Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize winners- 2021/22
Our thanks to everyone who supported this year's Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. We received in excess of 400 entries. The judging panel, comprising Island's poetry editor, Kate Middleton, Ali Alizadeh and Aidan Coleman, judged the competition ‘blind’. Each judge read all submissions, and then, over the course of discussion, came to the collective shortlist of five poems that make up the winner, runner-ups and highly commendeds.
Congratulations to the following poets:
Winner:
Stuart Barnes- Sestina after B. Carlisle
Runner-ups
Andrew Sutherland- Antarctica
John Foulcher- The Girls Become
Highly Commendeds
Kay Are – Nights and Works
Roland Leach – Approaching Zero
This is what Kate Middleton has to say about the prize-winning poems:
“What we looked for, accompanying the technical excellence of the shortlisted poems, was the ability of the poems to surprise us—and to continue surprising us as we revisited them. When we returned to our shortlist we determined the winning poem, by Stuart Barnes, and the runner-up poems, by Andrew Sutherland and John Foulcher; these poems will appear in the next issue of Island, due out in late March. Our commended poems, by Kay Are and Roland Leach, will appear in the following issue (Island 165).
The Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize honours the poet after whom it was named—a poet known for her wit, as well as for the nuance of her writing, and the formal feats of her verse. Considering these qualities of Harwood’s own poetry, I find it fitting that the winning poem by Stuart Barnes exemplifies many of these same qualities.
‘Sestina after B Carlisle’, by Stuart Barnes, is a sly poem that manages to traverse both in-joke and dead serious address to a dying friend, while adhering to the most intricate of poetic forms, the sestina. This poem is a source of constant delight, turning on the lyric of one of Carlisle’s most famous songs that is embedded in the repeated words of the sestina’s form. Each time the judges returned to discussing this sestina, we found more allusions to Belinda Carlisle’s music, while also noting that this appreciation of Carlisle added a delirious quality that cut against the seriousness of the subject matter in such a way that made rereading the poem ever rewarding. The theological questions the poem engages, and the spectre of mortality, ground the poem, while the complex interplay of pop culture levity with this subject matter creates a work that is full of surprises. It is often the case that the surprise of a sestina can wear off, as the recurring words become expected; here, the poem rewards rereading.
Andrew Sutherland’s ‘Antarctica’ is a poem that navigates the space of the page beautifully, interweaving the subjects of HIV, pandemic, mortality and eco-crisis through a distinct personal voice. This poem manifests the contemporary moment, confidently employing an offhand tone, as the speaker recounts what he was thinking about, what he was reading about, and how the state of the world impinges on his own status as Poz as he confronts himself. This confrontation with the self transcends gestures of pure confession as the personal is bound up in the global. The poem continues to startle right until its end, where it introduces both the imagery of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and a final, haunting image of wandering trees.
John Foulcher’s work ‘The Girls Become’ is a suite of poems marked by strength and clarity. Foulcher employs his ear for vernacular speech in these poems, offering sensitive portraits of five individual female students against the backdrop of the ‘most’ who ‘make it through’ their schooling. Each individual portrait of this suite could easily stand alone, while the cumulative impact of the poems allows the reader to encounter the stories of those who normally drop out of view. These poems are direct, moving, and deceptive: the ease of reading belies the considerable craft that clearly went into their making.
Seeing the breadth of high-quality work submitted for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize this year was a privilege that sparked lively conversation among the judges. Bringing these awarded poems to our readers is a joy.”
The winner and runner-ups will appear in Island #164, out late March. The highly commendeds will appear in issue 165, due out in July. In the meantime, you can enjoy reading some of the winners from recent years here.