Judge’s Report by Shey Marque
First Prize
Dovetail by Vanessa Page
Runner-up
The Final Year by Kevin Smith
Highly Commended
A Short History of the Dress by Jaya Penelope (WA)
Girl From the Underground by Martha Landman (SA)
The Book, the Garden, the Rain by Sarah Snider (USA)
Commended
A Lover’s Sky by Jan Napier (WA)
Arachnophilia by Lakshmi Kanchi (WA)
When You Go to Work by Tim Loveday (VIC)
Judge’s Report
Love poetry, often maligned unjustly, can be one of the greatest challenges for a poet because of its difficulty to tackle well. With such a familiar word and emotion, I really wanted to select poems that approached the theme with creativity and unconventionality. I was looking for originality of experience, insight and an honest voice to convey the ‘flavours’ of love, and poems with qualia that affect the senses and transform the reader in some way.
Qualia are bodily sensations that poetry can trigger, as an extra sense almost, that cannot be put into words but can be created in the reader in reaction to the aesthetic of a poem. The quale, a linguistics and philosophy term, is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective. Every judge and editor talks about subjectivity and I agree with those who insist it is a quality to be nurtured, not a problem to be overcome. My own subjectivity is driven by original imagery, an intriguing first line, an ending that opens out rather than winds down the poem, and a kindling of the quale.
In her poem, ‘Three Times My Life Has Opened’, Jane Hirschfield shows us great imagery with the lines: ‘all day a maple has stepped from her leaves like a woman in love with winter, dropping the coloured silks’ and then, ‘There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March’. Love begins, and love ends, yet something of the experience stays within us even if we can’t quite articulate it (a light, like a scrap of unreadable paper). Love, like nature, is a changing but never-ending cycle.
So, what is love? This question is asked every year. Love has so many versions. Some of the more unusual love poems have been written against the traditions of love. For example, Irish poet, Eavan Boland, writes about the ordinariness and stoicisms, the things that are often left out of love poetry: ‘…her feet were held against his breastbone/The last of his flesh was his last gift to her…’
One of my favourites is Kim Addonizio, whose poetry on the subject of love is very physical, gives us the innate response of the body, it’s honest and evocative. Its originality of image and phrase captures the reader’s interest, for example: ‘You don’t know what love is/ but you know how to raise it in me/ like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to/ wash off the sludge, the stench of the past./ How to start clean.’
Authentic voice in a poem comes from the lived inhabitance it emanates. It is anchored in the gut and is willing to address the messy complexities of human emotion. Love that isn’t perfect, written into imperfect poems, makes every individual feel that they are worthy of love, that the love they experience is real, acceptable in all its flaws, and exists even in circumstances where it’s least expected. The world is messed up, people are messed up, but love is still there, in our imperfect lives, in memories, in wounds.
The poems submitted this year, just under 400, represent the theme in all its usual forms and in new, surprising, and humorous ways. Romantic love still leads the way among a broad range including love of nature, familial love, spiritual love, physical love, unrequited love, and love gone wrong. I embarked on the judging process knowing that I’d have to exclude more than two thirds of the entries from the anthology. Many worthwhile poems were released to seek other homes, and I’m sure they’ll find their place. I read through all the poems three times before making my first longlist of 120 followed by a second longlist of 60 poems. Then, from a shortlist of 15, I selected a winner, a runner up, three highly commended and three commended poems.
Congratulations and thanks to all poets who have contributed their work to this anthology. The poems are an absolute pleasure to read and this is a publication of which everyone involved can be proud. Special congratulations to the shortlisted poets. I agonised over the final selections.
However, the winner and runner up were never really in doubt. Both winning poems kept me coming back multiple times as I tried to pin down a sensation so elusive I couldn’t describe, only feel. It is a skilled poet who can provide a sensory experience (a quale!) which seems to lie outside the scope of perception via the standard five senses. These poems also hold a poignancy that is at once familiar and universal yet unique in their circumstance.
