ABR poetry prize

(for the siblings)

they are there on the cusp of a
little hill, in the trampled splendour

of a suburban yard. they are three,
elephantine trunks standing against a

background of untidy sky, their oily
confidences drab on Escher limbs,

and the still bricks and lost pickets
heighten the haecceity of these three.

I go and sit with them often. I sit
between them, face to a bleary just-risen

moon and while breathing deeper and deeper
I find a kind of un-stringed puppetness

owning me. everything around them is
not tinted, a landscape of slow bleeds

In its short life the ABR Poetry Prize has become one of the most prestigious poetry competitions in the country. Now it is even more lucrative, with combined prizes of $4000 and a first prize of $3000. Entries are invited for the fourth ABR Poetry Prize. Full details and the entry form appear on page 15 and on our website. Poets have until December 15 to enter. The previous winners were Stephen Edgar, Alex Skovron and Judith Bishop. Advances was pleased to see that the latter’s poem ‘Still Life with Cockles and Shells’, which won the 2006 ABR Poetry Prize, has been included in The Best Australian Poetry 2007 (UQP), edited by John Tranter.

Life without poetry is unimaginable to me. Yet my own sense of myself as a poet has always been somewhat intermittent; or, to put it another way, I keep straying then coming back to poetry, like a prodigal child who trusts she’ll be forgiven. Those times when I’m actively engaged in writing poetry have been interspersed with quite long stretches in which I nonetheless work with language on other fronts – studying for a PhD on speech rhythms in an Aboriginal language, learning a new language (Russian being the latest) and, more recently, working on a set of prose translations from the Swiss-born French poet Philippe Jaccottet. I find there’s a wonderful sense of release and revelation in being guided by another’s voice, especially a voice as fluent, emotive and original as Jaccottet’s. My day job as a linguist with a speech-technology firm means that I also deal on a daily basis with language data – at times, two to three languages at once. I find I am a ‘globalist’ when it comes to language, and also, therefore, to poetry. I am just in love with the fact that each language brings with it a new horizon of experience; and each good poem does the same in miniature.

Ventriloquist’s Dummy
Jennifer Harrison

I

          I can’t tell where I’m going
but shall I memorise the shape of streets
          the slope of bridges, the vertigo?
today I’m carried somewhere new –
I’m lost, in pieces, and I rattle