There are clearly many poets writing—and writing well—in Australia today. It has been a pleasure to be able to read and share this sample of their work.

It was a great honour and pleasure to act as a judge for this year’s prize, and I extend my thanks to Declan Foley for organising it and to Dr Matthew Ryan for co-judging with me. Thanks also to Kris Hemensley for hosting the bestowal of awards at Collected Works bookshop.

Judging the Yeats Poetry Prize for the first time this year, I was surprised and pleased by the general high quality of the entries. Of course, that doesn’t make our job of selecting prize-winners any easier, but it does mean that the process of reading and evaluating the poems is an incredibly rewarding one. Being forced to make time over several days to sit down and read poetry closely, to focus not only on what we like but why—to have an eye open for deft execution, an ear alert to phrasing that achieves a natural music—reminds us why we read and love poems in the first place. In this report, I endeavour to shed light on what so impressed us about the prize-winning poems.

Damen O’Brien took home the first prize this year, along with a joint-second prize. His first prize-winning poem, “A Sky Empty of Birds”, imagines an alternate reality characterised by just such an absence. Although it was the 100^th poem in my stack of 106 entries, its clarity of vision and structure stood out immediately. Progressing from a reflection on how our experiences and cultural touchstones would be different in a world without birds, the poem then performs its central turn—a neat philosophical sleight—with great assurance. Insisting on some other, nameless lack, it challenges us with the unanswerable question, “What have we lost to gain the sound of birds?”This poem, with its allusions to ancient mythology, feels nonetheless incredibly timely. It appeals to some eternal, innately human sense of deficiency, a tendency to feel cheated and a certainty of loss which in our time manifests itself as FOMO, as post-secular spiritual yearning, and perhaps in the global swing towards a conservativism that fears its traditions and cultures are being eroded by endless outsiders. “A Sky Empty of Birds” speaks also to our inescapable awareness of impending climate crisis. Its eco-critical message packs a punch by illustrating the extent of the loss we face in our age of extinction.

            I read de-identified copies of the entries when judging the Prize and never suspected that the same person authored both “A Sky Empty of Birds” and the second prize-winner, “Slow Things.” A testament to O’Brien’s mastery across different styles of poetry, this was the only entry in rhyming verse to receive a prize. There is considerable skill involved in writing in rhyming verse, where the formal and audible elements of a poem must be balanced against it meaning without either part being constrained or warped by the other. While most of us can rhyme, few of us can transcend the limitations of rhyming forms or avoid lapsing into hokeyness, yet, with “Slow Things”, O’Brien succeeds and achieves an easy gracefulness in spite of the considerable density of his poem’s language. For me, the poem recalls Gerard Manly Hopkins’ own great hymn to the mundane, “Pied Beauty”, taking a similar pleasure in motley consonants and polysyllabic words. In speaking the poem aloud, the reader is forced to adopt the same slow-and-steady approach that the poem describes and simply enjoy its meandering variations. Like “Pied Beauty”, it pulls off a marriage of precise, earthy imagery and abstract themes, in doing so transforming unlovely imagery—including stains, mould and skin cancer—into something profound and worthy of contemplation.

            The other second-prize-winner was “Dubai Hotel Stop-Over” by Helen Thurloe. This deceptively simple poem is essentially a series of snapshots of a place through the eyes of a tourist, yet it steers clear entirely of superficiality and easy clichés. A critically insightful poem, it exposes complex layers of cultural and gendered power-relations and inequality, as illustrated by Thurloe’s beautifully understated depiction of the relations between Arab men, Filipino pool attendants and the white female Westerner. Capturing an interface of tradition and modernism, the natural and the artificial, the poem prompts reflections on the nature of authenticity and on the very possibility of authentic presence and authentic experience for an outsider or tourist. Imagery of women in traditional garb and their “Disney-clad children” also draws attention to the impact of Western cultural influence and locates that cultural exchange in a broader, inequitable economy that, in its most pernicious form, results in the enslavement of migrant workers. It is an economy in which the tourist is inevitably complicit. Thurloe’s neat, three-line stanzas serve to contain and focus these reflections very effectively while reinforcing impressions of separateness and alienation. It is in this three-line cage that we encounter a “Sudanese doorman” whose being likened to “Ted Hughes' jaguar” expresses both the entrapment and the dignity of the modern-day slaves whose plight is commonplace throughout the UAE and its neighbours.

            Nine poems were Highly Commended in this year’s prize, and these represented an astonishing breadth of styles and contemporary voices.

John Bradley’s “I Was the Boy” is commanding in its simplicity. Memories recounted with disarming directness nonetheless convey a complex mix of emotions: solemnity, election, nostalgia and the curious pleasures of ritual, even in sad circumstances.

Tim Collins’ “Detention” is rendered enigmatic and affecting by the interplay between the title and the content. On the surface, this is merely a light-hearted meditation on a landscape, yet the observer’s intimate familiarity with the scene over the course of a day and a year prompts the reader to wonder “where he is” and about the nature of his “detention,” reframing the poem as a glimpse into a mind in captivity. Collins’ also wrote “Always His Theatre”, another deeply contemplative poem, which transforms the unseen side of a theatre curtain into a symbol for the underside of memory, full of irrelevant details and moments of inattention that make up a large part of what we are left with of the past and those who have passed.

            Kim Waters’ bitingly self-aware, ekphrastic poem “On Barti Kheer's Six Women” uses white space very effectively. It seems to evoke the absence, from both this poem and the sculpture it describes, of the very women both seek to depict. As such, Waters draws attention to her own involvement in a particular kind of ‘prostitution’ practised by artists throughout history, who simultaneously made use of sex worker’s bodies while erasing their identities. Irene Wilkie’s “The Eye Beholding” is similarly self-aware, a poem that reflects on the impossibility of translating experience into language even as it does so with aplomb. Wilkie’s writes an arresting, disorienting collage of impressions in which varied metaphors accumulate, nouns become verbs, and sensations and times collide. The result is both excess and wonder.

Amelia Theodorakis’ delightfully multisensory portrait of infatuation, “Watching for bats without you”, illustrates the classic tension between purely enjoying the other and seeking validation from another. As the lust and fascination that initially promises the speaker a kind of momentousness soon apparently threaten to unmake them, their determination to instead expand themself by “growing my hair” becomes a small triumph of self-assurance. “Love Sculpture (Annette)” by Mark Mordue is another failed love-story that addresses a similar problem from a different angle. This time, the lover reveals an inability to ‘make’ their beloved into their image of her: she is not, in the end, clay. The cowardice evident in the poem’s ending—where the speaker defers to what they are told rather than accounting honestly for what they see and for the evident significance of carefree embraces—is poignant and almost Chekhovian.

            “Searching for Truths I wake up early” by Jenny Pollack is a love-song to the ocean, a skilful variation on the theme of the ocean as symbol of both life and death. Pollack’s ocean is personified so vividly and with such personality that it’s only in the second stanza that it becomes clear this is not, in fact, a woman that we’re glimpsing through the trees. Damen O’Brien’s “Signs and Semiotics,” on the other hand, is a love-song to cinema, a breathless showreel of Hollywood moments and techniques. As endless filmic analogies ultimately obscure the present moment and the imminence of loss, the poem illustrates the key paradox of signification: the impossibility of ever getting, through signs, to the thing itself.