Hunter Writers’Centre, Dombóvár: Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2024 (Hunter Writers’ Centre 2024)
On its web page, the Newcastle Poetry Prize describes itself as the most prestigious poetry competition in Australia. Few people would disagree.
The Hunter Writers’ Centre has coordinated the prize since 2002, and it publishes an anthology every year that includes the prize winning poem, the runners up, a number of subsidiary prize winners and a selection of other submissions.
As the 2024 judges Caitlin Maling and Peter Boyle, each with their own impressive list of prizes, point out, a distinctive feature of the prize is that poems up to 200 lines are accepted. And most of the poems in this anthology are of substantial length – the shortest is 27 lines. The anthology is a rare opportunity to read a selection of longer poems from a wide range of Australian poets.
As my regular readers know, I read quite a lot of poetry, if not enough to call myself a critic. I was happy to read poems here by people whose work I respond to:
- Mark Tredinnick, whose ‘A Godwit Sonnet Cycle’ won the Hunter Writers’ Centre Member Award
- B. R. Dionysius, whose three-line stanzas in ‘Fishbone Ferns’ give us scenes from life on the Darling Downs – ‘it can be quite WW1 out on the downs, bodies / hung up on barbed wire, left to rot as a sign to / others – don’t try it, don’t cross into no man’s.’
- Brendan Ryan, with another of his wonderful cow poems, ‘The snaking accuracy of cow trails’
- Kathryn Lomer, with ‘Hyaenia song’, a narrative poem set in Ethiopia.
And there’s the immediate reason that I bought a copy, Christopher (Kit) Kelen’s ‘Dombóvár’, which won the prize and gave its name to the anthology. I don’t envy the judges their task, but they’ve chosen well with ‘Dombóvár’, which evokes the small Hungarian town that Kit Kelen’s family come from (at least that’s how I read the poem).
I can’t do better than quote the judges (a PDF of their report is available at this link, and is worth reading in full):
‘Dombóvár’ skilfully integrates thoughtful reflection on important issues, humour, inventiveness and an engaging partly colloquial tone. This evocation of small town rural Hungary carries echoes of the moral ambiguities and violence of settler societies like Australia. Throughout the poem there is the suggestion of a larger, potentially national, narrative, but the reader is left to work through the weave themselves … With great skill the poem breaks standard idioms and expected word choices to produce a clipped, very tight effect that intensifies the reader’s experience. ‘Dombóvár’ uses the form of a poem sequence to powerful effect, shaping a masterful poem that can be read on multiple levels.
this is the land of forgive ourselves
for all we've done, will do
There’s lots more in the anthology. To be true to my page 78* practice, I’ll mention ‘The Keeper of the Field’ by Mal McKimmie (pages 74–80). It’s one of several sonnet sequences in the anthology, and a quick web search informs me that it’s far from being the only one written by Mal McKimmie.
The sequence is prefaced by a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, and I’m guessing that the ideas it explores are related to Hinduism: the field is (crudely speaking) the mind, and it is populated by sheep (ideas? poems?). The sonnets circle around the notion of an empty field – mind empty of thought, perhaps. In the two sonnets on page 78, the sequence moves forward to the notion that all fields (all minds?) are connected – we are not the isolated individuals that we think we are in the West. That might sound abstract and difficult, but the poems are remarkably lucid. Here, ripped from its context, is one of the two on page 78 to give you a taste:
Did I say this field has a fence? Well, it
doesn't anymore. It seems the fence came
down, was taken down, or disappeared
with the sheep, as if they were interdependent
(I faintly recall a lyric passing
through here, singing something along these lines).
Given the absence of a fence, where is
the distinction between this field and another?
Do I tend a disappearing border?
Leaves of grass, field to field, lean in sympathy,
mirror each other; flowers too; even
weeds copy their kin; creepers creep towards
each other; and roots, well, roots have always known:
nothing is alone, nothing under the sun.
if the poem is exploring ideas from Hinduism, it manages to remind us that the quintessential North American poet Walt Whitman was in similar territory – his poem ‘Song of Myself’ includes lines like ‘For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.’ And recent science about tree roots supplies the poem with a beautiful metaphor for interconnectedness.
Me fail? I fly! 