my poem 'Dombóvár' won the 2024 Newcastle Poetry Prize

 

 Dombóvár

 

Megbűnhődtemár e nép

Amúltat s jövendöt!

            – Kölcsey Ferenc

 

1

stone tulips, all teeth

 

pretty town of narrow hearts

 

its sturdy fence

 

this is not the train but

a train runs through

 

I remember before myself

there’s no one else to

 

make it a duty now

 

 

 

2

I like to be nowhere –

as far as can be

 

it’s where I’m from, I am

 

field and breeze, the lean of the land

 

I don’t know them

they don’t know me

 

comfortable to be nobody too

 

ruins now where they were taken

 

of course there’s a fierceness

could still call belief

 

must remember for the gone

 

no one here now has a debt

 

 

 

 

 

3

ghost dog, ghost cat – which is why

 

on brush cutter two stroke day

 

the id-pack would run, all jaw

best friends, and tear round yappy

 

all but for the fence, lovely, trained to defend

 

sit Puli! Hajna stay! drop it!

 

are simple as children

they like their prey processed

 

gave me a name and I lost it here

 

good fences make best dogs most angry

 

 

 

4

all across the Great Plains

 

on Trabant Saturday, in a diesel puff

 

our factories shut, heroes abandoned

 

you go back to look for the good old days

 

to imagine the coaches,

cauldron and the axe, religion

 

this is the land of forgive ourselves

for all we’ve done, will do

 

 

 

5

when one, unseen, goes off in your ear

jump skin

 

teeth so shine

that really they are barking for each other

 

a dog for my fence so I’ll need one

 

we could be hounded out with pitchforks

installed as courtiers

 

a fence to show they know

 

so loyal, all must bark 

 

 

 

6

to see which side they’re buttered on

each keeps yard tidily

 

will always vote for the king, whomever

 

we were the ones must have run

 

ever since in disguise

 

you won’t see me, I don’t recognize

 

 

 

7

egészségedre – here’s your health!

 

little dance with all paws

then who’ll command the tune?

 

it’s how one man makes a whole country

 

less violins than were

 

of course the narrowness had to be there

 

if just once they could go for a walk

they’d be less lonely then

 

 

 

8

‘haven’t we already suffered?’

 

and for all the sins we could yet commit

 

after the rains, there’s silt you’d sink in

 

so much was forest before

 

now it’s happy hour for mosquitoes

they bite through time

hook up with lice and with bedbugs

 

 

 

9

glum cats go

slink, furtive

 

perhaps they are our silence?

 

spectres glimpsed in the crossing

 

or ‘here comes conscience’

one might say

 

 

 

10

he doesn’t quite invent himself

though would like you to think, a kind of saviour

 

the gossip breeds

things have gone too far

 

then the future is like that view you get

from the end of the train when the tracks run away

into the yellow

it was a tunnel then

 

 

 

11

can hear the shouting from next door

some kind of crisis, little seas boil, here’s an admiral’s cap

 

sturdy street, all bark as a stranger goes by

 

see him look down from the top of the tree

 

defends the bitter loss

 

says cut down the tree and then you’ll be warmer

not mine of course, he means

 

he gathers in the tithes – ours, yours

for family, for friends across the frontier

so many!  and yet these many are few

 

to speak in a riddle of time

 

there’s a little town in his head

it’s becoming a village

 

 

 

12

they sing, who’ll see?

 

some blue, red poppies ragged in weed field

 

rooster and cuckoo all summer green,

soil quicksand too

 

here is my father’s pet fox

 

you could walk into the corn just sown

 

the barking spoils it all

 

 

 

13

if only it were clockwork, could make good then

 

every hundred years, expelled

 

these have cultivated a nervous quiet

but you do know they might squeal

 

have you ever trusted?

 

lick their young well

 

scruff them when stiff necked 

and some grow alley tough

 

and some –

if there’s cream they’ll get it

 

 

 

14

no one’s allowed to chase a car

 

some have eaten through the wire

to take down a bicycle too

 

 

 

15

soon we’ll burn witches again

 

we’ll be savage, we’ll have just arrived

 

this one blows with,  knows his market         

 

 

 

16

lest bite the hand that feeds

 

the good must accept their fate, face fact

 

jump Viktor, down Otto, Vlodomir beg

 

think paper, slipper, pipe, smell fear

 

haul to the park and home!

