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Brushstrokes III (Ros Spencer Poetry Contest Anthology 2022)

Welcome to Brushstrokes III 2022. After seven years the Ros Spencer Poetry Prize is now an established competition on the Australian poetry calendar. Of the 277 poems submitted I chose 87 poems from 59 poets for the anthology. The poems gave me an intimate glimpse into lives and thoughts of poets in Australia and beyond. Poets wrote about bushfires, COVID, extinction, old age, stolen generation, immigrants, refugees, memories, landscapes, grief as well as the ever-present themes of love, death, nature, desire and identity.
Coral Carter, 2022 Contest Judge

Brushstrokes III Contest Entrant Price
Special price for all entrants in the 2022 Ros Spencer Poetry Contest. Includes postage and handling to addresses within Australia.
A$25.00

Brushstrokes III Regular Price
Regular price for those who are not contest entrants and includes standard delivery within Australia.
A$30.00

Brushstrokes III Ineternational Price
For all international orders, includes standard delivery to the world.
A$40.00
Brushstrokes II (Ros Spencer Poetry Contest Anthology 2020-2021)

The second anthology of poems selected by the judges; Ann Gilchrist and Mike Greenacre, from entries in the 2020 and 2021 Ros Spencer Poetry Contests.

Brushstrokes II Contributor Price
Price for all contest entrants in the Ros Spencer Contests 2020 and 2021, includes standard delivery within Australia.
A$25.00

Brushstrokes II Regular Price
Regular price for those who are not contest entrants and includes standard delivery within Australia.
A$30.00

Brushstrokes II International Price
For all international orders, includes standard delivery to the world.
A$40.00
Brushstrokes I (Ros Spencer Poetry Contest Anthology 2016-2019)
The poems in the anthology, we believe, make for pleasurable and thoughtful reading. They are meditative and dramatic, celebratory and regretful, loving and elegiac, take place in the country, the city and suburbs, were written by both women and men – we have made no attempt to count the ratio – and by both well-known poets and emerging voices. Whatever we think, the poems remain resolutely themselves, and await your interpretation; they certainly offer a reader’s engagement.
Entries were drawn from over Australia but the poems’ settings were not necessarily Australian at all: the poems reflect an internationalised word of travel and immigration. One notable feature is the absence of a declarative Australianness or modernity; the resurgence of nationalism is a feature – an often disturbing one – of contemporary politics but it did not appear in the poems. Perhaps good poetry requires a deeper empathy. Also, there was almost no evidence of the self-conscious Modernism or Post-modernism apparent in much Australian poetry from the 1960s to at least the end of the twentieth century. While some poems are experimental, for example in spacing across the page, there has been so much experiment in English language poetry in the twentieth century that it now seems hard for any practice to seem deeply avant-garde. Poetic technique has largely settled down; in the poems submitted there was little extravagant diction and little philosophical sense that words cannot map reality, except in satirising those who think that way. This is valuable in any attempt to again diffuse an appreciation of poetry amongst a general public that has long lost the habit of reading it.
Dennis Haskell and Rose van Son (selectors)
To order your anthology, click on the appropriate button and select the number of copies you would like to order (price includes regular delivery) then click on Pay with PayPal (if you don’t have a PayPal account, you can still click on this button and pay using your credit card).
Brushstrokes
Regular Price (includes delivery within Australia)
A$24.00
Brushstrokes
Contributor Price (includes delivery within Australia)
A$18.00
Brushstrokes
International Price (for all purchases outside of Australia)
A$34.00