First Prize
Awarded to
Isi Unikowski
Canberra
for his poem
Who among the angels will find you if you move?
Unfazed by the coast road, we welcomed the challenge
of beaches heaped with wrack and kelp,
the uncertainty of estuaries gargling inland.
Neither offered nor seeking the locals' help
we volunteered to take the King's shilling
and gusted forth in an armada of vans
to appear beside unsuspecting straits,
bearing our strange totem across blanched tundras,
down cool corridors of shade beside dry-stone lanes
or out from some eternal grimy nowhere under
a fire-escape into midday-cambered street,
all on the assumption we had a lien
on any place with a name or GPS coordinate.
In lairy parkas or Hawaiian shirts we took our snaps;
and if sometimes the aperture missed a turning,
no-one could accuse us of a major lapse
in plying our trade: nothing made us deviate
around the patriarch and his ageing wife yearning
under the terebinth, or those doomed towns on the savannah.
Our lenses were the centre of a circle that is everywhere;
the cursor receding, as if fending
off retirees in their motorhomes, schoolkids on cycles.
We laid chevrons down on macadam like manna,
to be gathered as directions demanded; found
opportune rams in their thickets, junk food scraps,
billboards and graffiti; filled our jars
from the remorseless shaduf
of history's resentments; in chic boulevards or dusty bazaars
you could find us portrayed in antique maps
as cherubs puffing zephyrs of reproof
at the gaps left by burned, abandoned villages.
Our wings cover our eyes; your faces
grow unclear, blurred by the time we must
have spent out there, hurrying past all the places
we could not or would not go, a triage
of what had to be recorded so faithfully,
so faithfully missed.
Isi Unikowski is a Canberran poet, who has been widely published in Australia and overseas. His published poetry can be
viewed at https://www.isiunikowski.net/.
His first collection, Kintsugi, is forthcoming in August 2022 from Puncher & Wattman, New South Wales.
Isi will receive his Prize Certificate at The Hill of Content Bookshop 85 Bourke Street, Melbourne, and read his poem on Saturday July 9 next. 2. 00 to 3.30 PM All welcome.
The following poets work was
Highly Commended
(No particular order)
Lesson
Jenny Pollak
Domestic
Tug Dumbly
Peacocks
Ron Pretty
The following poets
work was Commended
(No particular order)
Diary
Alison J Barton
Christmas Day 2021
Anne Casey
Aisling
Anne Casey
In among the ruins, love
Denise O'Hagan
Spring in Albuquerque
Kerry Bonnie
Taste
Tug Dumbly
Audible Lines
Jonathan Cant
University Lake
Tracey-Anne Forbes
Today, continued
Richard James Allen
Yeats Poetry Competition 2021
Judges Report
We would encourage all entrants to this competition to keep in mind that this competition is named in honour of W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), whose life and worl drew upon several strong streams of lived experience. One hopes that entrants have read
at least a basic biography, be familiar with the wondrous variety of his works, as well as the canons of European literature. Not that pale imitations of Yeats are being sought, but his poems could well be explore as models and inspiration.
More than 150 poems were received, and there was a great range of subject matter, variations in style and in craft. Accordingly, the judges had much reading and deliberation before deciding on their final choices.
The best offerings successfully maried emotion, thought and form, paying attention to the decencies of poetry.
Highly Commended Poems (in no particular order
Jenny Pollak
NSW
Lesson
Say this is the lesson
with the shadow fleeting
then with the swallows
backlit
like embroidery
When they came from behind fast
and disappear in shade
its a reminder
When they shine like two knives in air
the lesson is
to keep trying
The dead are their bones
and then their bones
completely
The families are bereft
There are no signs
unless the ones we make
We place great store in birds
who also die
and whose bones
also vanish
Today its a whipbird
cracking its song on the blind cliffs
Which send it back
Which makes the darkness
blacker than before
This way a knock will make a house
appear
more vacant
when it stays
unanswered
The birds are singing note for note
the shape of the hill
The thing the hill is
in this moment
being
How no other shape can be made
without lessening
The sea is on time
also
the sun
The hill
the eucalypts
the boats on their mooring All of them
complicit
Leaning towards the exact measure
that the earth,
which also curves to the tune of something
that has already being named,
hums
Tug Dumbly
Domestic
Just quilting and unraveling the thing.