 

 

 

17

one may shit on one’s own lawn

lay the bottles where you will

that’s just superstition

 

obedient to the old borders

though worshipful, still real

 

down Árpád, roll over Attila

 

we know who is who

 

 

 

18

a whistlestop name too long, too fast

 

water birds, ivy up walls

rye stubble, hills to roll away

 

the village clouds, and the church run still

 

so many chimney whispers

 

 

 

19

who ever deserved a country ?

 

when the paint shines, here’s realm was

the buried cross bent top of the crown

 

 

 

20

a little gargle in the morning

throats sore from so much

 

some have held high office

I think in the case of Caligula

or that might have been a horse

 

who else can have erected these fences?

 

 

 

21

hold court from a kennel

 

come out to bark

 

but they can be bribed with biscuits

will each leap for a treat

 

 

 

22

one kingdom just against all comers

 

here where the Romans camped

 

one size fits all there is to revenge

 

tails wag as I get around

we’re nowhere     who’ll notice? who could care?

 

I lean over the gate, blade sharp as their bite

I slit their barking throats

 

 

 

23

meadows and the summer shade

insects known by name

 

it’s better to leave no tracks at all

 

to be small in a small place no one remembers

 

to be as good as gone

 

 Judges’ Report Newcastle Poetry Prize 2024 

Over 800 poems were entered in the 2024 Newcastle Poetry Prize. We read all of these poems blind. It was a demanding task but it also gave us the chance to experience many powerful and original poems. Experiencing these poems convinced us of the importance of the Newcastle Poetry Prize, no other prize in Australia allows for such variety of poetry to be considered in a competition. This is largely a feature of the length permitted—up to 200 lines—however we were struck with how the entries ranged widely in length, from three line haiku to poems filling out every one of the 200 lines. A 200 line maximum allows a poet to be ambitious, to try out forms not possible if the allowance was curtailed. One of the difficult aspects of choosing winners was the comparison of very different kinds of poems. How to rank a long ambitious poem that may have weaknesses at certain points against a far shorter lyric poem? Or how to compare an intensely personal, emotion-charged poem with a poem that works with history or science and has a more purely intellectual appeal? How to place side-by-side poems speaking urgently of the current day, with poems meandering in the currents of history? We wanted to judge each poem on its own terms and not apply any singular aesthetic too rigorously. 

The winning poem, ‘Dombovar’ by Kit Kelen, ranked very high on both our original lists and grew in stature with successive rereads. ‘Dombovar’ 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. Sudden transitions between dogs and humans and intertextual asides about fences and neighbours add to the poem’s humour. There is also a strong undertone of sadness as the poet subtly creates a selfportrait. 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. ‘Dombovar’ uses the form of a poem sequence to powerful effect, shaping a masterful poem that can be read on multiple levels. 

The poem we chose in second place, ‘Welcome Swallow’ by Verity Laughton, is a perfectly crafted short lyric. In its twenty-six lines not a word is wasted. All the dimensions of lyric poetry—sound play, rhythm, shifts in tone, imagery, line breaks—come together to evoke the moment of being fully alive in a small bird. It does this with great brilliance and poise. The suspension created by the repeated ‘if ...’ structure leads the reader onward through image after image till we see the bird with ‘this same/ glee of airy volume, this hump and slap of wild/ invisible ...’ To distil so much intensity and beauty in a traditional lyric form, perhaps a little like Hopkins, is a remarkable achievement. 

‘Tornados and other disasters’ by Jenny Pollak is at once a poem about the difficulties of writing poetry and a beautifully crafted reflection on human mortality. The effort to describe in words the light at midday, the sea in autumn or the shifts in one’s moods becomes a reflection on the writer’s ageing. Sparsely written and beautifully imagined, the poem offers us the woman ‘who resurrects the trees by making them/ her apostles’ and summons up the world that exists when we don’t see it or when it has truly vanished but continues ‘the way that pangolins exist/ and otters on other continents’. Understatement is a strong element in this poem, evoking the experience of losing one’s beloved. ‘Tornados and other disasters’ is outstanding for the originality of its clear short observations and for the way it joins together realms most often kept apart. 