The Finalists for Poetry d’Amour 2024
First Prize
Dovetail by Vanessa Page
Vanessa Page’s poem invites us into her private space where we experience the universal and much-valued situation of new love, guided by her personal perceptions and insightful use of the senses. The poem is set in the ‘golden hour’, that first magical hour after sunrise, placing the subject in the best possible light with its soft shadows and low contrast. This evocative poem creates a strong sense of intimacy without overt emotion or detail. The opening scene is gentle, a typical lovers’ pose presented to us via unique imagery of the kangaroo paw to convey proximity and arrangement of the couple, as well as a sense of being part of the natural world. This love is primal, preverbal. Communication is embodied, through touch and the membrane of suburban sounds. Those sounds picked out by the poet echo the feeling of being unmoored, the whipbird’s time signature is perceived as out of time, while a train is picking up speed, on, on, in unstoppable forward motion—a figurative acknowledgement that there is no going back. Everything seems a perfect fit, they ‘dovetail’, but can you really trust something so brand new, so unknown? This new love is felt with all the senses but remains unuttered, because everything is still a test.
Runner-up
The Final Year by Kevin Smith
Kevin Smith’s poem about an academic year break-up party immediately creates an atmosphere of openness to the world, its possibilities and uncertainties, through the setting and unfolding of events. It becomes the lens through which to focus the experience of potential for love upon a student’s identity and self-worth. This is a very natural and authentically human scenario. There is a simplicity as well as a depth to the telling by way of phrasing and voice. A night designed for winding down and having fun turns into something most profound, where a friendship is transformed. This image in particular carries the moment of awakening:
‘Beyond her, the dark jurisprudence of a night
sky, and her face—among a multiplicity of stars—
falling toward me’
Highly Commended
A Short History of the Dress by Jaya Penelope (WA)
Girl From the Underground by Martha Landman (SA)
The Book, the Garden, the Rain by Sarah Snider (USA)
While the winning poems were focussed on the beginnings of love with all its positive potential, full of hope, the Highly Commended poems are concerned with love gone wrong, subversive and unrequited love, delving deeper into the complexities of the human psyche.
I’ve thought often about certain items of clothing, or how anything we wear in close contact with the body, can take on special meaning, sometimes enough to perceive that it plays an almost causative role in our lives. Jaya Penelope quotes the Steve Kowit poem, ‘Notice’, in which a pair of split jeans becomes symbolic of a life lived and then taken away without warning. A Short History of the Dress, insightfully, uses an item of clothing, a well-loved dress, to symbolise the blossoming and eventual diminishing of a relationship and impart a message to the reader. The dress falls apart in the time it takes for the lover to reappear after a separation and it’s too late to repair either. Sometimes love cannot be resurrected after a betrayal.
In Girl from the Underground, Martha Landman draws attention to our propensity to allow love to bring out subversive behaviours and a dismantling of the senses. Referencing Rimbaud, Landman uses a synaesthetic metaphor of perfume to evoke a primal negative energy, engaging the olfactory emotions. The female object of desire, the adored body, rises like a spectre from the street to be viewed through a high window. He is frightened by the call of love, making her unattainable yet she can be experienced secretively via a lingering scent. Landman admits an affinity for this fearful longing: ‘I’m the kind of squirrel who’d follow/a man for acorns in moonlight, then cower/under hedgerows at the sight of his face’.
the book, the garden, the rain conveys a sensual awareness of the way the experience and/or memory of love can be tied to place. Sarah Snider’s understanding of love is derived from the natural world, it’s spiritual. The object of her love seems as difficult to grasp as the wind of which he speaks. There’s a sense of freedom about this love, as well as a touch of anxiety, the uncertainty of whether the feeling is returned.
‘I saw him Saturday/what if he’d waited for me, only to say/you’re running late/ to say/ your lilac is beautiful’
I liked this poem for its delicate, ethereal qualities and, like love, it is elusive, open-ended.
Commended
A Lover’s Sky by Jan Napier (WA)
Arachnophilia by Lakshmi Kanchi (WA)
When You Go to Work by Tim Loveday (VIC)
a lover’s sky is laced with stunning imagery and begins: high cirrus are strips of silk torn in the haste/and fever of a wedding night’s undressing. The poem is evocative via the interesting and skilled use of coastal metaphor and simile to conjure the magic of a sultry wedding night. Each line builds upon the previous, increasing the intensity of sensuality to its inevitable climax. Napier brings us right up close to this couple’s intimacy then, at the point where it approaches intrusion, pulls away again: ‘so let’s shoo moonlight from doorstep and sill, dim/the stars, leave these lovers spooning and rocking soft’, plunging us again into the warm and wildfruit ocean. This is a poem to delight the senses.
