2021 Tom Collins Poetry Prize Judges Report

 

by Scott-Patrick Mitchell

 

Approximately 248 poems were entered into the 2021 Tom Collins Poetry Prize. Each new poem was like opening a portal into a poet’s unique world. In the space of three weeks I travelled across the country, into the bush, through oceans, deep into human souls, took shortcuts through aching suburban landscapes and found myself in awe with each new adventure. I was invited into homes, into relationships both budding and breaking down. At all times, the language was fresh and invocative. The overall experience was akin to snapshot after wonderful snapshot of a life beyond my own, yet lives that became instantly familiar the moment each poem was finished. 

 

It was no easy feat, judging a competition like this. One must create their own marking system by which to gauge each new poem. I looked for:

 

- poems that held my attention

- poems that used language in a way that was unique or exhilarating

- experiences that were reinvented through language to make them shine with empathy, compassion and light

- poems that brought detail to the front, so as to capture the eye and soul and lead it in new directions, into new discoveries of my own existence

 

Overall, the longlisted poems all did this. Then came the hard work of figuring out a shortlist.

 

Before that though, I would like to note that, contrary to popular opinion, I am actually a very big softie. There were a vast wealth of poems that captured the passion of the poet writing them. While the majority of these poems were not as technically proficient as they could be, they showed me poets who were in love with their craft, who were willing to take risks or play. Approximately 25 poems ended up with a love heart drawn on them, a symbol that the poem had indeed touched my heart, made it ache, made it smile, made it shine. Poems such as Who am I, Why my Home Country isn’t Home, Spearing Towards the Sky and the wonderfully titled Cryogenics and Ernest Hemingway – among many many others – were all touching poems. To these poets I say thank you: please know you were seen.

 

Now… the longlist was long. I managed to get 60 poems down to 34 and then from there to 20. It was hard, but by this point I was trusting my instincts, looking for poems that had emotional impact on multiple re-reads. I would like to acknowledge the following poets who made the longlist though. To Amy Crutchfield, Rhian Healy, Rita Tognini, Gerson Maller, Andrew Burke, Rose Van Son and Colleen Russell: your work was incredible. Absolutely incredible. Thank you.

 

So, now for the Commended, Highly Commended, and Top 3 Placements.

 

Congratulations to Anna Elliston whose poem bruny island district school thirty year reunion was Commended. A poem about returning home to Bruny Island, this piece was rich with sensory detail. The refrains of “island is calling you”, “island is written in you”, “island has given you gutdeep knowings” etc create an anthem of pulling, one that draws the reader into a landscape that is haunted by memory, one where “it is more than salt air / pulling you to / the homeness you seek”.

 

Congratulations to Alan Fyfe whose poem The Angel was Commended. There were surprisingly only a few suburban poems entered this year, and this was the best of the bunch. From the structured exact line lengths to the lifting up of the working class, this poem fizzes with imagery that makes the familiar broken and other. There is an astute holiness in what the ramshackle narrator observes, a divinity that elevates the everyday: “Riding surfboard thick soles down a wave of sticky tarmac; odyssey to / see the corpse of a god, its stretched form is a concrete tilt-slab shopping / gallery”. This is a poem of injured wonder, a piece that offers the reader a bristling shaken soul, unabashedly so.

 

Congratulations to Bron Bateman whose poem The Boys Who Dream of Winter was Commended. This a poem of beauty and violence, of youth cut short and the mothers who mourn such loss. I cried on reading this poem the first and second time, largely because its second half deals with the violent death of Matthew Shepard, an image etched into the psyche of every queer kid and adult who lived through the 90s. This poem, while a poem about violent death, is also a poem about vibrant life, where in the first half we are told that the boy’s “biggest problem until then was how to flow on the field / like slow electricity, sinew and bone, ribbons of breath / drawn in and let out like a party horn, held”. From the get go we know the poem will embrace release, finality and emergency. How we reach that is crafted superbly by a poet who knows how to hold tension, sensitivity and compassion in equal measures.

 

Congratulations to Shey Marque whose poem We, the he(a)rd, do not like to share this cabbaged country was Commended. In this piece, experimentation, bureaucracy and desire to find home all collide to create a tension that pulls at the reader. We are torn between red tape and the human desire of connection. Alternating stanzas remix words from an Australian Immigration case officer’s response to a visa application – these are stilted stanzas that jar and bicker, squabbling over the regulations of governance. The abrasiveness of these stanzas are mellowed by italicised stanzas that draw us into a world where “we can try to churn the great Milky Ocean” or watch as “one hundred birds / rose in slow spirals above the trees” The tension throughout is sustained, tight, almost nerve wracking. But the humanity of this poem ultimately shines through like “lamps of ghee”.

