2022 Calanthe Collective Prize for Unpublished Poetry

The winner of the Open Category was
Bethany Stapleton with her poem Ashen Prayer

Ashen Prayer

My father opened the firebox,
hands cold
in white Augustine light,
to tamp down ashes
before withdrawing them
via a lower tray,
balanced in his palms
as if weighing his need
for repentance.
Discarding it
he allowed
a few flourishes, the white
velvet blooms of ash,
to erupt and write
benedictions in the air.

Judges’ comments
The judges were deeply impressed by this deceptively simple poem. It beautifully combines the concrete image of the father opening the fire box (with its ‘white velvet blooms of ash) with abstract ideas of repentance and benediction. In doing so, it creates both great beauty and depth of spiritual meaning. The poem has a complex emotional narrative in which the ash of winter (simply and suggestively referenced as ‘white Augustine light’) becomes the sign of blessing and benediction.

The winner of the Open Category was Year 7 student
Chiara Falls with her poem, Blood to a Fist

Blood to a Fist

Alert as the eyes of a hungry hound
As quick as the waves eating the bay
Blood to a fist, as the heart pounds
Carving a path to your soul, in a way
Power possesses you, thunder it brings
It pours down on you, sharp as knives
Twists your brain, as the devil sings
Freezing your heart, till it’s cold as ice

Ripping through flesh, crushing your throat
Powerful as a force itself
It leaves you to die, nothing to note
Abandons you there to melt
A poison so strong, your insides will rot
Can not be consumed for it feasts on
Not who you are, but who you are not
Telling you are a failure, or wrong
In a sudden movement it takes control
Leaving no prisoners in the act
Not your life but your mind is the thing it once stole
Multiple times, a reusable trap
We all have it, if that’s consolation
From your head, an immutable clangour
If it’s a poison, the drink is frustration
I believe I call it Anger.

Judges’ comments
The judges considered this to be the standout poem in the Under 18 category. The strong, provocative title leads into a carefully developed extended metaphor which controls the direction of the poem. A series of concrete images evokes the combined physical and emotional intensity of the subject matter in a way that renders an abstract idea (‘anger’) tangible to the reader. The difficult skill of crafting sentences to fit a rhyme scheme without clunkiness is something to be applauded in a younger poet.

Hunter Green

by Kerry Greer

The jungle feasts on fallen fruit, undulating hunger.
Everything is green, growing and dying,
the land changing daily in the ceaseless rain.
The dead are buried and, still, come back to life.

Everything is green, growing and dying,
in that teeming space, life erupting from decay.
The dead are buried and, still, come back to life.
There is no map to show what lies within the soil.

In that teeming space, life erupting from decay,
I heard you screaming, tied down by dreams
buried in the soil of yourself, a land without a map,
and no way out, no way up, to the air, the light.

I heard you screaming, tied down by dreams
of childhood, of some black seed at the centre,
and no way out, no way up, to the air, the light.
As with any flooded place, decay grew from the roots—

from childhood, from some black seed at the centre.
You asked me later what I had dreamed, and I didn’t answer.
As with any flooded place, decay grew from the roots.
How could I have slept, while next to me you screamed?

You asked me later what I had dreamed, and I looked away.
The hands of vines moved over us, blocking out the night.
I can say it now: I dreamed that you were dying.
Tell me where this leads, I’m asking for a compass,

some way to navigate the moving dark, the hands of vines
that catch me in my dreams again, again blocking out the light.
Tell me where this leads, I have lost my compass.
Where you walked is gone, is sliding towards the river.

Caught in dreams without you, without the light,
The land turns its face from me, refuses to be mapped.
Where you walked is gone, is sliding towards the river,
smooth as a hunter snaking through the leaves.

The land turns its face from me, refuses to be mapped.
I slip down, find vines waiting there
sharp as a hunter snaking through the leaves.
One thousand shades of green, and every shade decays.

I slip down, find vines waiting there
to bury me, my footprints swallowed by the rain.
One thousand shades of green, and every shade decays.
I move through sleep to find you, and always I’m too late.

Buried, no footprints to follow in the rain,
where you walked is gone, and you are gone as well.
I move through sleep to find you, and always I’m too late,
waking to find the dream was not a dream.

Where you walked is gone, and you are gone as well,
the land changing daily in the ceaseless rain.
The dream was not a dream. Awake,
the jungle feasts on fallen fruit, undulating hunger.

