Winners of New Poets 26 and Single Poet 2025 competitions!

I was asked very kindly if I’d judge this year’s crop for the Three Poets publication – of course, always happy to put something back, after all, FS has been a mainstay in poetry and spoken word circles hereabouts.?T he files arrived safely in my email, and the process began.? Several readings later, I began to apply some more rulings, in order to be consistent. Having done this sort of thing online for some twenty years, it was actually easier than I thought.

I also like to see what other poets we might be chanelling, and that’s actually a good thing, for we are truly on the shoulders of giants. I recall fondly my own early high-school lessons, and a treasured publication called Improving on the blank page…also locally produced, as it turns out. The problem I still have, though, the selection I have in front of me here are all very good and strongly written, all unique voices.

One was focused on travelling around the Adelaide Plain, Kaurna territory and all, another spoke of Siddartha and what he found in the mud. Yet another wondered if geese can see God… it was a close-run race, tell you the truth. Good use of form was evident, and much love of the word by all.??Now let’s back to the slaughterhouse.

I commend ‘The Plains Life’, a collection of place poems with imagery that took me on a journey to all those places around Adelaide I’ve been and seen myself.

The first collection I choose is ‘My Solid Heart‘ and this is a wonder-filled exploration of just that very thing. The poet begins with a beautiful soliloquy on his three best friends of childhood days – who only exist in the wardrobe mirror. The poet is entering that realm of AA Milne or even Korney Chukovsky, where adult logic has no place at all. We foolishly refer to it as the republic of childhood… yet it is no such thing at all, it is a kingdom, with angels and demons and all things thought to be impossible. Being a long-time sufferer of asthma, the poet then speaks of his own internal world, fraught with health-crises, the marvel of tall ships and rainbow-cake, old maps and cuffs in the gravy, love as a dance-form, taking us around to Shakespeare and galahs and a beloved polyester jacket, finishing with whimsical black holes.?There, now I’ve written the beginnings of another poem.

The next collection is ‘Skimming the seaweed’ and true to the subject, is playful and floating.
It is also great to see poetic form being used, one example is ‘Playing with Lego”, and nice to have a villanelle in the collection, and also with that lovely goofball voice, shades of Edward Lear. A young paleontologist on his way to the museum, with a companion T-rex, takes us by the hand as we disembark at the station, there’s fridge-art and sticks and later on, an orthographically oriented frog. The wondrous chaos of a child’s toy collection and books like flying birds – this scene is one of the sweetest in the collection. ‘Lessons from a gentle soul’ is a magnificent study, and the last line should be engraved on stone, methinks : ‘The value in being gentle with each other.’ Op-shopping for oddball crockery and a simple statement of simply being, chanelling Master Shiki rounds off this performance, I didn’t want it to end, frankly….

The final choice was, after many subsequent passes, ‘Thoughts of Deduska’, and a most powerful voice, quite different from the previous selection, but again – the consistency is what got this past the post. A tip of the hat to Ted Egan, of Gurinji blues fame – ah me, we must ever maintain the rage. We certainly take things too soon, as the poet says in another poem, and the comings and goings that erase the sandcastles we build. Couldn’t have said that any better myself – there’s shades of Jacques Prevert here, in my reading. Tourists are frauds, that’s too true, and there’s lessons in the sticky-note reminder crowns we affect. The rhyming schemes are almost transparent, and that’s a great relief, as we can skip from line to like, whispering…and then the meaning surfaces with a punch. The decoding of ‘ders and dits’ was another great line, I can almost hear the likes of Brautigan here, and we round off with a pregnant lady at the pool, her little monkey soon ready to be untethered, live and let live ….and sing!