Arachnophilia is a poem that invites multiple readings. At first, I was intrigued by the idea of how something that usually sparks fear and disgust in some, can cause desire in another. Sometimes love just makes no sense. The heavy focus on the speaker rather than the spider itself, suggests it may be a metaphor, and one interpretation (intentional or not) is that we can be drawn to something beguiling even though it could harm us, or maybe even because it could. That the encounter is fleeting: and the endless, dark /night takes you away, makes you /stone that shatters/on the steps of my temple, suggests that it could be all an illusion as, often upon reflection, love or the object of love is not really what we thought it was, easily broken.
When You Go to Work is a down-to-earth and humorous depiction of domestic life without pretentions, seeing a significant other just as they are and all their wonderful imperfections, through a disarray they leave behind after they go to work. This timeless untidiness keeps/you here, keeps you present. Keeps me/wanting. This is for those who do not want to see every trace of their lover removed and placed out of sight. There’s a tender logic to this mindset. Many of the items strewn around are too specific to be fictional, perhaps letting us into Loveday’s personal living space, like this one: and lacy underwear /is hanging from hibiscus (though I suspect this one’s intentional). The playfulness of this lingering final image is beautifully idiosyncratic and made me laugh out loud.
Shey Marque
July 2024
First Prize
Dovetail
Golden hours.
We are fledgling lovers, curled up neat
——- in kangaroo paw’s gentle pose:
curvature of the spine, soft hands – the smell of earth.
In this flood and retreat we have created,
——- I am unmoored.
A thousand versions of us concertina,
reverberating through the earth-places we inhabit:
——- a membrane of suburban sounds.
Somewhere close,
a whip-bird’s elastic snap punctures the morning,
——- a time signature, out of time.
Somewhere further,
a passenger train moans as it picks up speed,
——- a uni-directional compulsion; on, on.
I think about that moment,
when you decided with your hands in that way;
——- how you caught like pumice,
arresting the instinct to decode you.
We are incandescent, new.
The thought of you lies folded neatly beneath
resting eyelids. I already want to say I love you:
——- mind forms the syllables,
——- but my tongue is fixed firmly
to the roof of my mouth.
Today, interrogation is confined
to the shapes we make under the weight of our desire.
Everything, is still a test.
Vanessa Page
Runner-up
The Final Year
At the break-up party—for final year students—
in a woolshed out of town, things got a little weird.
Too much drink, the unspoken fear of what lay beyond
our known world, and a food fight breaks out. I gave
as good as I got, but when a friend chased me down
in a paddock and slammed a slab of cake in my face,
I wiped it off, and lay there looking at the stars. Then,
from nowhere, she sat on the wet ground, and leaned
over me. Beyond her, the dark jurisprudence of a night
sky, and her face—among a multiplicity of stars—
falling toward me. Was she a goddess come to earth
in mortal form? No. Just a girl. But what she sensed
in me—a boy worthy of love—spoke a vision beyond
my reach. And I, this night, gifted with a kiss. With it came
the knowledge, that love—in time—would come to me.
At the party in a woolshed out of town, things got real.
Kevin Smith
Highly Commended
A Short History of the Dress
after Notice by Steve Kowit
In tatters now—
the blue floral maxi I thrifted
from an op-shop.
I wore it in Japan the day I harvested
mushrooms and mountain ferns
from copper-leaved forests;
to tea ceremonies where I clasped
a matcha-moon between
my cupped hands.
It travelled with me to the Scottish
Highlands, the hem dragging
through purple heather
and circlets of stone by silver lochs
(no, I did not disappear
to another century wearing only
my thinnest shift).
I wore it through that bewildering
love affair among the water paddocks
and blue flint churches
in the pheasant-haunted
lanes of Suffolk
in your barn on rainy
Sunday afternoons
while you played sad jazz.
I wore it under my blue
collared coat the day I left
for the airport my face terrible
with your betrayal.
By the time you followed
it was beginning to wear thin
fraying at the seams
now it hangs
in shreds
and all I have
is this photograph.
Jaya Penelope
Girl From the Underground
for Arthur Rambaud
I feel you—that night on a park bench,
watching her window, wanting her,
the scent of her perfume in the air.
Slender body in checkered dress,
yellow hat framing her face,
her movements slow and deliberate.
Was she aware of you sitting there,
or the times you followed her
from the Underground
desire howling for her flesh,
her lips teasing your cheek?
You and I frightened by the call of love.
You, who bemused the Parnassians
with ‘dreams of dazzling love’,
your gifted tongue now paper dry.