Penelope was probably happy doing that,
flattered by a bunch of oily freeloaders
she didn't have to touch, the toyed with
idea of an absent husband better by far
than the smelly goatish fact of him
turning up with ten years of BO and VD
from a Boys Night Out battling monsters
and fucking witches on the high seas.
Who could live up, or down, to that?
And then what? Him at home endlessly
jawing his tales, like a pub bore, fisherman's
fables about the one that got away
head and tail growing more between the hands
with each deadly retelling; poor Cyclops
ever expanding, like an accordion, from
the wretched one-eyed shepherd they bullied
into a multi-storied ogre of awe.
Or him off his face on Lotus flowers, imagining
his faulty smoke alarm as a Siren call.
Yes, what a treat, 'King Odysseus', bored
to shit down on the farm, stumping about
pulling fat Elvis karate kicks at menacing
olive trees, bellowing up a nightly meat feast
for him and his pissed mates, berating his
kid for being a pale bedwetting vegan Goth
who brings home the wrong kind of dates . . .
No, all things considered, tried for size on,
better to tip Border Patrol: 'hey, he's on the horizon'.
Ron Pretty
NSW
Peacocks
When the rain came that afternoon, I
put on the Emperor. At first I thought
it was the peacock strutting on the roof
scrabbling around, but no, it was
the downpour flooding the damp ground.
I had seen them earlier, the peacocks
head to head, cock to hen in what appeared to be
avian affection. Washed away, I shouldn't doubt,
in the downpour that followed. Lovers
caught in the rain often find passion
drying with the return of the sun. I wonder
if I'll see those birds so intimate again.
Perhaps it was the rain souring my mood
or perhaps just the slow movement
of the concerto feathering my melancholy.
Ludwig had no plumage. He found
a deeper brilliance than any peacock blue,
but his lady students found him dull,
even in some ways a turkey. Each of those
beautiful talented girls declined his affection,
went looking for glossier birds. By then
he could not hear the rain, but saw
that look on their faces and fed it
into the slow movement of the Emperor
while winter washed the streets of Vienna.
Commended Poems
Alison J Barton
Victoria
Diary
Monday
Slept with pages in my eyes. Troughs undermined our mouths. We wanted to
believe in the underworld.The retreat to silence failed: rules were without a
game.
While thickets grew in green, summer would be black. A stay in a flowerbed
of lavender sheets split petals down the centre. Each year this garden will fill
me with water.
Thursday
Found no beauty today but what I already had. Forgot to leave burdens alone.
A disassemblage contained the sun like birds and monoliths.
We lived here when this street was foreign to me. We were a paradise to be
ruined. Rain could not help us now.
I sensed something was right, my heart like an attack.
Saturday
The moon covered half your face and stencilled your shoulder. I managed my
grief, filled your space with the brazen tips of my fingers, relaxed back to
tense, landed somewhere I did not recognise.
The night-time
Neither of us uttered your name. We were made of the city, where our
stars used to be. The weight of a ribbon from birth to fluid.
Tuesday
A black-out wound through like fire, hunted and trialled my mistakes both
minor and fatal.
What you sewed could not be untangled. They break doors down falling
through like an ocean.
Friday
I diagnosed a freind between the colours that morphed to descending lines on
fleshy skin maps, a aheavy grey. Broached subjects softly or not at all, gave
away hatchlings in place of you.
Sunday
I am worse for asking. I grip questions so tight that my tied heart told me not
to and broke stories of silent families in cement. We bridge the night.
Wednesday
They say I am queen, that my grandmother was a bushland dweller, both grand and mother. They say the earth
tremored me.