The CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry: Shortlist 2003

Judges report

If 2002 saw a large representation by many of Australia's best-known poets, 2003 saw a quite extraordinary number of entries overall - over 70 collections from 30 publishers - and a very significant arrival of new poets. There were also several books that confirm the stylistic diversity current in published poetry: the continuing and growing devotion of Australian poets to the verse novel, with examples from Geoff Page (his second) Dorothy Porter (her third) John Jenkins (his first); the combination of poetry and script in the work of Alison Croggon and John Millett; and, among the first books, some very precisely crafted explorations in stylistics from Michael Farrell, Kate Fagan and Kate Lilley. These latter poets are already demonstrating a sure grasp of the experimental, if not the avant-garde, then the post-modern.

There was also a core group of established poets, some of whose work is now presented in Selecteds, from Sarah Day, Anthony Lawrence and, especially noteworthy, a powerful collection from Jill Jones Screens Jets Heaven which also featured a generous group of new poems. Other books by established poets that we would like to acknowledge are the sensual and linguistically rich poems in Timedancing by Jan Owen; the exact language, the poems on incarceration, in Medium Security by novelist and poet Louise Wakeling; The Islanders by Andrew Sant, a collection of intelligent and likable reflections on Tasmania; and Mangroves, the sophisticated and highly poised poetry of Laurie Duggan, publishing after a hiatus of several years.

Shortlist

The Fall by Jordie Albiston (White Crane Press)
There is much jouissance and quirky humour in these poems but they are also intense meditations on depression, love and the variable compulsions of the head and heart. Albiston has shifted away from the historical preoccupations of her earlier poetry, and using everyday language and a striking melodic precision she creates a strongly lyrical poetry of formal tightness and acute observation. This very direct confessional mode is disciplined by elegant rhythms and is leavened with inventiveness; and her darker explorations are braced with addresses to the beloved and the mediating power of poetry itself. Many of the poems appear as more than art - as divination, or as prayer. There is a deep spiritual dimension to this striking collection.

Goddess of Mercy by S K Kelen (Brandl & Schlesinger)
This new collection confirms S K Kelen as a poet of likeable exuberance and diversity. His latest poems include re-enactments of the most ironic characters of popular culture - such as Homer Simpson and Buffy - alongside critiques of the more disturbing sides of that same commercialism. Goddess of Mercy teems with inventive, often startling imagery and with Kelen's characteristic knockabout humour. A roller-coaster ride of philosophical asides, it works within broken grammatical formulas, irreverence and compassion to valorize fun as our most permanent possession.

Anything the Landlord Touches by Emma Lew (Giramondo)
Emma Lew's new poems are elegant and quixotic, enchanting and yet disturbing. Displaced from the personal as autobiographical Anything the Landlord Touches is instead a book of voices, un-named, unexplained and variously located through history's physical and psychic landscapes. These voices are like incursions into memory and possible perception; they are haunted and haunting, oracular but also playful, in phrasing that is arresting, lyrical, aleatory and seductive. The fragmentations and inconsistencies are allowed to co-exist: past with present, the rational with the illogical, the living with the dead. These poems are ambitious and thematically rich and work accumulatively to form a book of great resonance.