'Crutchfield trained as a classicist, and her poetry combines conversational idioms with mythic visions of human relationship, ‘longing and its/ fierce metamorphosis’. Elegies, love poems and imagistic snapshots mix with wide open epistolary verse. Her poetry reclaims the linguistic power and range of allusion found in late romantic poets like Christopher Brennan and Francis Webb, bringing them to bear on contemporary female experience.' (Publication summary)
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Latest Winners / Recipients
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Year: 2024
winner y
The Cyprian
Artarmon
:
Giramondo Publishing
,
2023
26363908
2023
selected work
poetry
'Powerful debut which interrogates the nature of love in its various forms
'From poems of desire and sexual longing to poems of love in the face of death, The Cyprian explores the joy and heartbreak love weaves into our lives. The collection confronts some of our primary questions about love: how is it possible to accept the death of the beloved? What role does deception play in love? When does love become a force of exploitation? The collection is composed of five parts, reflecting the different aspects of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty — a complexity which is also implicit in the ambiguity of the book’s title, ‘the Cyprian’.
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Year: 2023
winner y
At the Altar of Touch
St Lucia
:
University of Queensland Press
,
2022
23428662
2022
selected work
poetry
'From the 2020 winner of the Thomas Shapcott Award comes a sophisticated, impressive and rich collection of poetry that unpacks the complexity of family, grief, and cross-cultural and queer identity.
'These richly allusive poems weigh violence and tenderness, wound and cure, history and future. Boldly and tenderly, they balance loss and gain, adventure and quiet, as they hum to one another of love and loss. This is a scintillating and exhilarating collection from an accomplished and distinctive new voice.' (Publication summary)
-
Year: 2022
winner y
Human Looking
Artarmon
:
Giramondo Publishing
,
2021
22958297
2021
selected work
poetry
'A ground-breaking insight into the experience of disability, from a distinguished poet who has lived with Marfan Syndrome, including severe spinal curvature, and whose poems give voice to those who are often treated as ‘other’ or alien.
'The poems are visceral and intimate, they comfort and discomfort at the same time – empathy for the other seems to falter, only to expand and deepen.
'The poems in Human Looking speak with the voices of the disabled and the disfigured, in ways which are confronting, but also illuminating and tender. They speak of surgical interventions, and of the different kinds of disability which they seek to ‘correct’. They range widely, finding figures to identify with in mythology and history, art and photography, poetry and fiction. A number of poems deal with unsettling extremes of embodiment, and with violence against disabled people. Others emerge out of everyday life, and the effects of illness, pain and prejudice. The strength of the speaking voice is remarkable, as is its capacity for empathy and love. ‘I, this wonderful catastrophe’, the poet has Mary Shelley’s monstrous figure declare. The use of unusual and disjunctive – or ‘deformed’ – poetic forms, adds to the emotional impact of the poems.'
Source : publication summary
-
Year: 2021
winner y
The Strangest Place : New and Selected Poems
Fitzroy North
:
Black Pepper
,
2020
20915373
2020
selected work
poetry
'The strangest place, this world of fact and figment we astonishingly find ourselves inhabiting, is the territory that Stephen Edgar’s poetry has been probing and framing for over four decades now, looking out on the evanescent representations of light and inwards on the mind and “the gyre of its own consciousness”, feeling “toward the labyrinth just behind Creation’s serene surface”, as Alan Gould described it, and “trying to keep faith poetically with that strangeness of the world”, in the words of Peter Steele.
'The Strangest Place offers a retrospective on Edgar’s career, with selections from each of his previous ten books. Opening the collection is a book-length section of new poems, Background Noise, which continues and extends the range of his meditations, with characteristic technical mastery, interspersed with the title’s leitmotiv, whether the notes of lorikeets in the morning trees, echoing voices in an abandoned railway tunnel, the mind’s running commentary or the cosmic hum beyond the death of the stars.' (Publication summary)
-
Year: 2020
winner y
The Lost Arabs
St Lucia
:
University of Queensland Press
,
2019
15423160
2019
selected work
poetry
'Visceral and energetic, Omar Sakr’s poetry confronts notions of identity and belonging head-on. Braiding together sexuality and divinity, conflict and redemption, The Lost Arabs is a seething, urgent collection from a distinctive new voice.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Works About this Award
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Ali Finds a Place on the Shortlist for PM's First Poetry Prize 2012 single work column
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 26-27 May 2012; (p. 7)
