After reading over six hundred entries, and from a shortlist of eight outstanding poems, the judges of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets 2023 — Elena Gomez, Andy Jackson, Autumn Royal and Toby Fitch — have selected three winners:
The winning poem, “Celestial Tree”, is a rich and layered poem that combines an evocative story about a memorable drink with a poetic exploration of systems of food production in colonial and capitalist systems, drawing on vegetal histories. It opens with “thick and rich and sludgy” Kopi o kosong (black coffee) and moves toward a “glistening mound of electric yellow”, margarine, “developed to keep the French working / class alive just long enough to die on front / lines and factory floors.”
This is a poem that explores the pleasures of food and drink, while uncovering the systems of class and production in Europe, Africa, South and South-East Asia that underpin them. Its assured voice and original style of halting lines expand as the poem’s argument reaches a surprisingly simple, humane revelation, that prevailing capitalist consumption is not the endgame: “Celestial Tree” reminds us that the material conditions of our subsistence are obscured but not out of sight, they are multiscalar, and most importantly, that through understanding these conditions, we can imagine a future of possibility.
The runner-up, “Febrile”, is a compelling, taut and uncanny recounting of an intimate catastrophe. The scene begins in medias res, and unfurls gradually, through precise and tense enjambments. The poem’s voice is composed, deploying subtle lyricism, slant rhyme and consonance to build a coherent, evocative sense of place and time. Yet its familiar, and familial, motifs — summer, grass, cricket, watermelon and childhood reverie — are rendered immediately foreboding and newly, darkly significant.
The poem’s thirty-nine short lines and single stanza play it with a straight bat, unfolding an event’s momentous implications with unobtrusive, vivid imagery and a rigorous ethic of vulnerability. Here, a fateful “unsupervised / experiment into gravity” ends with the speaker of the poem face-to-face with their sister’s “accusing glare”, the body’s “last distress signal”. “Febrile” is a deft, unsettling and memorable poem of mortality, guilt and consequence.
In third place, “larapuna” articulates an evocative contemplation of ancestral memory and knowledge. The refrain of this poignant lyric, “my foremothers are in the wind”, invokes the physical sensations of blood memory as matriarchal lineage pulses from the speaker’s body, while its original imagery — “saltskin”, “belly-boulders” and the hurled apple melting into the bay — signifies how body, language and cultural memory are intertwined with the land.
Across just six stanzas, and with subtly weighted lines, “larapuna” is intimate yet wide-sweeping in reclamation and (re)mapping of Country. The unceded land and waterways of larapuna, the far northeast coast of lutruwita, have been the homeland of the palawa people since time immemorial, and the poem’s focus on colour and fire dexterously alludes to how larapuna was illicitly branded “The Bay of Fires” in 1773 by colonists and subsequently co-opted by tourism.
