ABR is pleased to present the shortlist for the 2025 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which this year received 1,171 poems from twenty-one countries. 

Congratulations to those who reached the shortlist: Sarah Day, Jennifer Harrison, Audrey Molloy, Claire Potter, and Meredith Stricker. Each of their poems are listed below in alphabetical order by author. For the full longlist, click here.

The Orphan

L’Orpheline, a sculpture by Paul Niclausse

for TB and TMc

by Sarah Day

An old woman and man, a goat, a child –
the lines beneath the lichen curve
to tenderness in this chiselled stone;
the old people’s bent backs bookend the form,
he at the head, she at the rear of the goat,
the baby suckling beneath. Each point

connects the whole – this is the point
the artist makes. Her hand cradles the neck of the child,
his hands cradle the neck of the patient goat
who rests her bearded chin on the curve
of his bowed crown.  The two old people form
a pact with the goat in the silence of stone,

their bent knees and folds of cloth in stone
shelter and cradle; the delicate point
where the goat’s tail-tip to the woman’s temple form
a kinship is crucial to our sense that the child
will thrive. The backward sweep of the long horns curve
to the man’s huge fingers gently cupping the throat of the goat,

stilling, not restraining. In her weight of repose, the goat
rests her chin on the man’s stooped head. Cool stone
summons warmth, the animal gazes over the curve
of his head – benign, beatific even – to a fixed point
in the universe as she suckles the child,
she, the goat, summoning the common good, a form

of love. Even the clogs the old people wear form
an alliance around the infant and the goat
with their patina, their workmanlike fidelity to the child.
The couple, half squatted on the stone
from which they’re hewn are grave with effort – their point
of view, the burden of their task, fixed on the curve

of the orb of the baby’s resting head. They curve
to one another, woman and man, form
in their faces of endurance, a point
of concentration on the gravity of the task. The goat
yields to their concern with the tolerance of old stone
while her gaze trusts the long view in which the child

will set forth at some point.  Praise the goat
for her milk, her trust, and each supplicant curve in this form,
a hand unearthing from stone a blooming and unoblivious child.

Sarah Day’s books have won awards, including the Queensland Premier’s and ACT poetry prizes. She has collaborated with musicians in the United Kingdom and Australia, and taught creative writing to Year Twelve students for twenty years. Her ninth collection, Slack Tide (Pitt Street Poetry), was published in 2022.

Hook, Grandmother, Line, Marlin

by Jennifer Harrison

Hook

Shiny, jagged claws, threaded with
mullet bait, gut shreds cast into the ocean,
the peeling boat putt-putting, bobbing,
the horizon moving, too, wreathed
in cloud-haze. Smell of brine, tackle,
wet tarpaulin, the sea filling nostrils
with indelible vetch, that monstrous
edge between omnipotence and death.
The yellow plastic reel in your hand, hollow
where a hand holds the inner rim steady,
hubcap, thumb and forefinger patient
like a musician sleeping. Sonar of the
quivering angle that reaches into deep’s
tug/tug/release. Nothing biting, grandmother.

Grandmother

She fell regularly between the boat
and the jetty. The family would laugh
there goes nan again as she was pulled
aboard, short legs glistening, skirt wet
and clinging. She laughed too, a grimace
that was half remonstrance, half mutiny.
At dusk, she would take herself off to
the jetty with blackfish rod, green weed
and worms wriggling in a rusty Heinz can.
In the outgoing current, silky weeds drifted
towards the entrance. She’d cast, once, into
the fastest part of the stream, then, back bent
against evening’s metal shafts of thread
silvering, she’d begin untangling a matted line.

Line

Over, under. Across. Over, under. Across.
Hook, sinker. Faded green, two-to-four-
pound breaking strain for estuary bream.
Braid (made in the fifteenth century from horsehair,
now gel-spun polyethylene, minimal stretch,
best for lure fishing). Monofilament nylon
(originally made from coal, water and air,
invented in 1937, abrasion resistant, low cost,
large spool, diverse colours, UV protected).
And fluorocarbon strands packed tight for
invisibility in ultra-clear waters. Eight-to-
twelve-pound tensility for trevally and flatties.
Eighty for horse barra and reef dwellers. One-
fifty-to-three hundred pounds for chasing marlin.

