Please click on the title to read each winning  poem.

 

First Prize: Frankie McMillan, Christchurch - 'My father's balance/Le marriage des funambules'

Second Prize: Owen Bullock, Waihi - 'echo/reading Yunna Morits'

Third Prize: John Horrocks, Lower Hutt - 'Ordnance'

Highly Commended:

Tom Dowling (Ireland): ‘White frost'; Amanda Hunt (Wellington): ‘Overture'; Frankie McMillan (Christchurch): ‘Man with two legs'; Catherine Moxham (Palmerston North): ‘She tells you'; John O'Connor (Christchurch): ‘His first language is Japanese'; Pat White (Masterton): ‘Process/ remembering Christian Hugens, 1658'.

Commended:

Alison Denham (Waimangaroa): ‘Windmills and Beaches', and ‘Raspberry Money'; Janis Freegard (Wellington): The Wind and the Caterpillar'; Karen Goa (North Shore City): ‘Shoes'; Saradha Koirala (Wellington): ‘Echolalia'; Frankie McMillan (Christchurch): No money in Hungarians'; JM White (USA): ‘ "They shall entangle this world with iron" Wooden Cup'; Nick Williamson (Christchurch): ‘My father was a hare'; Cy Mathews (Dunedin): ‘Little Night Song'.

Judge's Report:

714 poems that arrived in various degrees of fitness, and all keen to make a claim for one of the finalist places in the 2009 International Poetry Competition. Poems in a very wide range of themes and forms and voices. To be read and reflected on and read yet again, especially those that made it through to the long-list, which initially came out rather ‘long' indeed at some 100 poems. Out of which I had to find three top prizewinners, a 1st, 2nd and 3rd; and then a combination of 15 poems Highly Commended and Commended. And all of which were in various ways and forms of saying, a pleasure to read.

When it came down to the short-listing of fifty poems, and then the short-list of contending finalists of some 25 poems, I began to see and hear the quality of the writing in both content and form, which made the end-run to the Finals difficult, but difficult by way of pleasure at having such a number of distinctive poems to choose from; at the same time a little frustrating because there were clearly more poems deserving of a ‘top spot' than there were places available. The delight in reading such a range of very accomplished poems quickened, but finally after a great deal of re-reading (all of which was aloud as well), I was able to settle on the finalists.

1st prizewinner, 'My father's balance/Le marriage des funambules' is a poem as metaphor in itself at the same time it is a very skilled enactment of, as the epigraph signals, "Le marriage des funambules". There is a robust sensibility of language that sharpens the detailed ‘narrative', so that there is that kind of clarity that can make a poem shine, in this case a fairly quiet kind of light - no flashy stuff going on here. From the very first reading, I kept returning to this poem for the pleasure of reading how finely tuned it is to both the eye and the ear. A poem that makes intimate the experience that it touches.

2nd prizewinner, 'echo/reading Yunna Morits'. On first reading 'echo' I felt strongly that it was going to end up as a finalist, and repeated readings confirmed that. One of those poems that presents the thing in order to convey the feeling, it allows the feeling to show in the words/ images through using a 'personified voice' that is both instinct with elegy and resonant with a (quiet) redemptive note. There is in the language a sensibility of shared feelings that is everywhere present, and that creates a sense of intimacy between the voice and its 'echo'; you could say, a conversation with its 'other self'. As well, it reads rather like a translation, or translation-version of one voice to the other, in itself a fascinating act of the imaginal.

3rd prizewinner, 'Ordnance'. A poem whose very title ends up saying more (and significantly more) than it appears to say at first glance, just as the object itself in the poem is more than a "mere unexploded/ordnance, a relic of old wars" A poem that extends what happens at one level into a brief meditation (in memoriam, rather) on a near-death experience and the "power of water"; and takes that into a deeper territory of meaning as we see and hear in "the force of ungovernable/transformation, stood bright/moments in the whirlwind". Rather than invent this is a poem that discovers - that understanding is one thing, 'knowing' is another.

In the Highly Commended grouping, there were a number of poems that kept wanting to make the top trio into a sextet or a septet of prize-winning estimables. In no particular order:

'His first language is Japanese' (I read it as a prose-poem), where fragments of experience - rather like a triptych of micro-poems in themselves - are scored to explore and show, in brief, the way the imagination and its associational fluency can "make words dream again" so that one day in this poem the "Bishop" might be "aware that he [is] about to be imagined by a tow truck."

'White frost' is very assured in what it has to say and the manner of its saying. A poem that digs deep, as it were, to say in a language that is clearly true to the occasion and itself, something that matters, and deeply so; that it is in the natural world that we confront ourselves most fully. A quiet lyric that looks through to the deeper places of understanding. One wouldn't want to alter or change or delete, or shift a word in this poem, so well composed as it is to sing, as they say, solo (with chorus in attendance).

In Overture there is a kind of easefulness of language that is at the same time quite animated in its crispness and feeling for how words can and do sometimes fly to each other with surprising results. A poem that takes some sharply observed particulars/details and opens them up to a deeper experience in which (again) an invisible knowingness is made visible as revealed in "and yet...every morning the first notes of a song/he already knows".

'Process' uses a good measure of wit, in that sense of good judgement about the seriously 'light touch' (used seriously), to talk about the ramifications of displaced passion (the territory of the obsessive-compulsive), and the fascination with duration, and time itself. Rather a 'Process' of much ado about something that resists itself, the reasons for which the poem leaves open to the curiosity of the reader, but says enough to give us a word-hold on what that might be. This is good prose turned to verse that brings us closer to what the words are up to on the way to any idea that might declare itself, as it says, in the 'process'.

Whatever else is happening (and there's lots) in 'Man with two legs', this is a poem that gives pleasure, and some delight, too. There is much to be said, and all of it good, that poems can do this particularly in the way that this poem does. The talent for using words for 'making strange' the ordinary, the neat and tidy and predictable (without settling for invention when discovery is the 'ticket', as they say), can create those 'quick surprises' that can lift a poem to a more imaginative way of seeing what's going on in the world inside and out, large or small.

'She tells you' is a finely crafted (love) lyric with I think not a word put wrong or gone astray. There's lots of word-music here. And when we listen to what's happening in that great hole behind words, we discover (because the poem makes that happen) that the voice of the loss of self-regard turned against itself, as it is here in the hurt heart, finally calls forth that 'other voice' - you could say the redemptive part of the self - that despite all "she sings in the morning/and it is light, not words/falling from her mouth"

Equally among the Commended set there were a number of poems that were always pushing to place themselves higher on the scale, as it were. Again in no particular order I can mention some of those:

The quite lovely canticle, 'Little Night Song' for its striking and provocative images and measured reticence, which in combination open the poem to any number of possible imaginings. A pleasure to read, rather a gem of a poem that resists too much knowing; that 'resists the intelligence almost successfully' (Stevens).

'Echolalia' for its exploration of 'learning to talk' through the imaginal, and the power of language to transform the ordinary into more than the predictable and what lies at the surface of a word's reach.

'Shoes' for the way it builds on a moment of recognition that results in a truth-to-telling of what happens when Eros makes an appearance in a story just waiting for the action; and for the way it uses the colour of local/dialect to very engaging effect.

Congratulations and a Bravo, too, to all the Prizewinners and those who placed as Highly Commended and Commended. 'Take a risk, trust your language, make a poem' still seems a modest but worthwhile proposal to me, so thanks are in order for making that happen.

Michael Harlow, June 2009


NZPS Home