Yeats Poetry Competition 2021

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Judges Report

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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.

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Highly Commended Poems  (in no particular order                                                                   

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Jenny Pollak                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

 

NSW                                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                           

   

Lesson                                                                                                                                               

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Say this is the lesson:

 

with the shadow fleeting

then with the swallows

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backlit

like embroidery

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When they come from behind fast

and disappear in shade

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it's a reminder

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When they shine like two knives in air

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the lesson is

to keep trying

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                                                                              The dead are their bones

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                                                                                     and then their bones

                                                                                                    completely

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                                                                                 The families are bereft

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                                                                                        There are no signs

                                                                             unless the ones we make

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                                                                  We place great store in the birds

                                                                                                 who also die

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                                                                                          and whose bones

                                                                                                    also vanish

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Today its a whipbird

cracking its song on the blind cliffs

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Which send it back 

Which makes the darkness

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blacker than before

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The way a knock will make a house

appear

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more vacant

when it stays

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unanswered

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                                                             The birds are singing note for note

                                                                                     the shape of the hill

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                                                                                     The thing the hill is

                                                                                            in this moment

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                                                                                                            being

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                                                               How no other shape can be made

                                                                                        without lessening.

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The sea is on time

also

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the sun

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The hill

the eucalypts

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the boats on their mooring       All of them

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complicit

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Leaning towards the exact measure

that the earth,

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which also curves to the tune of something

that has already being named,

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hums

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Judges comments:Whilst ostensibly about birds, the strong imagery & interesting form, reminiscent of Snyder, 

retains the reader's attention throughout.

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Tug Dumbly

 

Domestic

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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?

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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.

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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'.

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Judges comments: A poem to be enjoyed, with its play between 'Wild Swans at Coole', the writer's

language following much the same cadence & patterns, and Beethoven's Emperor Concerto.

The central argument is appealing.

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Ron Pretty

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NSW

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Peacocks

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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.

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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.

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Commended Poems

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Alison J Barton

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Victoria

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Diary

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Monday

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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.

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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.

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Thursday

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Found no beauty today but what I already had. Forgot to leave burdens alone.

A disassemblage contained the sun like birds and monoliths.

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We lived here when this street was foreign to me. We were a paradise to be

ruined. Rain could not help us now.

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I sensed something was right, my heart like an attack.

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Saturday

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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.

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The night-time

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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.

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Tuesday

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A black-out wound through like fire, hunted and trialled my mistakes both

minor and fatal.

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What you sewed could not be untangled. They break doors down falling

through like an ocean.

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Friday

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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.

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Sunday

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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.

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Wednesday

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They say I am queen, that my grandmother was a bushland dweller, both grand and mother. They say the earth

tremored me.

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Denise O'Hagan

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NSW

 

In Among the Ruins, Love

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After Cupid and Pysche, Ostia Antica, Rome

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I tread the wide slabbed stone street, lined

With pines, thinking that those ancients knew

How to build a road alright. Passing the half-

Shell of an amphitheatre, the grid lines of

Tenements, remains of shops of wheat and

Wine and other goods, some with deities still

Rubbled at their doors, I come at last to stand,

As we stood so many times before, on the

Pale tessellated floor where, raised clean

Among the mosaics and sunbaked bricks

They stand, twin torsos, pedestalled: Cupid,

Accidental victim of his mother's ploy, in a

Marbled embrace with Pysche, beauteous

And unwitting prompter of so much envy.

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You used to bring me here, too fractious

A child to be constrained by an apartment.

Meet at the statuettes in twenty minutes!

You'd say, and off I'd run; what would I give

To turn back now to you. I no longer wonder

What happened to their legs or why their

Eyes are blank, but fancy I can still feel --

As I watch a lizard slowly cross Psyche's

Polished thigh -- in among the ruins, love.

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Note: The statue referenced here is located in the House of Cupid and Psyche at Ostia Antica. In classical mythology, Venus (Aphrodite, Gr.), mother of Cupid (Eros, Gr.),

being jealous of the exceptional beauty of Psyche (soul, Gr.), instructed him to shoot a golden arrow into Psyche which would cause her to fall in love with whomever

was in front of her; instead, while contemplating her, Cupid accidentally scratched himself with his own arrow, and was instantly and permanently smitten.

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Kerry Bonnie

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Spring in Albuquerque

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The car accident happened at 20mph in a parking lot

on campus. The passenger side, where I sat, was struck,

and I watched the other driver through my window,

her daydream, cracking like a cicada's exoskeleton

as she realised what was happening, the breeze coming

in through the windshield all over her skin. We could have made

eye contact it was so close, so slow. Shock can roll

down the body like this: leisurely kiss along the shore,

and wondering where it might end--the gentle line of white-

wash they call the break.

                     

                                       You were driving me to a dance class

before the car accident, and I said, Its ok, I can walk there.

I still have time. You took me by my shoulders, and said, up close:

Baby, you've just been in a car accident. You are not going

to any dance class. Everything seemed like A Big American Deal

to me. Eventually I agreed to stay, to provide a police report

on this very slow accident and let my idea of the future float away

for one evening. Later, we ate curry at a Thai restaurant with

a lopsided drive-through bay, faded image of a burrito

below the 'Lotus Palace' sign. I stared at the sheen-black

countertop flecked with grains of rice, pale fingerprints, wondering

who really lost the plot?

