Island 167

In this first issue of Island for 2023, we’re proud to include all the shortlisted entries from the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. Congratulations to all the poets and our hardworking judges! Jane Rawson joins our team as Fiction Editor for 2023, and we’re delighted to have her on board. In this issue, two young Tasmanian writers are inspired by the ‘Island Conversations’ project, curated by Danielle Wood, which connects emerging Tasmanian writers with works from Island’s extensive archive. One of these new pieces responds to a poem by Les Murray that appeared in Island in 1981. Such are the riches in our back catalogue! This issue also presents the second work in Island’s graphic narratives series, curated by Joshua Santospirito, and our usual complement of excellent new essays and stories. And if you like what you read here, there’s even more at Island Online, islandmag.com/read.

— Vern Field, Managing Editor

Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize Judges’ Report

The judging committee for this year’s Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize comprised Jill Jones, Shastra Deo and myself, Kate Middleton. The process we followed to determine this year’s shortlisted poems, commendation, runners-up and winner took place over many weeks. At the first stage, each of us read the full range of poems submitted to the prize and created our own longlists which we circulated to the other judges. With these longlists combined, we focused on the 25 poems that had struck us as sharing qualities of impressive craft and the ability to surprise. We also were interested in the range of work a poem can do, from narrative propulsion or linguistic metamorphosis to lyric meditation, as well as the forms it can take. In discussing the longlisted poems, we created a shortlist of ten poems (included in this issue). Here we both prized the quality of individual poems as well as the way a shortlist can showcase a real variety of poetries being written in Australia today. We noted with real pleasure the range of work we had to choose from, and the high quality of the poems entered into this year’s prize.

The winning poem, ‘Day 210’ by Brigid Coleridge, is a timely poem that combines striking imagery, a supple sense of the poetic line, and deft dialogue (both spoken and through text messages) in a narrative of encounter taking place against the distant backdrop of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The judges were particularly impressed with the ease Coleridge brings to dialogue: this belies how difficult it can be to incorporate speech into a poem, and how laboured the results of such a move can be. Here, dialogue is interwoven effortlessly with the speaker’s narrative, and what emerges is both topical and personal. A comment like ‘In Russia, we ask/ ‘how are you’ and it is serious/ you tell me’ gains urgency for its simplicity, while the setting of the gallery, and the contemplation of Picasso’s paintings of his first wife, dancer Olga Khokhlova, born in what is now present-day Ukraine, provide a counterpoint to the contemporary moment. Coleridge is a keen observer – ‘Your lipstick is the brightest/ idea in the room’ – and a sensitive reader of image, interlocutor and history.

Shey Marque’s poem ‘Improbable Acts of Proximity’ is rich in images, both visual and in sound. Time moves in strange ways within this poem: ‘When minutes go backwards, we will/ return all this chaos to order’; ‘Toothpaste goes back into its tube’ and ‘Pictures in my mind remember the future’. At the same time, Marque comes to moments of startling stillness, as when she notes ‘Our baby teeth are fully of historical hours’. What emerges in this sequence of meditations is a portrait of grief as it ‘hollo[s] long into the wintering acres’, collecting ‘blurred hours’ and making of them a striking, deeply felt whole. 

Chris Andrews, in ‘Shedload’, also takes us into an unworldly other-time, as the smell of ‘turpentine, creosote, ivy, mouse’ gives way to the strangely kept ‘broken promises/ of repair’. Through an heirloom radio receiver, static shifts to fluid contemplation, by turns serious (‘I am/ the stubborn promise of a fragment’) and funny (‘you still have to lose/ your shoes before you get those pants off’). The poem creates a larger architecture of repetition, as well as riffing on Harvard sentences (phonetically balanced sentences used for testing audio circuits), and brings us to the too-large task – ‘I may never sort this shedload out’ – and the smaller achievement – ‘but I’ve cleared a way into the mess’ as Andrews considers the very local (the garden, the shed) of ‘the locally reversible collapse’.

Caroline Reid’s commended ‘Rhyming Poem’ is a careening reinvention of our notions of rhyme, and what does and doesn’t correspond. This poem keeps surprising, right up until the devastating last line.

The breadth of the poems we read through the different stages of this competition reflects a contemporary Australian poetry landscape that offers a rich chorus of voices. We are delighted to be able to present a comprehensive shortlist that showcases such range, including the versatility of poets who appear more than once here.

— Kate Middleton, Poetry Editor

My first outing as Island’s Fiction Editor has been an absolute treat. Thanks are probably due to my predecessor, Ben Walter, whose selections of strange, subversive and hilarious stories must have created an impression among submitters that, for Island, odd is good. Sam Elkin’s story of a group of trans men finding opportunity in a catastrophic beaching of weird fish definitely fit the bill. On the surface, Barbara Ivusic’s ‘The Midwife’ is a straightforward tale of postnatal jealousy, but go a little deeper and things become very unsettling. It was a thrill to stumble across Tasmanian author Jennifer Kremmer’s wild ride of a story, ‘Space Monkeys’. Jennifer won the Vogel Prize last century, but it’s been some time since readers have heard from her. ‘Space Monkeys’ will make you eager to read the rest of the collection she’s working on. While I welcome weird, there is still a place in Island for beautifully written, emotionally resonant realism, and writers Troy Dagg and Bethany Lalor have contributed two glorious pieces in this vein. The stories in this issue will take you from the beaches of California to the rubbish tips of northern Tasmania, from the gritty streets of Barcelona to wherever/whenever ‘Space Monkeys’ is happening – I hope you enjoy the trip as much as I have.

— Jane Rawson, Fiction Editor

One of the most joyful parts of my job is the chance to read ideas expressed in ways I’d never have dreamed possible. A surprising word choice, a deft play with sound, a perspective I haven’t read before. The pieces in this issue of Island all take situations that will be familiar to readers, and find a different way to contextualise, explore or manifest them. I’m so pleased to share with you Mesh Tennakoon’s lush and heartbreaking interplay between the Sri Lankan tsunami and her mother’s life (and death), ‘Re–Merge’. Two writers take us into their experiences of sexuality and connection: in ‘Naked Under Leather’, Lucy Robin has written a warm, vibrant piece about queerness, motorcycles and the other, and Beau Windon is dating while neurodivergent in ‘Alien Language’. I was surprised and delighted by Joel Keith’s ‘Featherweight’, which is somehow reminiscent of both a hardboiled crime novel and deadpan literary fiction. Finally, Elizabeth Bourke’s multifaceted mourning of Barrow Island is the perfect amalgam of poetry and fury. I know you will enjoy reading them all; I hope, too, that they inspire you to express the inexpressible.

— Anna Spargo-Ryan, Nonfiction Editor

This issue features two incredible Hobart-based painters, Richard Wastell and Robert O’Connor – and the pair couldn’t be any more different in terms of their subject matter. Wastell takes us into the wilds of Tasmania, stitching together the flora, fauna and landscape in ways that go beyond pure observation into the symbolic, hinting at spiritual connections to place. O’Connor, as Tricky Walsh suggests in their essay (of which an excerpt is printed in this issue), is harder to understand, and that is part of the appeal of his wild and woolly collections of paintings that layer multiple and diverse items, artefacts, animals, portraits and places. In this issue we can also enjoy the work of Leonie Brialey, an artist based in Mparntwe/Alice Springs who is the second in our series of four artists who create comics/graphic narratives. Leonie’s gorgeous work establishes a reflective, black-and-white pause in the magazine, deliberating on the question of what is a ‘perfect person’.

— Judith Abell, Arts Features Editor