive the oxymoron. That makes a final selection and ordering very difficult, and I will say a little more on that later.

The subject matter was extensive, from the small scale and domestic to the far wider and serious current problems facing the world. There were many evocative poems about places, principally but not exclusively Australian. There were poems about parents and families, friends and lovers, poems of joy and grief. There were poems about libraries, exams, postmen, Aboriginal lore, animals, art, time, houses, islands. Even a poem about a matador! This demonstrates the great openness to subject and experience reflected by the freedom of modern poetry.

Does this freedom mean that anything goes? Not at all. Too often a poem can be so loose, so verbose, so lacking in the vital concentration, intensity and precision of language that poetry still requires as to be but a scattering of words upon the page. I remember Les Murray telling our OOTA poetry class, some years ago, that what he looked for when choosing a poem was what he called the “ensemble”. At the time, this seemed rather generalised advice, but the more one considers it the more accurate it seems. A poem is to an extent like a piece of machinery which requires all its components to work, and each of those components complementing the others as efficiently as possible.

Although there were a few competent poems in traditional verse forms among the entries, the majority was in the form known for the past hundred years or so as Free Verse. This means that there is no regular rhythm nor rhyme scheme. But poetry is far more than metre and rhyme, important as these can be, and the Free Verse poet must compensate for what is lost or diminished when these elements are not present. Principally, he or she must become a master of imagery, must be mindful of the importance of sounds (alliteration and assonance and onomatopoeia), must consider the appropriateness of form, where to break lines, how and when and where to surprise the reader, how to begin and end. How to choose the right word from all the synonyms available. How to edit. There is much to be done.

This brings me back to the difficulties, not so much of identifying the strongest poems, but of trying to rank them in any purposeful way. What will become obvious from surveying the poems that I have selected is their enormous variety of tone, form and subject. And yet, for all their differences, they stood out for their energy, vividness, commitment to an idea or emotion, for their sheer ability to involve and to move one to engagement. They are all technically well-written and professionally presented, which is not always the case with competition entries. Now to the awards themselves, with firstly a few words on the Youth Category.

YOUTH CATEGORY

It was a wonderful principle to include a Youth Category award to encourage younger poets. They are certainly out there, as I know very well from having judged young poetry awards such as the Roland Leach Prize. Unfortunately for this current award, however, only two entries were received. Both had their very definite merits. “Impermanence” by Eloise Coomber (17 years WA) is a substantial and well-constructed expose of the teenage years (15, 17, 19) and the climb to maturity. It is image-rich indeed: “Strawberry seeded teeth”, “Rivers of sickly lavender milk”, “Blood lipstick and marbled floor” and much else. “Dark and Hidden” by Essence Atkinson (16 years WA) is a catalogue of the everyday routine of the young person’s life, the anxieties and uncertainties that go with growing pains. It is technically well written, making effective use of rhyming couplets. I wish both these poets well and encourage them to keep on writing and to enter future competitions. There is no formal award this year.

ADULT CATEGORY

SPECIAL MENTION

Before proceeding to the Commended, Highly Commended and place-getters, I should like to give Special Mention to six poems, and there could have been several more, but I felt I had to do a little pruning despite the real quality of many poems entered. I stress that I liked these poems very much indeed. They are, in no especial order: “Almond Tree in Blossom in a Car Wrecker’s Yard” by Jeff Guess (SA) (full of beautiful atmospheric and closely observed detail); “Naneh” by Hessom Razavi (Vic) (lush with references to Iranian culture and society); “October 31 - Samhain Festival” by Gail Willems (WA) (an emotional punch in almost every line: “we share wine and blood we have eaten time”); “The Prunus Tree” by Judith Green (Vic) (a gentle and lyrical meditation on time and memory); “Clear Water” by Edward Reilly (Vic) (not quite strictly a sonnet, but very similar in impact as it evokes a specific place - also terrific images such as: “the key would be a cold G flat,/ That almost purple shade creeping up the wall”); “Urban Haiku” by Rita Tognini (WA) (eight brilliant observations of urban life, such as “Cyclists”: “A Tour de Suburbs/ each weekend as pelotons/ perform latte stages.”)

COMMENDED

These are again in no ranked order: “Canto LXXIV. 6” by Chris Konrad (Vic). This manages to be both a critique and pastiche of the Canto-form by Ezra Pound, while using the structure to render images of the Australian suburbs, comments on the tragedies of overseas refugees, some Greek mythology, and a journey to hell, among other things! Ideas and images shoot off in all directions. It is in fact very Poundian, but also can only be the author’s.

“Blue” by Jan Napier (WA) is an ekphrastic response to Charles Blackman’s “Tryptych Alice” in the WA Art Gallery. When these poems work, as this one certainly does, it is because the other art work has sparked a chain of associations - still related to the painting, but also revealing the poet’s penchant for detail and close observation. There is some delightful fun with language: “In blunderland it’s the turtle that mocks” and “Daisies laugh from carpets” and the white rabbit wishes “that it wasn’t too late.”

“Dreams” by Hessom Razavi (Vic) is a very moving poem, evoking the Persian/Iranian past, in which the lost father visits the poet in a dream, or several of them. And the poet makes that dream real for us, too: “We hug,/ hard enough to bruise,/ as if bodies could merge to/ crush lost time. . .I wake/ from his cedar tree, arms like boughs.” It is beautifully restrained, displaying that while cultures may be different, love and grief are the same in all languages.

“Hansel and Gretel in Australia” by Rita Tognini (WA) also makes a comment on the relationships of different cultures to each other, in this instance using the metaphor of the fairy tale to render migrant experience, specifically the place of mother tongue (“the bones of our discarded speech”) versus the rather sinister if enticing lure of the new language (“we gorged that lexicon”). Controlled, clever and humorous.

