2014 CREATRIX POETRY & HAIKU PRIZES
Congratulations to all the winners of the 2014 Creatrix Poetry/Haiku Prizes selected from Issue 22 to Issue 25.
Thank you to Sunline Press, Fremantle Press, Crow Books, Mulla Mulla Press and Tantamount Press for donating the prizes.
Thank you to all the poets who contributed and to Peter Jeffery OAM, Alexis Lateef & Zan Ross for judging the Poetry Prize and Amanda Joy, Gary De Piazzi, Meryl Manoy & Rose van Son for judging the Haiku Prize.
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Creatrix Poetry Prizes
First Prize – Jan Napier
Turned On
Second Prize – Fran Graham
Tour De France
Third Prize – Tash Adams
She’s Designer
Highly Commended – Sue Clennell
Elegy
Highly Commended – Deeksha Koul
Letter To Merwin
Highly Commended – Chris Palazzolo
Australia
Highly Commended – Mardi May
Between Poems
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Creatrix Haiku Prize Winners
First Prize – Matt Hetherington
slowly
over the spiral notebook
a caterpillar
Second Prize – Tash Adams
morning service
movement of hands
at the coffee machine
Third Prize – Kashinath Karmakar
mountain path –
at every turn
a new moon
Highly Commended – Jennifer Sutherland
by tank light all the tiny seahorses
Highly Commended – Jayashree Maniyil
autumn leaf —
the lightness
of her swaying hips
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Creatrix Poetry Prize Winners
First Prize
Judges’ Comments: Turned On by Jan Napier was seen as highly original with its ingenious use of the everyday mundane chore of domestic ironing transformed into a sensual daydream.
A delight to read and to hear with Jan reciting the transformation of your laundry into the heat drenched boudoir of your wildest thoughts.
Turned On
(an ode to ironing)
Steamy and mysterious a relationship tropical as the Congo
connection galvanic and sudden as stepping on an electric eel.
You know how it is a pile of crumpled clothes
the heat between us me stroking your back
you quiescent permitting me to press my suit
rhythm a therapy that helps straighten out material concerns.
Our accord allows us to damp down any potential hotspots
get things straightened out.
Familiar as we are with each other’s foibles
I know which buttons to press to make you spit and hiss
like King Cobras know that if left alone too long
your temperature rises and I’ll return to a skirt
scorched as Saharan sands.
I press you to my breast relax those arthritic legs.
Rest now relive porn star reveries but never dream of leaving.
Witches cannot abide cold iron and I would be such a mess
without you.
Jan Napier
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Second Prize
Judges’ Comments: Tour de France by Fran Graham with its sinuous peloton viewed night after night on SBS impressed for its calligraphy as much as its content, with its ever-unwinding, slithering rainbow ribbon of colour, much like Alice’s Tale of a Mouse’s Tail.
Tour de France
The peloton, a multi-coloured ribbon,
surges across the landscape,
riders’ concentration set
hard as their saddles,
their movement,
fluid as a fish’s tail.
Country coded,
muscle primed and flying,
they transform their fatigue
into ripped determination.
It propels them
across soft velvet folds
of meadow and hillside,
a swaying paintbox.
Occasionally a spill
disfigures the canvas
but mechanically they reform
and flow on like textile,
a sarong wrapping the road,
a pulsating tapestry.
Then holes appear
and the fabric begins to unravel
in the sprint for the line
where heads lift
and pumped fists telegraph victory.
Fran Graham
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Third Prize
Judges’ Comments: She’s Designer by Tash Adams visits the Third World and its cottage industries of garment-making that brings the East to the West all to the bidding of an ingenious world class designer whose origins were equally humble to those that work to her design.
she’s designer
people make the clothes; clothes do
not make a person – Zhang Nah
pull back the bamboo curtain
she holds scissors like shears
to the throat
of the mannequin
rips stitches
to remove an olive collar
hitches up a hem
frays a cuff
left over fabric for a belt
she sews late into the night
on grandmother’s machine
her lamp casts yellow light
through wafts of smoke
cigarette burning
in the ashtray
from the cushion
on her wrist
she plucks a pin
with her teeth
East no longer looks West
Fashion Week over
her up-cycled clothes sell
to help rural women
her designs stitch
a future to the past
she won’t forget where
she’s come from
red heart beats strong
she‘s designer
rainbows of ribbons
butterflies on strings
Tash Adams
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Highly Commended
Judges’ Comments: Elegy by Sue Clennell is epigrammatic but savage in its conclusion as the visiting of inappropriate death on innocent children, dead without the proper season.
Elegy
Next door’s hen went to the corner
of the fence to die.
Cats and dogs slink under the house.
But children die everywhere,
the Sudan, Syria, Nigeria.
Sue Clennell
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Highly Commended
Judges’ Comments: Australia by Chris Palazzolo uses the anxious scrutiny of bringing binoculars into focus by an equally anxious boat person assured by the blue of waves but fearful of a possible grey prow.
Australia
Pull the two blue discs to focus –
churning flecks of foam
and sky.
It’s not the smell of diesel and sea air
that’s driving him mad. Not the sun
boiling the blisters in his skin. Not the sput-sput
engine or the parching waves thumping
the hull every second after second after second.
Even the memory of that brute counting
his father’s cash has lost its rage. Only Australia,
invisible in that iris of lurching sea, fills him
with futility – without him they’re blind,
but when he hears the children crying
in the hold, and thinks of safe classrooms,
his weeping eyes scream at the touch of binoculars.
Pull the two blue discs to focus –
churning flecks of foam
and sky.
Watching for a grey prow.
Chris Palazzolo
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Highly Commended
Judges’ Comments: Letter to merwin by Deeksha Koul talks of the fragility of love and relationship as being ever flawed, a vase ever shattering and never finding fulfillment.
letter to merwin
surely I know this becoming
the vase is already shattered
why am I always so surprised
it is written on everything
bells that toll along the river
sighing grief of this rain
air wet and your skin warm
in the deepening evening
oil burning in our lamp
your eyes
the smoke and the shore
it is written on everything
how many times I have emptied the ashtray
in worn silence following drowsy goodbyes
my pale reflection in the long mirror
we were talking while the flowers slept
surely I know this becoming
the vase is already shattered
why am I always so surprised
Deeksha Koul
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Highly Commended
Judges’ Comments: Between Poems by Mardi May is a wonderful end piece for a poetry selection and is concerned with feast and famine, the abundance and drought of poetic inspiration.
Between Poems
In the calm between poems
the poet trawls through
the journal of lost words;
reels in a line left dangling,
lure for a thought in the ebb
and flow of a rhythmic sea.
And then,
///////////the tidal wave.
In a dry spell between poems
the poet searches the sky for
a coalescence of cloud,
for that flash of lightning,
a random fall of summer rain;
the ‘if’ and ‘when’ of drought;
And then,
///////////the storm breaks.
Mardi May
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