?I was cheering by the end of this, and that completes my nattering – now I pass these poets on to you.
?Enough from me finally.
Enjoy!?
Avalanche

Poetry is a mysterious beast. For me, the yearnings poets experience and strive to render in a variety of forms are all valuable expressions of the human psyche, but only some seem to embody emotions, the senses, and the liminal spaces between the psychological and the physical. While poetic forms and styles are many and varied: ballads, elegies, free verse, haiku, lyric poems, odes, pastoral poems, senru, sonnets, and villanelles, etc., in my view the form must offer a window into something deeper than a mere intellectual response to the subject/s at hand. The form must be a gateway into an inner world; a journey to a hitherto unknown land, for which the poet acts as gatekeeper. It is my strong preference that this place should offer emotional and sensory touchpoints. 

It is with these thoughts in mind that I approached judging the suites of poems for the Friendly Street 2025 Single Poet award. I have engaged this profound responsibility with the sensitivity of knowing how hard each poet has worked to create and compile their specific anthology. 

Some poems began with promise but left me at the end with a feeling that something had been missed. Perhaps as a reader, I have occasionally missed the point of a poem because most poetry is somewhat elusive. 

Les Murray has made the point that ‘the best versus the rest’ (to paraphrase him) comes down to an ability that evades explanation; perhaps the talent to use words in a painterly or musical way; to sculpt an impression of a moment in time; to make the intangible real. Perhaps the way one person’s work shines more brightly than another’s for a particular reader is about resonance – a sort of vibrational alignment like a song that moves you with its rhythm or rhyme (internal or external).

Congratulations to all the poets who ventured into the world of competition for one spot which offers a publication opportunity. All brave hearts should be rewarded.

In this case, first impressions were significant, though for the sake of fairness, they needed to be strengthened by deeper engagement. The winner made an indelible early impression, though I’ll continue here now by offering comments on the two runners up:

1. trundling the everyday is a worthy anthology of poems that edged ahead early on. I appreciated the depth of the observations of humans and human behaviours; the strong connections to nature and landscape; the poet’s curiosity about the world. I particularly liked Blokes with Dogs; Limpet; Noisy Miners; Pelican; Pub Gig; The Dry; Overture for Winter; and others. All the works are well-crafted; unhurried; self-assured; well-anchored.  In the end, however, I had to make the difficult choice of labelling this marvellous anthology as a ‘runner up’.
2. Putain Ouais is a capably wrought anthology of poems about climate change, love and loss, etc. with allusions to mythology and astrology/astronomy. The title translated from French is something like ‘fuck yeah’ – capturing humorously (and with suitable vulgarity perhaps) Der Zeitgeist (spirit of the times) of the 21^st century. The anthology also pays an extensive homage to life in Adelaide. Of all the works, this one struck me as the most contemporary in tone. To label this as a ‘runner up’ was also a very difficult choice, in a field where the standard overall was very high. I enjoyed the sense of freedom in nature and the body that this anthology evoked, and the intimacy of the poet’s voice. I commend to the reader poems such as ‘ebb tide’, ‘drought’, ‘Marino’, ‘after Tim Flannery’, ‘the penultimate brunch’ and many more.

To any poet who submitted a manuscript and missed out: I know first-hand how scary it can be to put your soul on the line in the hope of receiving recognition. Most creative people will have the experience of many rejections before their work meets its mark. No matter how hard one works, essentially, there is always an element of Fate or luck involved. There is never any way of knowing in advance how one’s work will be received. Roland Barthes talks about ‘the death of the author’ – in other words, that the primary source of meaning in a text has nothing to do with the author’s intention or background, but instead resides with the reader’s interpretation, which may have multiple dimensions.

Without further ado, it is my pleasure to announce that the manuscript of the 2025 winner of the Friendly Street Single Poet award is the author of The Heart is a Sinkhole. It’s a cohesive suite of poems on the human condition. Well-observed vignettes of all sorts of people left their humorous traces in my psyche. I particularly liked: Ultrasound in B-flat; A Social Worker’s Lament; Mystical Makeover; and many others. I’m not entirely sure what gave this anthology the edge… perhaps it was the overall ‘knit’ of the entirety of poems; perhaps it was the wit expressed by a poet who seems to have a deep, personal engagement with her (I assumed these were written by a woman) subjects. In any case, this one ‘stole the show’ so to speak. I am convinced this manuscript fully deserves to be published. 

Karen Pentecost