2016 Boldrewood Literary Award winners
Prose
First prize Fitzy’s Complaint Roger Vickery
Second prize Liang Xiao Paul White
Highly commended
Epiphany Val Clark
Badgengandah Bridge Garry Hurle
Battle of the Stockyards Carmel Lillis
Second-Hand Light Kat Pekin
Movement at the Station J.S. Scholz
Poetry
First prize Drought and Flood Mark Miller
Second prize Triptych: In the Marine Light Mark Miller
Highly commended
The interchange Jenny Blackford
Beneath the Stars of Mother Country Sue Grocke
A Terrible Dream Tom McIlveen
Angela Leonie Parker
Second prize Triptych: In the Marine Light Mark Miller
Highly commended
The interchange Jenny Blackford
Beneath the Stars of Mother Country Sue Grocke
A Terrible Dream Tom McIlveen
Angela Leonie Parker
Judge's comments
Prose |First prize Fitzy’s Complaint
Intelligently contrived humorous piece with evocative descriptions, careful character delineation and deft handling of multiple voices.
Second prize Liang Xiao
A sympathetic examination of one man’s burden and deliverance in a cross-cultural context. The prose lingers where appropriate, not detracting from the overall tightness of composition in a work of judicious length.
Highly commended
Battle of the Stockyards
A very Australian tale with a methodically assembled plot culminating in a wry twist.
Poetry | Overall the standard was quite high, which made the judging experience enjoyable. Numerous poems were written with a regional perspective and captured a sense of place and character effectively.
There was a large number of poems that employed a rhyme scheme. While this was handled fairly well, there were instances where the poem seemed “forced” or restricted by the demands of the scheme. Few poems seemed to employ enjambment between couplets and stanzas, which would have had the effect of freeing up the lines.
The less successful poems had a prose feel in the sense that they could have usefully been compressed to their essentials.
Others failed to take advantage of the rhetoric stresses available in poems at beginnings or endings of the piece or stanzas.
My congratulations to the winners and high commended entrants as well as to all those who entered the competition.
Winner: “Drought and Flood”
This poem effectively conveys the contrast between two weather phenomena typical of regional and Outback life: drought & flood. It does so with economic and memorable imagery such as in the stanza where we see –
Cattle coalesce along the fence-line,
they lie down in hollows
beneath pockets of bitten trees
beneath an upside-down sea
of bruised nimbus
Interestingly, the poet uses rhyme and near-rhyme from time to time, showing an awareness that this can be done for dramatic effect.
But the most striking element of this poem is its strong and emotive closure, where the river is personified in flood, “betraying…closeness” to yield a “muddy boot / of our neighbour’s missing child”.
2nd Place: “Triptych: In the Marine Light”
A very close runner-up, this poem dazzles with striking imagery, such as where a “weedy seadragon…takes on an ethereal glow” in the morning sun with “lacquer-black eyes, / like china beads…”
The third section of the triptych is especially impressive where we see the moon climbing “the black staircase of sky” moving “like mercury through the water / the stars her unstringed pearls / spilling on the floor of the world”. The poet uses line breaks and rhetorical stresses with great effect here.
Highly Commended
“Angela”. An intriguing sense of elusive character, in which the speaker engages with a young girl and her “private” father at a distance. The ending was perhaps too ambiguous as the speaker “got it” while the reader wasn’t so sure.
“The Interchange” was the best of the numerous poems inspired by past wars. It was written in free verse and more efficient in its story telling, using rhetorical devices to enhance the movement and pacing of the work.
“Beneath the Stars of Mother Country” provides a sensual view of Outback life from an Indigenous perspective. The ending is perhaps too abrupt in its shift in perspective, and a stronger unifying focus throughout would have helped.
“A Terrible Dream” captures the story of how the speaker is separated from her mother due to the mother’s mental problems. The voice of the mother in poetic diary form is rendered effectively, though the regular rhyme scheme of the mother’s story may work against our understanding of her problems.
Intelligently contrived humorous piece with evocative descriptions, careful character delineation and deft handling of multiple voices.
Second prize Liang Xiao
A sympathetic examination of one man’s burden and deliverance in a cross-cultural context. The prose lingers where appropriate, not detracting from the overall tightness of composition in a work of judicious length.
Highly commended
Battle of the Stockyards
A very Australian tale with a methodically assembled plot culminating in a wry twist.
Poetry | Overall the standard was quite high, which made the judging experience enjoyable. Numerous poems were written with a regional perspective and captured a sense of place and character effectively.
There was a large number of poems that employed a rhyme scheme. While this was handled fairly well, there were instances where the poem seemed “forced” or restricted by the demands of the scheme. Few poems seemed to employ enjambment between couplets and stanzas, which would have had the effect of freeing up the lines.
The less successful poems had a prose feel in the sense that they could have usefully been compressed to their essentials.
Others failed to take advantage of the rhetoric stresses available in poems at beginnings or endings of the piece or stanzas.
My congratulations to the winners and high commended entrants as well as to all those who entered the competition.
Winner: “Drought and Flood”
This poem effectively conveys the contrast between two weather phenomena typical of regional and Outback life: drought & flood. It does so with economic and memorable imagery such as in the stanza where we see –
Cattle coalesce along the fence-line,
they lie down in hollows
beneath pockets of bitten trees
beneath an upside-down sea
of bruised nimbus
Interestingly, the poet uses rhyme and near-rhyme from time to time, showing an awareness that this can be done for dramatic effect.
But the most striking element of this poem is its strong and emotive closure, where the river is personified in flood, “betraying…closeness” to yield a “muddy boot / of our neighbour’s missing child”.
2nd Place: “Triptych: In the Marine Light”
A very close runner-up, this poem dazzles with striking imagery, such as where a “weedy seadragon…takes on an ethereal glow” in the morning sun with “lacquer-black eyes, / like china beads…”
The third section of the triptych is especially impressive where we see the moon climbing “the black staircase of sky” moving “like mercury through the water / the stars her unstringed pearls / spilling on the floor of the world”. The poet uses line breaks and rhetorical stresses with great effect here.
Highly Commended
“Angela”. An intriguing sense of elusive character, in which the speaker engages with a young girl and her “private” father at a distance. The ending was perhaps too ambiguous as the speaker “got it” while the reader wasn’t so sure.
“The Interchange” was the best of the numerous poems inspired by past wars. It was written in free verse and more efficient in its story telling, using rhetorical devices to enhance the movement and pacing of the work.
“Beneath the Stars of Mother Country” provides a sensual view of Outback life from an Indigenous perspective. The ending is perhaps too abrupt in its shift in perspective, and a stronger unifying focus throughout would have helped.
“A Terrible Dream” captures the story of how the speaker is separated from her mother due to the mother’s mental problems. The voice of the mother in poetic diary form is rendered effectively, though the regular rhyme scheme of the mother’s story may work against our understanding of her problems.