I’m the kind of squirrel who’d follow
a man for acorns in moonlight, then cower
under hedgerows at the sight of his face.
I get you—nights on a park bench,
watching her window, wanting her,
the scent of her perfume in my hair.
Martha Landman
The Book, the Garden, the Rain
this one’s bacon & eggs
my lemon rose with
slow white edges
and there in the bees
[my spears of camphorous sage]
heavy peony, iris finally, and
what I now know is English ivy,
all of my favorites stay,
little bells little valley, all casually laid
with violets with
fleabane stars in the grass
with run-away-robin, I’ve
passed my fingers over this page,
and over a lake as clear
as a bottomless city,
over mountains far away
just to hear him talk about the wind
and I’m not sure
where this is going, to
another woman’s highland,
or to a grove of trees, but here
is where the bluejays are,
and cedars, and Coyote,
here they were whistled into being,
into books into knots into trees
and are they not the same thing?
——– I saw him Saturday,
what if he’d waited for me, only to say
you’re running late, to say
your lilac is beautiful.
Sarah Snider
Commended
A Lover’s Sky
high cirrus are strips of silk torn in the haste
and fever of a wedding night’s undressing,
dunes pinked by last light are soft as the scoops
and hollows of a new bride’s body after her
husband’s hands have soothed away the day’s
thunders, the beach a long skein of smoke unwinding,
or a grey past laid down and lost, sea’s indigo,
thoughts slowing, calming into horse latitudes.
so let’s shoo moonlight from doorstep and sill, dim
the stars, leave these lovers spooning and rocking soft,
leave them adrift, enfathomed in the salt and kissed
skin of their warm and wildfruit ocean, leave them
dreaming of young gilled and slippery; silver darlings.
Jan Napier
Arachnophilia
I see you
against the moon’s
shadow, a flinty grey flicker
—- in this endlessly dark
night. You spark desire
that flares into stars.
Moondrunk, I pluck the skin
of the passing river,
become moistened, glistening,
like a dew-laden flower,
I lean towards you
heavy with want.
A dazzling spider—
prey and predator,
clinging to the rocks.
You heed my Siren’s
call. This song, a zephyr
that breathes life
into language itself,
makes it blossom
deliciously
on our lips, our mouths.
From my mouth into yours,
I whisper.
Sky touches the earth—
and we meet in moon-soaked
rain. Like salt
in sea, like sun
in amber, the heat
of silk on our bodies.
Till I withdraw
—and the endless, dark
night takes you away, makes you
stone that shatters
on the steps of my temple.
As the shard of the moon
gleams
on the unkempt river.
Lakshmi Kanchi
When You Go to Work
you leave yourself
everywhere. The cat-shaped woollen coat &
its black snow
lakes on the carpet. The pendulum-like
echoes of earlobes with their fish-hooks and plated golds.
Maangchi’s Real Korean cook book, strung open sticky
on the Laminex. The half sipped glasses embossed with
your red-wine infused lipsticks. The endless pick-up-sticks
of pens & those forever winged post-its – ideas, now, fixed
to flightlessness. The tiny laminate portraitures & ID cards
splayed out as if a winning hand (though no one
beside me is here to witness it). Your dresses,
nightgowns, jumpers, jeans, sweat shirts:
lifeless props, pastiches across our mustard
bedsheets, the snow-capped mountains of
couch cushions, the darker sides
of armchairs.
In the bedroom: lonesome socks with their stitched on
French bulldogs awaiting some precocious pre-school production.
Another bottle of leaking perfume, wiping out instinctual deviation.
A poetry collection pointed upward as if the most divine pyramid.
A bedside light lit permanently like a wartime woman waiting.
The attitude-embodiment of everywhere I go I need a new tote bag.
This confusion, this clutter – the listlessness of objects, of artifacts,
of shadows. Cherished reflections & traces. See the way gloves in singular
is a hand held out to another? See the untucked chair that begs
the tucking? See the eye-liner inscription on the porcelain –
is that an illegible lover’s quarrel? Memories moored in
recent motions. Refractions, reverbs, still-frames
of stilled-living. This timeless untidiness keeps
you here, keeps you present. Keeps me
wanting.
Meanwhile: a laptop has misplaced a lap. Headphones have gone headless.
A polaroid has come unstuck: a tropical wedding in a Melbourne autumn.
A crown of dishes crowds our benchtops. And lacy underwear
is hanging from hibiscus (though I suspect this one’s intentional)
Tim Loveday