 

Now onto the Highly Commended entries, all three of which were short, sharp and contained yet also all reached toward an unknown liminal space.

 

Congratulations to Rafael S.W. whose poem Darning and Drowning was Highly Commended. My jaw dropped the first time I read this poem. I was struck by how sharp the images were, yet how they leant themselves to misdirection. This is a poem filled with dark humour and potentially dark subject matter. A confluence between darning, roof beams and birth / death emerges to strike the reader with such lines as “Everything you wore had to have its gaping mouth / stitched closed yearly”. The birth scene has a strange ambivalence to it, the imagery profoundly dark: are the father’s tears happy ones, or tears of grief? It’s this uncertainty that makes this poem so powerful, especially when we’re caught off guard by lines like “The possums / in the attic played midwife to the beams”. An intoxicating space, one I found myself returning to again and again, if only to bask in the masterful mystery it conjured.

 

Congratulations to Dick Alderson whose poem Butcher Bird was Highly Commended. Another short, startling poem, one where the celebration of life ebbs into an unknown liminal space of grief. The poet matches the butcher bird’s song to poetic forms, giving the bird wings on words as we travel a season in a short breath. This poem is well-crafted, tight, evocative. The tug between poet and subject is constant – “you sing in my sleep / to wake me” – and grows at times intimate in the power the poet gives the bird: “yesterday you sang shorter / brought haiku tree to tree”. As a meditation on mortality, this poem opens and bristles before pulling back sharply into lament. The effect is breath-taking and I found myself re-reading this poem, savouring the emotions it brought me each time.  

 

Congratulations to Renee Pettitt-Schipp whose poem Love (and lost for words) in a Time of Covid was Highly Commended. There weren’t nearly as many Covid poems as I expected, and I found that strange. That’s why when I came across one, I paid particular attention to see if it offered something new to the past two years and my word… THIS poem added so much. Which is interesting, because it’s ultimately a poem about reaching toward the unknown where “we need new nouns / for fragile privilege / dictionaries of modern deaths”.  In this world, nature, global calamity and the interpersonal are all given the same tenderness and attention, creating a space imbued with a democracy of love and compassion. It’s ultimately a love poem, but not before it carries the “sharpness of stars”, a “hammer of moth-wing” and “an index for fresh suffering” with equal duty of care, equal duty of witness.

 

Now for the three finalists.

 

Congratulations to Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon whose poem I’ve Been Dreaming About Eating Salmon has placed third in 2021 Tom Collins Poetry Prize. The instant I read this poem, I knew it was 3rd place. This is a poem with teeth. It bites. It tears. What begins as tenderness for dream-space quickly moves into social media paranoia doubled with the horror of Tasman salmon fishing. The poem then becomes a meditation on name and identity, although meditation is probably the wrong word – this is more of a rock song, something punk, an anthem pushing back against. The poem is “penned up in mandala-line nets”, a flux of zen and captivity. Ultimately, this is a performance poem of true worth, one that shines when spoken out loud because it’s here the poet’s anger rocks us on the vibration of voice.

 

Congratulations to Willo Drummond whose poem Ways of Seeing has placed second in the 2021 Tom Collins Poetry Prize. This poem is like a moon-struck fish, flitting through a pond: it is bright and shimmering, yet profoundly evasive. The language in this poem is beautifully crafted, is a joy to read. I believe it to be a poem about pregnancy – “Currently / you are stardust. / Not even // yet / a crescent” – but it could easily be a poem about the expectant arrival of love. Whatever the subject matter, this poem brims with melancholy and yet an ever-resounding hope: “I dream of conjunctions / luminous alignments / stackings of hope // in indigo night”. This poem bristles with life, yet has a perfected restraint that makes it yearn and reach with tender hands.

 

The 2021 Tom Collins Poetry Prize winning entry is a poem called from here. This poem also made me cry when I first read it. Again, this is a poem of tension, as we move from watching from a window to being wheeled down to a riverbank. The poem is at once both stilted and a rush of memory. It yearns on an incredible level as the narrator desires to join the river and “to follow my own slick mammal stream back up to / the surface”. This is juxtaposed by the act of witness where “pane shards into quarter tones of birds”. The volta, or reveal, at the end of the poem is a shock to the gut, a revelation that places the want and need into a heartbreaking context that leaves the reader aching. I shan’t reveal the ending and instead, I invite the winner to read their poem.

 

Without further ado… congratulations to Kevin Gillam, the winner of the 2021 Tom Collins Poetry Prize with his entry from here.