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                                       The insurance company said our car

with a single  dented door

was a write-off. They paid for us to see an osteopath, and

when she asked how my neck pain had started, I told her

it was the car accident. She leaned over her clipboard,

ticked some boxes. The her fingers found the knots

that were there always there, always returned. Not long after,

you went away. That last day

I was getting Raphael ready for the playground. Holding him,

trying to dress myself, strange fractals of panic in my throat

and

a phone call that split the seam of my life with its noise, white

ringing in my ears.

                              For weeks I woke into the deserted bed--

two thoughts only in my head: You had gone to work early

in our new car. I would meet you later on your lunchbreak.

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Then your face a ghost up close to mine in the grey bedroom

the breeze dusting my shoulders from the open window

everything split wide and something cold that was not

the air but my own skin, raw and not yet real--

But (let me past you, I know where I'm going)

if I could just lift Raphael over the crack, we might reach

the playground still, find you waiting outside your office

on campus at lunchtime. Itr's ok, we can walk there.

We still have time.

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Tug  Dumbly

 

Taste

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A dead Snapper in a fishshop window

is lovelier than a sports car,

the scales, the fins, the whole design,

the brutal set of the mouth,

slanted like a One Nation picket line.

But no politics for fish, something deeper:

look into that jellyblack eye and see

what it saw that last day at sea,

what rocks, what wrecks and weeds,

what crabs and creatures,

all the wee fishies aswim in the yeasty

deep, under a churning ferry,

through the gangrened legs of a pier,

scooting some undersea canyon,

echo sounded gully, valley, trench.

Tell me how it was dear fish,

that last day you were took from your self,

what frolics before you were hooked,

trawled, scooped from the shelf.

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Jonathan Cant

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Sydney

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Audible Lines

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I

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I am

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I am the Road am I, the roadsong sung on high--potholed, stoned. All dangerous curves

       and black ice. Miss Rock 'n' Roll Roadkill at your (next) service.

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I am the shoulder you cry on for the one who left--or stayed too long. Now so far away.

       Destiny and ley: a lay in the distance or some future happenstance.

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I am all pent up with pentameter and spent kilometres--you know Who. The Great

       Grey Serpent with a misspent youth of feckless, reckless acceleration.

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I am an old typewriter ribbon unspooled, indigo ink spilled like sperm, a semi-permanent

       spot on the horizon--a vanishing point of no return.

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I am the Mercurial One always going somewhere. Your possessions will pass you

       just south of here--though better to be Possessed than to owe on "Paradise".

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I am the Blues tone. Bluestone and bitumen. (Bitch, you mean!) Momentum's nine-tenths

       of the law. Your secret flaw, a needle to the red, the thread, tread, and trouble ahead.

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I am the highway sign assaulted--peppered with pellet holes and menace, the rock that

       slipped, the fallen eucalypt, a guardrail you clipped.

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I am the reverse camber, the perverse camper, the fatal distraction or cheap, roadside

       attraction, the neon greasy spoon, your favourite mixtape tune.

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I am the hitcher's uneasy currency, a pearl necklace string of places, a million

       half-forgotten faces in deadly, high-speed chases.

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I am the way to Curio City. Curiosity: what's your rush, Driver? Voracious Striver?

       You devour my towns like a Pac-Man! Pull over and check out the scenery.

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I am the high way, the road you decided to take. It was I

       who kept you awake with my audible lines.

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I am the Road am I--come with me, Ami!

 

I am

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I

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Tracey-Anne Forbes

 

Queensland

 

University Lake

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There is a quietude upon the lake

When early evening falls in drifting mist

And echo cries of lone ducks and swans

Seem like the homing calls to those they miss

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Sometimes a flash of pewter silver shines

As last light catches on a quiet splash

And lilies close their starburst flower folds

And all the glow of day becomes as ash

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On days when loneliness hung like a haze

For all the world I'd known was far away

And love was lost with nothing in its place

As faith in God and fate faded to gray

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I sought the lake. I sought its soothing peace

Its languid lapping at my fretful feet

Its promise that all rounds of life and dreams

Were constant on its shores and in its deeps

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Now forty years have passed: I seek it still

This ink-dark mirror shot with shards of green

This lake that lifts the mind, that shifts the heart

This place of what is there and what is seen

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Here still the swans alight to meet and mate

Ducks yet waddle, squabble, reverberate,

The darkening still claims that light must go

But night will end, and in its ending, glow.

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Richard James Allen

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NSW

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Today, continued

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I see you've got your own private wolf.  A history of toys.

The horrors of sleep.  I love your password.

You and the blue sky.  I've kept your secret all my life.

Death will be a good place to hide it, as good a place as any.

Suicide on a Tuesday.  Why stave off death, isn't it the big finish

We've all been waiting for?  Then we can head off

To the after party to join all the darlings we have killed.

I don't walk the dog.  I walk the emptiness.

Don't judge a book by its abracadabra.

This isn't the sonnet at the bottom of the escalator

Or the idea of Christmas in the tangible hotel.  When I go,

I want to leave behind more than the smell of roses.

Remember, human history includes typos

And successful people never look down.

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