The two poems we chose as Highly Commended, ‘Glass Creek’ by Verity Oswin and ‘The Grasscutters’ by Jo Gardiner, both skilfully shape their material into memorable poems. ‘Glass Creek’ brings together the story of a colonial real estate tycoon in Melbourne and the narrator’s morning jog by the Yarra, asking us the question ‘a colony in the body—how does it feel?’ ‘The Grasscutters’ weaves together intricate descriptions of the natural world with such daily routines as a chat with friends and a swim in the local pool. The poem gives us the beauty of moments intensely perceived as when ‘the grass- / cutters shred long stems of light/ along the road’. ‘Lake Days’ by Andrew Menken has been awarded the 2024 Harri Jones Memorial Prize. This category was one of the most contested, with many fine poems being submitted by poets 35 and under. What bought us together on ‘Lake Days’ was firstly its humour and then how it, as a poetic sequence, roamed across forms, stanzas and influences. The ultimate result is a deliberately, delightfully, incomplete portrait of pedestrian town life, by, as the name suggests, a lake, where ‘fishes plop’ and ‘the flies have gotten into the dog food’. The 2024 Member Prize is awarded to Mark Treddinick’s ‘A Godwit Sonnet Cycle’. One of many sonnet cycles submitted amongst the 2024 entries, Treddinick’s poem uses the form well, interrogating the cyclical nature of tides and human lives. The poem avoids veering into sentimentality or the sublime, while still managing to convey whimsy, humour and love, where the poet concludes that ‘Self appears/ To be more like a ragged constellation/ Than a star’. 

It was striking how many poems had a rural location. If you relied on this sample of Australian writing as a guide to demographics you would conclude that two thirds of Australians live in the country and only a minority in the cities. In part this reflects the large number of poems concerning the natural world, whether as landscape, plants, trees, animals or birds. There were several poems about floods, which occupied a much larger place in this year’s poetic imagination than bushfires. The present danger of climate catastrophe was reflected in many poems addressing directly changes wrought by global warming, or imbued with a sense of climate grief or dread. Many other poems focussed on other urgent domestic and global issues, many questioned, as Auden famously denied, if a poem could in fact make anything happen. But as readers of these poems, we often felt moved by them, and in the situation of a blind reading we truly were being moved by unnamed strangers. Many poems focussed on personal stories, often very moving, but in many cases the range of personal details were not well integrated into the poem. The problem of finding an aesthetically satisfying conclusion often escaped the writer, leaving something that seemed less than what a short story or prose autobiography might have achieved. Many of the entries suffered from being recounts of various experiences, whether one’s own or another’s, whether in teenage years or midlife, that failed to pass through the imaginative distillation required to create a poem. Often the details or personal disclosures evoked a response of ‘Why are you telling me this?’ rather than building towards a poem. Occasionally poems relating historical stories read like Wikipedia entries with line breaks inserted while many very personal poems felt like rambling conversations that don’t reach beyond an implied personal context. That said, there were many strong poems among the entries and only a fraction of these could be included in the Anthology. It seemed important to us as judges to focus on what the poem achieved, on how successful it was as a poem, regardless of its brevity or length. Tight, well-crafted, shorter imaginative poems to us ranked more highly than longer, overly prose-like pieces that lacked the sharpness or emotional force of the best poetry. In several cases the personal story was all too much like a prose recount with no real music to justify the line breaks and with little daring or originality in language or imagery. A good poem needs to surprise or startle, leading the reader somewhere new rather than remaining within familiar tropes and expected language. It was often a question of finding balance, with many fine musical poems petering out after 150 lines, unable to cohere towards a sense of an ending. And this is what the Newcastle is unique in asking its competitors submitting long poems to do—to be expansive and diversionary, but to return us at the end to enough of a sense of a conclusion to feel sated. 

Caitlin Maling and Peter Boyle