Marlin

You are not knowledgeable enough about beauty.
Istiophoridae. Long nib to stab and capture
prey. Fast. Spear extending from your snout.
Threatened. Over-fished. Large eyed,
warm water loving. Thirty to a hundred
million eggs per year floating in the ocean.
Greenpeace. Rainbow Warrior blown up
in 1985 in the Port of Auckland on the way
to protest a French nuclear test in Moruroa.
Now, a wreck’s artificial dive site off
Cavalli Islands. Warriors of the rainbow.
Litter at the bottom of the sea. Spear
extending from a rusting snout. Glistening
metallic fish, jumping over, under, across.

Jennifer Harrison has written eight books of poetry, most recently Anywhy (Black Pepper, 2018). Two new collections, Sideshow History and Finals, are forthcoming in 2025. She is Chair of the World Psychiatry Association’s Section for Art and Psychiatry and won the 2023 Troubadour International Poetry Prize.

Notes from a Room

This beautiful sound. Like you’ve thrown a plum
and an orchard comes back at you.
Richard Flanagan

 by Audrey Molloy

Irena arouses the room.
Deep in the bath, considering
the decline of her flesh, the woman,
giving up on her mortal body, starts to hum
the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria – holy music –
and the room joins in on one low note.

Even walls offer resonance. While every other note
dies off, this tone is amplified – it makes the room
vibrate. One rogue tone, and she has conjured music,
as though the bathroom were an orchestra of strings,
as though she’d plucked – when she began to hum –
an instrument, a marble harp. This woman

doesn’t care for physics. In the glass she sees a woman
rising from the steam, warbling a note.
Across the tiles, down the stairs, Irena hums,
still dripping. At the old piano in the drawing room,
she taps the keys, their hammers ring –
C, C-sharp, D; the walls rebound no music.

That’s how it goes: a signal sent out, seeking music,
the off chance of an echo; it’s how a woman
comes to fathom that this far-flung life-ring
for the drowning – this hurtled little note –
is everything. Almost nothing resonates; a room
is just a room, no matter if you hum.

She floats her cargo back upstairs, hummed
inside her head – throat music, sinus music.
Right where she left it is the glassy room:
each feels the other pulse – walls and woman – 
strange company, naught in common but this note.
Irena’s pale reflection smiles, remembering

the flare of synchrony – like the firing
of a matchbook; hot light, then nothing but the hum
of phosphorous – her story, now, a footnote
in the book of stories. From the street, distant music
drifts through the window, through the ears of a woman
straightening a photo of a bride and groom.

Lowering the window sash, she drowns the music;
where once there was a perfect hum, there’s just a woman,
and where there lived a holy note, a silent room.

Audrey Molloy grew up in Ireland and has lived in Sydney since 1998. Her début collection, The Important Things (The Gallery Press, 2021), won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize. The Blue Cocktail was published by both The Gallery Press and Pitt Street Poetry in 2023.

 Moths That Fly by Night

by Claire Potter

An empty room, nothing more than a table and a chair, a faded curtain swaying.
An electric globe to the left of the ceiling.
Closed doors, night beyond and moths pressing glass, powder-grey wings, black spots.
A woman works at the table, her reflection pooled in the starless sky as lights from apartments
flicker across the way. Pebble-blue gown, worn slippers.
Through the window, a crepe myrtle and a palm tree criss-cross in the breeze. Night is fluid,
deep and dolorous like a black vase swimming with waterweeds.
Looking through her reflection (thinking of distant romance), she notices company:
Four large moths, half in light, half in darkness, at the centre of the pane.
Five smaller moths on window’s outer edge, perhaps fledglings since they fall away
after only a few moments of fluttering.
Between trees, higher up, two moths swabbing the glass again and again
for the cold spill of light.
The room whistles. An edge of curtain sways as before.  
Distant lights gloaming on and off.
The woman bites her lip, she has the feeling that life is imposed. As if a troupe of parrots,
a forest of clouds, or skein of jellyfish had imposed in plain sight just to unsettle her.
Wings flutter like soft pewter tongues licking the glass.  
Heavy wind.
The corrugated sails of tilting branches.
Rasps of dogs back and forth as if shuttled by an asthmatic loom. Like a pinned study,       
a single moth waits immaculately for a point in the glass to open.
The woman doubts that it is possible to know anything about moths at all other than
what they recall as tiny brooches of light that pique the darkening sky–––
Her mind swerves to late January, adolescence, seated similarly at the desk, grieving.
A small clock ticking beside a fern. When she looked up, face crinkled, an unexpected
shape appeared out of the dark at eyelevel and rested on the windowsill with such pronounced
markings (across the outer wings) that she believed the moth to be not only watching her
but that her grandfather, by some occultish means,
had reformed and was communing through the glass:
Large, scalloped wings. Papery veins. Clear silence. Lavender outline and thin antennae     
corresponding preternaturally to his face. Coffin under a flag. Pulse of rain in
celestial grey through stained-glass windows. Horses on the radio. Two dots on the wings,
brown haloing blue, fringe of downy silver, twinkling in a way that she recognised,
darkly, as blinking.
She rests her elbows on the table, the memory folds. She rests her elbows on the table,
the memory grows old.  
–––The wind whistles; the moths winter.  
Thirty seconds. Lights out.   

