The Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry ($15,000)

Jennifer Compton, Blue (Ginninderra Press)
This is a fine book which takes the reader through several faces of blue.
The colour permeates the landscape, sneaks in through holes in the walls.
With a practised ease, this author of two previous collections and four
plays begins with the well-known quiet, dreamy but intense voice for which
Compton is known.The second half unveils the dark side of this colour with
death in the forest beneath a relentless, unforgiving sky. We also visit the
infamous Belanglo State Forest which is in the same area, saw more atrocity
beneath this firmament.

Brook Emery, and dug my fingers in the sand (Five Islands Press)
The title of this book misleads the reader: Emery's focus is offshore and
rarely in Australian literature has the sea been so pondered, so travelled;
not dissected though, Emery knows you can't do that. In the waters, this man
is in touch with everything important in his life. With the waves as his
companion he puzzles through the pain and wonders of life. Formerly a beach
inspector, English teacher and removalist amongst other things, this is
Emery's first book. Coming back to poetry later in life, he shows a unique
balance of maturity and freshness.

Philip Hammial, Bread (Black Pepper)
Hammial has a strong, fascinating, individual and reliably animated style.
What might be mere experimental whimsy in another writer is toughened and
made memorable by his well-integrated but unyielding ethical tone: "His is
an evacuated face. Actually, it's an extrajudicial face permeated with suck
this immunity … A scummed face. A face in the final analysis, that's down on
all fours' ('Howard'). This is a beautifully disciplined book, mirroring
social and literary genre absurdities back and forth to achieve a stance
which is extremely valuable both artistically and socially.

J S Harry, Sun Shadow, Moon Shadow (Vagabond Press)
Sun Shadow, Moon Shadow shows the poet at her typically intellectually
agile, sportive, critical, witty, work.. Her Peter Rabbit, met in earlier
volumes, makes an energetic reappearance, playing with Picasso and 'Chairman
Miaow'. This is immediately engaging poetry; poetry of the mind made flesh.

Wendy Jenkins, Rogue Quotations (Fremantle Arts Centre Press)
Jenkins' fine, succinct, explorative collection is particularly welcome
because it is her return to publishing poetry after a period of editing and
aiding other writers. In it, she delineates the physical and metaphysical
role of metaphor, and the absence of metaphor, in art and passion.

Ken Taylor, Africa (Five Islands Press)
Africa is Ken Taylor's first volume of poems in fifteen years. The subject
matter of Africa is love, and the individual lyric poems may be read as the
continuous narrative of that love. The poems are lucid reflections of and
upon the natural world. 'Postcards on the Way', the book's second half,
enables the poet to embrace much of the known world in his vision. Africa is
composed of lyric poems of the utmost economy, the most revealing lucidity,
the most compelling intensity.


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