Blake Prize 2013 Judges’ Comments
This meditative poem works by combining astute observation with thoughts that seem to grow from the lucidity of its clean lines. The pine trees become a haunting metaphor that moves through the poem as it explores man’s place in nature. The images of ‘a woman and her children burying a dog’ and ‘common brown frogs’ blend effortlessly with others drawn from memory such as ‘Christ under a veil of Carrara marble’ in Naples. The language is fresh, original and powerful, especially as it addresses the crafting of a poem in the stages of image-gathering and thought-connecting, such as ‘skimming the tight skin of a thought’. It evokes a spiritual world that exists in the poet’s lines without any direct or obvious language or reliance on traditional religious symbolism.