Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection

Naag Mountain

Manisha Anjali (Giramondo Publishing)

Judges' comments: 

Naag Mountain is a mytho-poetic explosion that circles itself obsessively, draping the language of dream over a history of slavery and violent extraction. Anjali speaks directly to and through the settler colonial veil to tie this dreaming to Indigenous realities. Formally inventive and lyrically compelling, even the telling is complicated in this intricate weaving: “there are flaws in our performance… I want to be depicted as I really am. Standing in the rain. Holding a basket full of snakes.” This is a stunningly assured and beautiful work of poetry.   

Reliefs

Jarad Bruinstroop (University of Queensland Press)

Judges' comments: 

A relief can be a reprieve, and a work of art. In this moving collection, Bruinstroop’s poetry acts as both, responding to queer representations of men across time and space while offering his own. This offering queers “looking” itself. Historically, and currently, in a homophobic society, sometimes all a queer person has to communicate their desire is their gaze. Power and vulnerability exist in this moment of reception, and both are explored in depth here. These ekphrastic responses to interior and exterior landscapes are expertly rendered, becoming a meta mosaic of tenderness firmly and softly attentive to the body. 

Three Books

LK Holt (Vagabond Press)

Judges' comments: 

Three Books comprises "Merry War (of never meeting and never ending)", a suite of streetwise translations of 14th-century Persian poet Jahan Malek Khatun with Catullus; "Nina in the Hag Mask"; and "April", a singularly ambitious long prose poem. These are the work of a poet at the peak of her considerable technical abilities and imaginative range. If sentience is, as April, the heroine of the eponymously named poem, wonders, then perhaps we can see Three Books as the poet’s attempt to reckon with “the baffling result of simple action”. Holt transforms language into invocation, holding it by its stem. 

Vehicular Man

Mitchell Welch (Rabbit Poetry)

Judges' comments: 

Mitchell Welch’s Vehicular Man is an unleaded Corolla gunning along outer urban connector roads across a “Day’s uncertain autumn”.  These well-observed lyrics stake a place in the world, a cynicism rebarred with determination. Welch’s vibraphonic language demands acknowledgement. Poems are built of sprightly lines spring-loaded with syllables that bounce, ring and chime against each other. Witness “cloud eggs and cold drip coffee, rum lanterns and lobster/ Pots on bedecked bathing boxes’ multicoloured balustrades.” This is an impressive debut portending an exciting future. 

That Galloping Horse

Petra White (Shearsman Books)

Judges' comments: 

That Galloping Horse is a poetry of inner worlds – of labour, as in “Work, that galloping horse we ride bareback”, parenthood, the past and the dead. Situated in time and haunted by place, White exquisitely renders childhood in Australia, a new life in Berlin, and the (post-)pandemic experienced in “the soft realm of home”. White’s work is exhilarating in its energy, surprising in its flexibility of form, storied in its portrayal of domestic reality amidst catastrophe. By no means “tame as horses”, these poems enact, with consummate skill, life and self as boundary-less and wild.