HIGHLY COMMENDED

These are also not in ranked order. “Aftermath” by Josephine Clarke (WA) is another meditation inspired by a different art genre, in this case photographs about Black Saturday by John Gollings. From the opening line we are with the poet, leaving the outside world to “enter a room and find night in long stripes around the wall”. And what do we find? The tragic burnt landscape is conjured up, and as if there are no barriers, we have somehow been transported to this terrible place: “and underfoot the ash is soft, waiting for the wind”. Although we are told that “there can be no name for this”, the carefully chosen sparse and stark images and descriptions do in fact convey a very great deal. The impact is considerable.

“Double Symmetry” by Gail Willems (WA) is also descriptive, but this time we are in a landscape near the sea, where a wave “jetes across the bay”. But underlying this subtly evoked place is a sense of imminent parting or loss. The tone is almost that of a prayer (“Let there be grace”) but the elegiac is counterbalanced by a sort of defiance too: “Let there be dance”. The dance imagery infuses the poem, and despite the sadness, it is, perhaps, impossible to be completely melancholy while observing this surrounding dance of life.

“The Pain of Faces” by Carolyn Abbs (WA) ( is yet another example of the creative mind finding matter for thought after contemplating other types of art, in this case the huge sculptures of crawling babies that were a marvellous feature of this year’s Sculpture by the Sea exhibition at Cottesloe beach. Both the sculpture and the poet in turn revel in upsetting the stereotype - there is very little cute about these behemoths! They are of “mammoth proportion” and as “neat and purposeful as an elephant”. Strangest of all are the “Puckered bar-code faces”. Amidst the dark humour, there is also musing on the nature of creation itself (“Why the cruel disfigurement?” Why indeed?). A quirky and unusual poem that does justice to its infant begetters.

“the map breathes” by Kevin Gillam (WA) has a serene confidence from its very opening line: “at dawn, sea is breathing, the pylons like staves unplayed”. While essentially pictorial, there is such a control of rhythmical effects, such skilful enjambment, the movement from line to line and stanza to stanza, that sounds and pauses too play such a major part in, yes, the ensemble of this poem. There is lovely surprise in the phrasing and word-dislocations: “like hope might candle wax for more” and the final powerful line: “lost as story, as bottle dropped, as gulled, as dawn”. What a finish. Tremendous!

THIRD PRIZE

“A Lover’s Guide to Musical Terms” by Rita Tognini (WA). This is perhaps another of those poems that triumphs because of what might be called the ensemble-effect: title, structure, image and artifice, idea and emotive impact, the sustained double-entendres, all are drawn together with considerable thought and imagination. The poet, using musical terms from Pianissimo to Andante (“We move at heart’s pace”) to Andante Cantabile (“The voice of pleasure cannot be stilled”) and finally to De capo, Maestro!, guides us through the phases and variations of love and its play, its intensity (“It sings. It sings.”) and its ultimate understanding of “the pleasure of pleasure.” It is a delight from beginning to end.

SECOND PRIZE

From the delights of love to a far more sombre but no less artistically skilled rendering of the complex emotions of loss and grief in “Like a Diving Bell” by Tim Collins (Qld). At the centre of this unusual poem is an extensive and specific list of objects, some relatively commonplace, others quirkier and hinting at stories and mysteries (“one cuff-link with an image of an antelope (gold on brown)”). All these things (paper clips, string, buttons), if interpreted, could tell us much about the deceased. The narrator wishes to question these objects in a quest for understanding (“what magnetic reason stood behind the existence of each object”). But ultimately, the poet suggests, we take many of the secrets of who we really are with us. During this musing on death and personality there is some powerful poetic backgrounding: “the impasto petrol blue sky, the air rinsed of dullness by/ yesterday’s showers but still the remnants of pewter storm”). Like the poem’s subject, the poem doesn’t reveal all either, but there is a lot here to ponder, both in the craft and in the interrogation of life.

FIRST PRIZE

This poem, “The Hum of Being” by Chris Konrad (Vic), is an extraordinary and angry reproach aimed specifically at violent events happening in contemporary Mexico, especially in the area of Cuidad Juarez, where there have been hundreds of unsolved murders, drug trafficking on a huge scale, massive corruption, and almost every shade of human malevolence imaginable and unimaginable. Often anger and other intense emotion can get in the way of the poem, or the poetic, by becoming a harangue or diatribe or clumsy lament. But the poet here avoids this by making of the fabric of the poem a collage, of images, of lists, of personal identification and, most stunningly of all, the intervention of and dialogue with the finch. The finch is the voice of simple and not-so-common reason in the midst of chaos and cruelty: “take only yourselves/ knock on the door of the stranger to ask for food//play in the sun/get wet in the rain.” The unfathomable horror is likened to “walking in the wake of white noise”, the “Hum of Being” of the title. Although this poem has been called forth by anguish at this particular place of sordid brutality, it is also symbolic of all the brutal places currently on the earth, places in which what once might have been called humanity has been turned against itself, places where so many have behaved in such a way as to make null and void their claims to any such title as human being. This is (needless to say!) not a happy poem. But it is a powerful and necessary one, and fully deserving of the honour of this prize.

I congratulate the winners and all those mentioned and not-mentioned who entered this important competition. My thanks to all the hard-working people at the Peter Cowan Writers’ Centre who enable these events to take place. As I hope can be seen, even from my summaries and examples, the standard has been very high. It is more than likely that in other competitions, those specially mentioned or commended here may well have been place-getters. Be very proud of yourselves and keep that vital stream of poetry coming.

Thank you.

- Shane McCauley

26 October 2015