Judges Remarks

Peter Ramm

I was at a work conference in Melbourne this week and after a day of sitting in a windowless function room, the group I was with decided to go for a walk in the evening. Winter still hung in the high-rise apartments and as we talked a non-poet friend of mine observed of the magnolias outside our hotel, “The spring blossoms are a couple of weeks behind us.” I enjoyed the keenness of her eye and her love of the trees which connected us to the understanding that we were in a different place—somewhere a little foreign, separate from the safety of the places we know more intimately. It was a joy to break away from the long presentations and the buzz words of the day, however much they resonated. On the walk it rained. I saw a couple of black swans and as we strolled along banks of Albert Park Lake three keen rowers set out on the border of nightfall. The place teemed with life, those who were familiar with the small things, and the things that seemed strange to me—like those rowing into the darkness on a frigid Winter’s evening in Melbourne, seemed normal to them.

The wind reminded me with each step of the ones I’d left behind in Robertson, still in winter, but with the cherry trees in full bloom and the green waste bins ripening into spring. I called my wife and two boys each morning as they were rushing to get ready for school at the same time I was doing the career-minded mathematics of whether I needed a tie for the day, or if I could get away with jeans. There was a few ‘love yous’ some, ‘have a good days’ and always the goodbyes. I missed them. I thought back to Pitt Street’s recent post in memorial for Ron Pretty’s, in which they quoted lines from his poem ‘Letter, unsent,’  

Sitting here bleeding ink again tonight,
I know this is another letter I will not send.
Sleep well, old friend: I’ll never find the words,
But my love, my care is with you always.

There’s a beautiful irony in these words, in that it’s our job as poets to find the words, but they don’t come easy, and at times, they may not come at all. There’s a deeper truth here though; as is poetry’s way—we write our ‘letters’ from a place of love. Whether that’s a love of life, a love for family, a love for others, a love of the landscapes we inhabit, a love for the parts of ourselves. In that love, we write to find the words that remain unsaid, the ones that try to capture the depths of this love. But, as Ron suggests in those lines, we don’t always get there. The words come slow, they hide around the corner like a child behind a door. They’re stubborn, clinging to the pages of the thesaurus, refusing to fall into their intended places. Or they come at the wrong time—in the night, in the car, when you don’t have a pen in your hands. The words don’t always say what we want, the way we want—the ever present wrestle of the poet. The words so often distort or dilute, they drift from our initial purpose. But, I like the way Jane Hirshfield put it, “Perhaps for something to be found, the only thing that matters is that there be searching—certainly that is the way in the writing of poems.” Writing poetry isn’t easy. There’s a cost, often without a lot of physical return; rejections, failures, the search for publication. We bleedalong with the ink. But the important thing is that we write. As John Foulcher recently stated, “We live in a world which is reducing us to the superficial and it's an art which demands depth.”And today it is a great honour to celebrate those who have taken the time to write, who have spent countless hours honing their craft, who have braved the territory below the superficial and banal, who have starred long into the mirror of themselves and, who despite Ron’s suggestion, have found their words.

This year the South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award responded to the theme, ‘in colour’, again in partnership with the Wollongong Art Gallery and their exhibition Thinking Through Pink. Guest curated by Dr Sally the exhibition juxtaposed diverse cultural objects inviting pleasure and speculation around the many manifestations of pink – the colour and the idea. In this sense the poems did the same. Many poets wrote through the lens of colour and especially pink, aligning with the Gallery’s exploration of it as a resonation of gender in its many forms, sexuality, race, and class. Many of the poets chose pigments to carry the layers of meaning in their work as expressions of themselves, their connection to place, landscape, family, and each other. The poems were vibrant and bristling with all the shades of humanity, the depths of vulnerability we associate with colours of our past, or the moments colour has found its way into our lives. It was Robert Gray who suggested, “Poetry should be a hymn to the optic nerve” and we saw so much of that. Whilst the judging process is always very difficult, when we got down to the final thirty or so, these poems stood out and spoke to us through their appreciation of form, their lyrical dexterity, their play with language, and the power of their ideas. There were so many poems that deserved celebration and it is a shame to have had to narrow the list down. So many were written with the love that Ron’s words conveyed: of a lost lover, of the hard work of migrant, of those who march for equality, of the hands of an ageing parent, of childhood lost, of the scurry of little feet.

