Prize Pumpkins
An Inflection of Silence and Other Poems
Edited by Christopher Pollnitz
University of Newcastle Press

The viewless wings of poesy were never anybody’s idea of the way to make money. The rewards for writing poetry must certainly be in heaven because they are mighty scarce on earth. Writers may get grants and free board and lodging in universities from time to time but that is about the size of it.

So when poetry prizes are offered worth several thousand dollars in used notes to the winner it’s bound to make even the most unworldly light up. The Mattara Poetry Prize has an unusual history. Offered by the University of Newcastle, it is funded to a large extent by the somewhat unlikely beneficence of the Hunter District Water Board and over the past four or five years has established itself as the country’s foremost poetry competition attracting, as it did in 1986, as many as 1500 bids for fame and fortune and, of course, the best-pumpkin-in-the-show award.

An Inflection of Silence is the title of the anthology selected by Christopher Pollnitz from the most recent entries. He has chosen the work of 28.writers of whom only nine are· women although the winning poem and two of the three poems singled out as being of special merit were aIl from. women. This year’s judges, reading poems in the soundproof booth, were Roger McDonald and Vincent Buckley.

While the judges read the poems anonymously, it is possible that Pollnitz felt inclined to doff his cap to entries from Dorothy Hewett, Les Murray; Geoff Page, Philip Salom, Vivian Smith and John Tranter, although there is no question of the merit of the poems – particularly the powerful “Travellers’ Tales” from Hewett describing the Antipodean exotica which still boggle us, the later inhabitants: “Exiles/shut out of heaven magnified with grief/we have sculled to the Island of Glass full of fabulous monsters” and Philip Salom’s “Images from Cartier-Bresson”, a poem which moves imaginatively and is proof of Salom’s maturing talents:

“Cartier Bresson knows how it leaps so much
from rubble. It favours children, lovers and
the simple, but all have its brilliant engine.”

What strikes the reader is the assurance with which so many of the contributors approach the poem sequence. A number are particularly memorable- Wendy Poussard’s devotional on St Francis and St Clare:

“Believing Everything in Plaines’; (‘We who have kept the faith/have never really known/which things to bury/ which to keep’), Margaret Scott’s ironic group “Housework”, Geoff Page’s account of racial tensions in “Monologue for 88” and Margaret Bunce’s quirky series, “Margaret Preston’s Vases Speak”, which like Salom’s poem and Margaret Scott’s vividly detailed “Elegies”; merited its special commendation from the judges.

Other poems which catch the eye are Sudesh Mishra’s bifocal view of Fijian culture, “In Nadi”, Peter Goldsworthy’s characteristically sardonic “This, Though” (he also supplied the line for the anthology’s title) and John Griffin’s haunting poem, “My Father’s Anger” describing the failure of the land to come good – ‘My father’s anger is to hear dry thunder/ rolling ‘Abandon’ down its rainless throat.’

And finally, the winning poem, Lily Bret’s “Poland”. It is a remarkable achievement- W.H. Auden had doubted that poetry could speak again after the photos of the death camps were first made public. Metaphor could never match the enormity of fact. Bret’s poem recognises this quandary and its tactic is to avoid rhetorical collision with the Indescribables. We return to contemporary· Poland with her, Bret’s mother had been in the camps:

Everyone looks depressed/deprived
and distressed and I feel cheerful . . .
…You’ve got/what you deserve
I whisper / to a man in the tram
who looks/the same age
as you/mother

It is a bitter poem, and one of remarkable affirmation. Like the best poetry it takes you through the poet’s thoughts so that her discoveries become the reader’s also.

Inflection of Silence is a strong collection of poems. Ignore its unprepossessing cover – a rather washed out photo of a cemetery in Newcastle – and dive straight in to the text, proof that poetry isn’t in the graveyard yet.

“Prize Pumpkins”, The Adelaide Review, No.34, January, 1987, p.21.