AustLit

Blake Prize 2013 Judges’ Comments

This meditative poem works by combining astute observation with thoughts that seem to grow from the lucidity of its clean lines. The pine trees become a haunting metaphor that moves through the poem as it explores man’s place in nature. The images of ‘a woman and her children burying a dog’ and ‘common brown frogs’ blend effortlessly with others drawn from memory such as ‘Christ under a veil of Carrara marble’ in Naples. The language is fresh, original and powerful, especially as it addresses the crafting of a poem in the stages of image-gathering and thought-connecting, such as ‘skimming the tight skin of a thought’. It evokes a spiritual world that exists in the poet’s lines without any direct or obvious language or reliance on traditional religious symbolism.