OPEN results – NZPS International Poetry Competition 2026

OPEN JUDGE’S REPORT – ANNA JACKSON

There is something very contradictory about the idea of a poetry competition.  Any poem is a winning poem, in that by taking words and bringing them into a newly significant arrangement, a moment is commemorated, a conversation is evoked, a scene visualised, symbolic resonance given to an image or a story.  Something has been made out of nothing.

As the poet Jackson McCarthy wrote recently in a Poetry Shelf interview, “Poetry probably isn’t necessary, strictly speaking. It doesn’t happen because somebody thought it financially viable or ethically responsible or somehow socially vital. But in the bombed cities, the wasted homes, the dishevelled places, poems are still being written; poems are still being written in Palestine. And so one of the reasons that artmaking remains radical is that its existence alone suggests, or even speaks into reality, however briefly, an alternative system of value.”

Reading the entries for this year’s poetry competition opened up a space for me in that alternative system of value, a space given over to memory, play, conversation, reflection, emotion, intimacy, rage, nostalgia, anticipation and the connection to place.  I read about black-currants and blue cheese, firewalking and whale logic, charity collectors at the supermarket, the mating cry of the last matuku bird, a whipper-snapper for tidying garden edges, a shining silver cloud, a Sahara frog, a medlar tree and beds of rhubarb.  I overheard conversations between friends, and soliloquies with the self.  There were some beautiful punctuation marks, some surprising line breaks, some appealingly ordered stanzas.  I had a beautiful time.

But with so many entries to read, I often had to move on too quickly.  Not to longlist a poem felt dismissive, even or especially after saying “I like this!” or “True.”  But with over 600 poems entered into the competition, I couldn’t read every poem over and over again.  If yours wasn’t in the list of 20 commended or highly commended poems, perhaps I moved on too quickly, or perhaps it wasn’t really a poem that belonged in a competition pool but had a different kind of purpose.  Some of the poems I read would mean most to one or two people, who I really hope will be given the chance of reading them.  Many of the poems would read beautifully at an open-mic poetry reading, or to poet friends, and many I hope to come across again if they are sent out to poetry journals, either print journals or online. 

The long-listed entries were ones I returned to again and again, and each time I liked them more.  There were more long-listed entries than I could include in the list of commended poems, and every one of the nineteen poems listed, as well as several others, could have been a place-getter.  These poems are distinctive, thought-provoking, memorable, surprising, and went beyond anything I knew I was looking for. 

I could not choose between the four winning poems, so stretched the rules with a third-equal place. There are so many different ways for a poem to be excellent.  loved them all.

FIRST:

Presynaptic

Shey Marque, Two Rocks, Western Australia

This poem, about trapped words, a pebble language, the difficulty of expression, is itself beautifully composed and perfectly paced, taking its time over two sonnet-length stanzas to attend to the effects of presynaptic dysfunction in Parkinson’s and autism.  The imagery, both literal and figurative, is vivid and precise, and the experiences, both immediate and remembered, set out with clarity and what feels like patience.  Reflecting on her time as a writing instructor, the poet Elizabeth Bishop complained that so many of the writing students “seem in a hurry to get it over with” – but this feels like a poem that has been written with care and a respect for the process of composition.  Words are perfectly chosen – the raven “aching” on the fence, the voice “sand-like,” the hint of “soft” catastrophe watering the eyes.  These aren’t the expected words – they could only have been arrived at through a commitment to radical precision, trying to express something very particular very exactly. 

SECOND:

Fittings

Rose Anderson, Ōtautahi, Christchurch

There is so much going on in this deceptively artless-seeming poem about friendship, time and the intimacies of the fitting room.  This is a close friendship – the poem begins “I know what your house looks like,” not only indicating the familiarity of the friends but through the second-person address drawing the reader in – though the reader, unlike the speaker and the friend, is left uncertain about where the friendship stands in the present. The way the poet works with time is masterful, moving backwards with a glimpse of a girl “in the street the other day” who resembles the friend, or at least “has your hair colour,” prompting the anecdote about the fitting room incident that gives the poem its title.  Oh, the intimacies of the fitting room!  It is the perfect place – like the stanza of a poem – for both the intimacy of close friendship, where you trust your friend to tell you, honestly, how you look, and for the random, unexpected intimacy with a complete stranger who, overhearing your private conversation (private except taking place in public), is moved to join in.  Does the purchase of another orchid suggest the friendship is still being sustained, even though “it is much colder here,” or does the reference to what doesn’t last extend to a friendship that is no longer what it was?  It seems like the kind of friendship worth holding on to, in the capacious stanzas of a poem like this one.

THIRD:

The Last Straw

Nigel Skjellerup, Ōtautahi, Christchurch

I loved the simplicity of this poem, with its image of the blade of grass spared by the reel mower recalling both the poem by Catullus (number 11), which ends with the image of a flower cut down by a plough, and C K Stead’s updating of it in a version with a Masport Mower cutting down a lawn daisy. In this poem, all we have is a grass stalk, but it is a canny stalk which has deliberately grown sideways out over a gutter, not only out of the way of the mower but poisoned with road fumes.  So there are twists upon twists in this short poem, more tightly wound than it might at first appear, ending with an offering of bitterness that is no offering at all for the lover being addressed, but surprisingly refreshing from a reader’s point of view. 

THIRD EQUAL:

On the Kererū Ward

Mary Rainsford, Whanganui

We meet so many characters, so fast, in this poem, with Natalie discussing hospital socks in the first line, Lisa apologising herself to sleep in the second, Matthew coming in at the start of stanza two, Murray writing at the end of the stanza, his laugh taking us to the end of the line and the silence that he laughs into not picked up till the line continues in stanza 3.  I love this array of voices and people, this roll-call of people’s names, and the way the details are so perfectly placed to move our attention across line breaks and down the stanzas.  Like the graffiti that might read “hell” until you see it reads “hello,” there is a movement back and forth between trauma and comedy, between the bottomless loneliness of individual hunger and the community-building activities that fill the poem and give it so much life and liveliness.

ANNA JACKSON