Claire Potter is author of four poetry collections, Acanthus (Giramondo, 2022), Swallow (Five Islands, 2010), N’ombre (Vagabond, 2007), and In Front of a Comma (Poets Union, 2006), as well as numerous essays and translations. She lives between Sydney and London, where she teaches at the Architectural Association.

 The Vastness of What Poetry Can Do

by Meredith Stricker

i| ‘since the imperfect is so hot in us’
                – Wallace Stevens

in my Iliad, the women and slaves walk away
from tight-wound hexameters, unfreezing millennia
they shout their own bright-lit dactyls into the thunder of waves
              as Briseis wakes up and departs
        the inferno of helmets, shields and warships
‘and like this, my poetry names you’ says Cavafy
              like this, lonely in a cafe, then flung out
over starry nebulae – there is the vastness of what poetry can do
         as it cries out stubborn, forlorn, resplendent
and leans into the world like an interlocutory cloud
the poem measures Plato’s blue until it aches
then kicks the door open – Rhapsodes Rhapsodes so hot in us
let heat take our branching form – skin against tree body
           more ocean, more O, more Orphic, more unowned waves
into the cauldron of green sycamores, the keening of raptors

ii | ‘The great interrogation room is the stanza,
       you are standing at its door’
                – Dione Brand

ink that smells of rusty blood, the mind of ink
whose black and dendritic branches trace
the falling away of women’s rights, the rising
of the absolute rights of guns treated
          as though they were living embryos –
                   wouldn’t it be better to be governed by trees?

meanwhile, Achilles, in a funk, throws his spear into sand
and enlarges his grievances as ships idle – Oh glossy swag-Shield
        a mirror, a maze, threads of gold & murex, Tyrian purple
the glisten of seashells, pale mist of marshes, the spoils rotting there
No wonder the sky is tired carrying our heat, bearing the molecules
of countless wars, combustion engines, unmooring weather and homeland
seasons and storms. Tiredness and hunger – these are forms of narrative
just as narrative is a form of hunger and displacement a hunger
for narrative that finally returns to a home
that no longer exists

iii| ‘on the gray sea...
       combed by the wind’
                – Archilochus, fragment 279

even Archilochus dreamed of a peaceful life
instead, face down in mud, sent his words ahead to us

iv | ‘we live
       opposite
       reckless
       men’
                 – Sappho, fragment 24

synopsis:
             spears, blood, honour, betrayal, slaves, men

Achaeans, their wings overhead
         Danae, singing from the bushes
                 Argives, who fly in and out of dreams

while in some other history that we are called to imagine
         Helen undoes fate, unknits Troy
                    washed by the shadows of birds

who is more swift, Eros or the hummingbird?
what is more radiant, Achilles or
         the rings of a tree, the chambers of a beating heart?

v | ‘There must be non-human memories from which our own surges,
       to take us to the next thing’
                – Etel Adnan

hidden in the sound of water like a god or microbes
     there is someone who exists, there is someone in leaves
in mud, in meat, in measuring the space between bird and air
the scansion of twigs, there is someone who is spiral
who arcs her neck back and runs in the rain, there’s someone alive
     in herd, in hive, in highways, someone in grains of pollen
the colour of crushed minerals, I’m holding out my hand
to a place I cannot see, I’m counting on existing, I’m counting
on gravity, on aquifers, I’m counting on forests, their articulation
of thirst, the precision of what cannot be said but is spoken
every day outside language, I’m counting on their prophecy
listening to the curve of birds, as they dip homeward at dusk
into the gaps and fissures between here and Troy
between being born and disappearing

Meredith Stricker is the author of six poetry collections and recipient of the National Poetry Series Award. She co-directs visual poetry studio, a collaborative that focuses on architecture in Big Sur on California’s central coast, along with projects to bring together artists, writers, musicians and experimental forms.