The 57th Blake Prize

The Blake Poetry Prize is unique in Australia for requiring an engagement with a topic which many poets find challenging: rendering into verse that which cannot be easily articulated without lapsing into lyrical, moral, aesthetic glibness, or received rhetoric. This year’s winning entry, ‘Four Ways to Approach the Numinous’ is an outstanding example of a successful poetic engagement with manifestations of the divine.

‘Four Ways to Approach the Numinous’
This assured and rigorous quartet of poems impressed itself upon the judges as the clear winner. Through four strategies, ‘By the Mystery of Presence’, ‘By Embracing Multiplicity’, By A Devotion to Objects’, ‘By Approaching the River’, the poet scrutinises the notion of the numinous in a compelling manner that ultimately leaves the reader with no clear or comfortable answers. The poetic voice in this quartet draws the reader into each topos in a way that is poetically and intellectually exhilarating. At times the poet plays with the reader’s expectations in a cheeky way, while at the same time maintaining a profound integrity. Tropes in the poems appear seamlessly and are uncannily apt. Each of the poems is individualised by a different stanza/line form. ‘Four Ways to Approach the Numinous’ is an endlessly fascinating and rewarding investigation of the mysteries of presence as they may appear in artworks, memory, landscape and the concept of a master guiding a disciple on a spiritual quest.

The judges decided to highly commend three poems – ‘Mahler and Webb’, ‘Metaphysics on the Farm’, and ‘Vishvarupa’.

‘Mahler and Webb’
This diptych evokes the spiritual with levity and gravity. The movements of Mahler’s Resurrection symphony are imaginatively remixed with an animated procession of ants. In the second poem ‘Reading Francis Webb’, the poem reifies the growth of a spiritual imperative in the figure of the poet Francis Webb during his life in psychiatric institutions. This tautly paced and compassionately insightful poem concludes with an affecting generosity.

‘Metaphysics on the Farm’
In a pastoral setting, everyday reflections on a relationship are transformed into a suggestive meditation on love as eros and love as agape and their relationship to the divine. This is effected through an implied dialogue between the self and an other. The delicate and restrained casualness of this meditation impressed the judges.

‘Vishvarupa’
This triptych, focusing on the three Hindu deities, Ganesh, Krishna and Kali, dazzles with an unusual radiance. It is intimate, amusing, freshly contemporary and politically aware in the imaging of its subjects, while maintaining a more traditional devotional attitude. There is variation in this triptych: the middle poem, ‘Two Souls’, which addresses Krishna, enchants with a quiet lyricism.

- Joanne Burns & David Musgrave 

Read the 2009 Blake Prize Judges Comments