Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection

The Oblong Plot

Chris Andrews (Puncher & Wattmann)

Judges' comments: 

The Oblong Plot is only Chris Andrews’ third collection but “The years of pfaffing around that had to go into” (p.21) writing the collection are obvious. These poems are observational but deeply complex, devoted to helping the reader shed the dun patina of familiarity that settles so readily on our perception and replace it with something far more striking. Beguiling urban pastorals chasing “the amber that stills a moment” sit alongside expert Oulipian experiments in a book as “bold as bougainvillea claiming a lane” (p.17).  

Tintinnabulum

Judith Beveridge (Giramondo Publishing)

Judges' comments: 

In Tintinnabulum, Judith Beveridge shifts effortlessly across registers and landscapes in the collection’s remarkable love poems, elegies and experiments. These poems delight in detail, encouraging us to remain alive to a world that always offers more: each poem unearths a new surprise as Beveridge invites us to look closer, to think again. 

Kangaroo Unbound

Luke Johnson (Puncher & Wattmann)

Judges' comments: 

Drawing on Garry Shead’s iconic D.H. Lawrence paintings, Luke Johnson’s Kangaroo Unbound immerses the reader in the landscape of Thirroul, New South Wales, where the natural world collides with the dark edges of suburban life. At once reflective and irreverent, these poems deftly interrogate the contradictions that run through the national psyche.

The Infant Vine 

Isabella G. Mead (UWA Publishing)

Judges' comments: 

Isabella G. Mead’s The Infant Vine abounds with unsettling encounters within and beyond the body’s boundaries. The collection grapples with experiences of transformation and (re)birth: child-bearing and raising, climate disaster and seasonal change, and the capacity of visual art to revivify the familiar world. Abundance and devastation coexist, and ‘the direction never changes: / begin again.’ 

Mixed Business

Alan Wearne (Puncher & Wattmann)

Judges' comments: 

Roughly tracing, via interlocking verse narratives, the matrilineal line of seed merchant Mayor Moriarty, Alan Wearne’s Mixed Business moves from pre-war to present day Melbourne, climaxing with 100 pages of bawdy ottava rima outlining the spivvy strivings and tawdry peccadillos of the campaign for the state electorate of Yarraville.