It is our great joy to announce the winners this afternoon in our three different categories: the South Coast Poetry Award, the Art Gallery Prize, and the Member’s Award. We’ll start with the Art Gallery Prize:

This year’s winner is: Pigment by Carolyn Leach-Paholski.

This poem deftly explored the way colour infuses with our lives. The poet crafts vivid images through striking uses of language; charged with the metaphor of the canvas of one’s life and the shades of red that run through the subject’s existence. It is masterful in what it leaves unsaid, like it’s final lines, “You tell me that dying can’t afford to lie, least of all to themselves—there’s too much else to say.” The poem plays with form with lose lines and irregular stanzas that carry the sense of a life’s undulations and brush strokes. Whilst the audience never ‘sees’ the painting, we begin to know the life that crafts it, the humanity in ‘the earliest days broad brushed’ and the ‘love in the foreground.’ Like many great poems, it tells the world at a slant, the moths ‘untrained astronauts’ with heads ‘filled with dust and ideas,’ the meeting of the speaker and subject that, ‘walks off all the crimson’ and ‘works its way through plum and ox blood.’ There is a feast of pigments here, and a deep care for how they speak a life. 

Once again, we received many poems from members of the Centre, and it was a joy to find so many in the final lists. This year the member’s prize was awarded to: Crab Nest by Kathleen Bleakley.

This poem also responded to a work in the gallery as this poet has on so many occasions in past with such delicate insight. Here it stands as a testament to the power of art and poetry to intertwine and capture the depths of humanity in a chorus, in fine harmony. It builds itself like its subject though the metaphoric language of the nest—branch by branch, line by line. There’s a beauty in the rich texture of the poem’s diction, the ‘ochre of her mother’s loved scarves, jeans, cardies, shawls and pashminas,’ through which the reader can’t help but be drawn in. The poet’s ocular vision is stunning in its precision and perception of life’s minute details. Unlike the growing nest, the process of grief is laid bare in the lines, ‘hair a tangle, sitting seaward... you had joined the sea birds so I perched on a rock, watch them, reeling memories of you photographing gulls.’ This poem, as Mark Tredinnick has suggested, does ‘love’s work,’ using the prose form to capture the narrative of human suffering in the absence of a lover, and allowing the audience a sense of the echo.

That just leaves two more prizes. Again, this year as most, the judges deliberated for quite some time over these last two, and quite honestly, over the last fifteen. It is a pleasure this year to announce Outside The Cyanometer by Scott-Patrick Mitchell as the second place poem.

This poem instantly draws the reader to its prose form, to the weight of its lines, to the power of its unrelenting strength of vision. The poem is a visceral exploration of otherness through the ‘colour’ measuring of the cyanometer, and the lyrical dexterity of the metaphors that run throughout the piece, “I am a cyanometer, trying to match myself to men, to gods, to the expanse of the sky: there is no colour for starlight, for comet, for the pink bruise building across the west.” Each line is a masterful revelation of the limitations of human knowing, of the way we refuse to be instrumentally or institutionally categorised, diagnosed, labelled, ‘The cyanometer cannot articulate thunderstorm, the lightning strike, the rage of rooves being ripped off as we rage and fight back.’ The words are cartwheels of resistance, kinetographs of vivid imagination, a testament to the power of poetry to restlessly deal with the heart of existence, refusing the superficial through small acts of monumental struggle, ‘My mother always told me the world is built on one small act at a time, so I write poetry instead.’

And finally, it is my honour to announce that the winner of the South Coast Poetry Award for 2023 is And My Pink Ashes by Meredith Wattison.

Much like the second place poem, And My Pink Ashes stood out from rest through its strength of its imagery, the breath of its vast diction, the lightning strike of its lines. Grounded deeply in place and landscape, the poem spoke uniquely of the striking presence of the pink in the palette of human memory. The musicality of its line sang through each stanza as the poet deftly wove the lyric through. In its cultural tracing of Nina Hagen, Campion, and Lawrence, enjambed with a sweeping social history of the Illawarra, the poet conveyed the stark transience of a human life, of the movements of moments through a seascape. In its haunting last lines, the revelation, And my pink ashes, like German porcelain reverted to type, will enter this water, quietly as Kangaroo. Each line was coloured with sublime poetics and the hypnotising colour of language that dripped off the page and off the tongue in each reading.