Damen O’Brien is the winner and the runner up to the 2019 Val Vallis Poetry Award, managed by our longtime partner, Queensland Poetry Festival.
Says judges Tamryn Bennett, Judith Beveridge and Yvette Holt on the winning poems:
1st Prize
‘Ice and Glass’ is an elegantly sustained poem set in motion by artful weavings of recurring images of ice and glass. Swinging between crystalised hallucinations and the stellar, the poem fluxes between liquid and solid, grounded in detail while slippery visions are suspended just out of reach. The fluent lines are skilfully orchestrated across the fourteen stanzas, most of which are end-stopped, demonstrating skilful control of form. Tonal modulations, coupled with a penetrating focus of image and diction, create lingering resonances. The intense alchemy of ‘Ice and Glass’ hangs in the air after reading, an incredibly accomplished poem.
2nd Prize
‘Bezoar’ is an intriguing poem that takes the subject of the universal compulsion to eat and runs with it surprising and dynamic ways. The language and imagery have strength and energy which carry the poem’s observations forward ultimately into the realm of the personal. The poet’s style is fresh, rhythmic and incisive. The way the poem brings the non-human and the human into balance and focus is one of its pleasures, a poetic petrification mirrored by the lyric intensity of syntax and conversational phrasings.
Damen O'Brien is a Queensland poet. His poetry awards include the Moth Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (joint winner), the Val Vallis Award, the Café Writers Poetry Competition and the Magma Judge’s Prize. He has been a finalist in many others. Damen has published in journals including Southerly, Mascara, Verity La, Stylus Lit, Rabbit and Island. Damen’s first book of poetry, Animals With Human Voices, is available from Recent Work Press.
Judith Beveridge is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Sun Music: New and Selected Poems which won the 2019 Prime Minister’s poetry prize. She has also been awarded the Christopher Brennan and Philip Hodgins Memorial Medals for excellence in Literature. She was poetry editor for Meanjin from 2005-2016. Her work has been studied in schools and universities and has been translated into several languages.
http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/beveridge-judith
Tamryn Bennett is a poet and Artistic Director of Red Room Poetry living on Dharawal land. She has founded a number of poetic projects including Poetry Month and Poem Forest. Her two poetry collections are
Icaros (Vagabond Press) and
phosphene (Rabbit Poetry). She is also editor of
A Line in the Sand: 20 Years of Red Room Poetry (Pantera Press) and
Líneas en tierra / Lines in land— a bilingual collection of Mexican poetry (Australian Poetry). Tamryn collaborates with many artists and her poetic projects have been exhibited and published widely in Australia and internationally including with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Kennedy Centre, USA.
