Winning Audio Poetry Entries
(titles listed in order)
Our judge this year was poet, author and broadcaster, Paul Farley. All the commentary below is his:-
1st (£1000)
‘The Medical Man’ by Isabel Prior (AUS)
In just over two minutes of audio, time and place and story are brilliantly constructed and evoked. The poem is full of voices, braids together great shifts in perspective and scale—from poinciana flowers to ‘satellite-vast’ bushfires, the working week in a hot Southern Christmastime—and is symbolically resourceful and coherent. Written in the light of the late Bruce Dawe, it also seemed—to me at least—to contain other, older soundings—‘When fiery December sets foot in the forest…’—while all happening in a very recognisable here-and-now. Each time I listened to it, I latched on to something new. It’s a wonderfully rich elegy.
2nd Prize (£300)
‘Our Earthenware Jug’ by Paul McMahon (IRE)
This is a lovely remaking, a broken object poem that contains landscape, time, the course of a fractured relationship in it… Listening to it, it reminds us of how, long before printed words, ‘ekphrasis’ originally meant the conjuring of a thing before the mind’s eye through clinching, clear, vivid description. The telling here is purposeful, focused, nicely measured; and the ending chimed a little for me with a poem I love, Binyon’s ‘Winter Sunrise’, in its gorgeous inversion.
3rd (£100)
‘The Mind’s Eye Sees Red’ by John D Kelly (N.IRE)
This surprised me at several turns, not least in the way it seems to move from its fantastical, whimsical opening towards, by the close, something much more urgent and driven. Along the way, it picks up speed and pulls out the stops in the way it uses voice, sounding a distracted, echoic ‘double-double-take’, making the most of rhyme and refrain, and has an appealing sense of plenitude, of a voice gathering its own music and momentum.
Highly Commended
‘The Smile’ by Morna Finnegan (IRE)
I’ve thought of a dozen different ways to respond to this poem—but in the end, at the risk of sounding corny or glib, essentially this put a smile on my face! The combination of its central imaginative conceit and lovely, warm, buoyant delivery is so freighted with hope, and seems to reach beyond that, too, to have us wonder what a smile is, what a smile can do… I enjoyed it on each relisten and am very happy to award it a commendation.
Comments about the Shortlist
Artclass, Claigmar Gardens, Night Pictures, Perfectly Adequate, Building the Kingdom on Scone Bread, The Wrong Children… I enjoyed listening to you all and can only say: this was tough. Like, really tough. And very close, in trying to distinguish between such strong, varied and interesting work. It’s easy to see (or hear) why you went deep into this shortlist, and I wish you lots of luck with whatever you do next.
Shortlist
‘Artclass’ by Steve Pottinger (ENG)
‘Claigmar Gardens’ by Sylvia Cohen (ENG)
‘Night Pictures’ by Bill Ratner (USA)
‘Perfectly Adequate’ by Lucy Leonard (ENG)
‘Building the Kingdom on Scone Bread’ by Adrian Coyle (IRE/FRA)
‘The Wrong Children’ by Clive Piggott (ENG)
Long list
‘Another Suicide Plan’ by Dena Molen (USA)
‘Mutiny for the Girls’ by Dena Molen (USA)
‘Afterwards’ by Jenny Pollak (AUS)
‘Dark on dark on not listening to the news’ by Jenny Pollak (AUS)
‘The Droplet’ by Robert Campbell (ENG)
‘SC Verdugas’ by Bill Ratner (USA)
‘Learn Ya English Good’ by Gerald Smith (SCO)
‘Canta’ by Morna Finnegan (IRE)
‘7-38 55 Theory of Communication’ by Sally Evans (ENG)
‘The Graphs’ by Christopher Nield (ENG)
Congrats to all our winning audio poets. Well done to the top 20 who made the long and short lists. We’re publishing names with the results because you asked us to.
The Plaza Poetry Prize (20 lines max) is OPEN to enter. Judge: Lachlan McKinnon. 1st prize: £1,000. Deadline: 30th September 2024.