AustLit

Blake Prize 2013 Judges’ Comments

There is tautness and a natural flow in this lyric poem’s self-reflexive, meta-spiritual themes. Arguments about meaning, doubt and transcendence are abstracted and developed with restraint. There is paucity of image but the variation in tone from ironic to philosophical is persuasive. The poet manages to characterise essence and anthropomorphise river in ways which both tease and clarify the reading. With its spare, whittled-down language, the poem emulates the physical entity of a river, of its movements, its depths and at the end, its recreation.