Judges’ comments
Hunter Green employs the form of the pantoum, where the second and fourth line of each four-line stanza become the first and third lines of the following stanza. The judges considered the poem’s extended and elegant use of the form was a remarkable and powerful achievement. Its sustained repetitions and contemplations mimic the speaker’s state of dreamlike half-consciousness, evoking a nightmarish confusion that is explored through overarching metaphors of the jungle. Despite its tone of loss, the poem, as one of the judges remarked, is strangely calming, like a lullaby.

home is here

by Overcomer Ibiteye

i. in between the jabs and punches and safety of shadows, i explain to my kids how dreams shine better when broken like communion bread. i teach them to recite the Kyrie eleison over and over again because i was taught that life and death are in the power of the tongue and when they point out that my tongue and the rest of my body are antonyms i reply that a body is meant to be marooned in sizzling contradictions – what is a body if not a blancmange of errors?

ii. i know how the sky can be when it holds the sun for too long. i am aware of how longer days can bring danger & i am aware the longer i’m awake the harder my bones fall like failed origamis like pyrex concrete & i am aware that hope is a swirling bubble that breaks on water on grief on bones whose owners fled from their bodies & i am aware that my country is a cocktail of flags and honor stained with blood. my kids ask me why my French tastes like burnt pies, why my Spanish hides my tongue in holes, they ask me where my identity is buried and my throat cells fold into extinction. how do you describe the anatomy of loss to a child? this sacred space where our histories are stored before decaying into stuffy libraries, do you call it a tomb? and this compressed air of happiness sucked into a void, do you call it the future?

iii. but I explain that home is a chaff of radio waves, a TV ad. and in the explanation, there is an underlying anger frosted with helplessness. i explain that home is an album of laughs wrapped in white and black. home is the queue at the country’s border. home is a duffel bag of tears and trash. home is a stigma of stars dripping with ash. and sometimes, home is right here, a falling castle wedged between foreign languages.

Judges’ comments
The judges responded to the way the prose poem ‘home is here’ deploys clever juxtaposition, arresting imagery and delicate rhythms to produce a masterful meditation on the different homes we inhabit: discomforted and unsettled; lived and remembered; of the imagination and of embodied places. Association, precise word selection and judicious repetition create layers of meaning, evoking our vulnerability and need to both survive and belong. There are no easy solutions or comfortable, pat reassurances in this poem; rather, identity, place, and belonging are turned around and examined from many angles. All the while, these wider concerns are manifested in facets of bodily sensations and feelings, achieved through powerful, precise verbs.

Three Variations on Mallarmé’s Brise Marine

by Bruce McIntyre

1.
There was a time, believe me, when I did not know,
I would stand upon the bridge and only
The future counted.
I knew nothing and could not know,
And to know meant only to arrive somewhere so far
Away that only today or maybe tomorrow
Counted. Simply getting there.
And how very avidly I counted everything.
Believe me, below me they knew even less.
They alone were wise who had been there before
Where the rocking waves brush the scanned horizon.
To their souls the rocking waves are endless
And all our lives and loves are distant flesh
Beyond an ocean of imaginings.

2.
At last the soft nudge of bow against the pier
As we arrive at one of the many stillnesses
Awaiting all who travel and all who sleep -
Meaning all of us - but you and I have longed for here
Through gnashing years and undesired recesses
Of separation and a pale grey faith to keep.
What stillness now? The dream of time regained
When it has overtaken our creaking progress
In seas churned up by told and untold pain?
With what calm trembling is our flight sustained,
This life of ours, while from afar a failed distress
Explodes across the waves to our domain
Where in the golden hour we nuzzle bitterness.
We look up, weep a touch, distraught again.

3.
There were times, believe me, when I stood firm,
So firm upon the bridge in the tempest
And the lurching - how much more can it lurch?
No, no word exists for lurching of that kind,
None anyway that I would know but I
Affirm I did not choose to go to sea
To play with words.
So firm upon the bridge I stood and felt
(When fear was not all over me like lightning)
I was like a nub of rampant flesh still
Strong in the crisis as I was required,
To keep us alive, to keep us alive,
Quite simply that. Well, dear heart,
We sailors are notoriously short-lived.

Judges’ comments
The judges thought ‘Three variations’ was a wonderfully ironic counterpoint to Mallarme's three-stanza poem, in which the speaker's projected voyage is away from boredom and banality and out into gales and strange lands, based on the songs told by sailors. Here, the poem is told from the perspective of having reached a place that has all the features of purgatory. It begins in past tense with the hope that characterised Mallarmé’s speaker, but soon reveals a sense of unease. This is beautifully captured in the second stanza which shifts to the present tense and from 'I' to 'you and I'. Here, the voyage is now seen as a metaphor for their relationship over time. The third stanza returns to past tense (except for the final line) with the voyage recast as the speaker's role in the relationship. The judges thought that the shift in tone from the high symbolism and emotional tenor of the first two and three-quarter stanzas to the prosaic and wearily matter-of-fact final lines was a superb way of ending the poem.