The CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry: Shortlist 2005

Judges
Judith Rodriguez (Convenor), Alison Croggon, Rodney Hall

This year’s poetry catch was one of the largest – and, surely, most stylistically varied - in the history of the Prize. There was tantalising evidence of fresh literary skill – all three judges included in their long short lists one or two ‘first books’. It was very difficult to put aside from the final batch the deeply worked, mature lyricism of David Brooks (Walking to Point Clear), the strong, controlled immediacy of Patricia Sykes’ world and voice (Modewarre), the virtuosity of Philip Hammial’s prose poems with their comically surreal edge (Swan Song) and the tough urban lyric mode of Samuel Wagan Watson’s Smoke Encrypted Whispers, with its wonderful addition to the deep lore of Brisbane life.

Shortlist

<More Or Less Than>1-100
MTC Cronin
Shearsman Books
MTC Cronin’s latest book is a single structure, the development of ideas impressively sustained within the arc of the whole; its formal device is an increase of line-length with each piece of the book-length poem until it reaches fifty (Nos. 50 and 51), and then shrinkage, poem by poem, back to one. In Cronin’s hands, the result is startlingly effective, as if the book is an entire slow respiration, out and in. The language of this meditation on speech and experience – richly allusive to human occasions - is sensuous, intelligent, and passionate.

Doppler Effect
John Kinsella
Salt Publishing
John Kinsella’s is a public voice, for the past decade one of the most consistently restless and intelligent in Australian poetry. Doppler Effect collects work published in small presses since 1993. The substantial selection of new work considered by the judges demonstrates a continuing engagement with the vertiginous qualities of contemporary experience. These are eloquent and inventive explorations of meaning by a widely-read poet – often, indeed, linguistic experiments devised to interrogate a world of genetic experimentation, virtual reality and environmental degradation. At his best, Kinsella’s poems crack and fizz with fractured energy.

Firelick
Morgan Yasbincek
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Firelick demonstrates the power of Morgan Yasbincek's sensuous intellect. Her generally short poems continually surprise with their personal, sensuous and immediate language and vivid imagery, correllatives for passion. The poems are energised by a heightened awareness of the ambiguity of physical existence; their private world is of today because it is a world of enduring forces – of the family, of rumoured arbitrary lore. Indeed, behind the fierce holding to life there is often a dark sense of violence or threat, the scars of mortality. The entire impression is strong and visceral.