MA in Creative Writing graduates on Sarah Broom Poetry Prize shortlist
Alice Miller and Ashleigh Young are two of the three finalists for this prestigious prize.
Three finalists have have been announced for the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize 2015. They are Wellington-based poet Diana Bridge, and MA in Creative Writing graduates Alice Miller and Ashleigh Young.
The shortlist was chosen by the 2015 guest judge, Irish poet Vona Groarke, who will visit Wellington in May as a guest of the IIML: holding a masterclass with MA students and appearing at a poetry reading, in conversation with Cliff Fell.
Alice Miller is a poet, playwright, essayist and fiction writer, who is based in Vienna. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria (2005) and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow. Other awards include the Royal Society of New Zealand's Manhire Prize, the BNZP Katherine Mansfield Premier Award for fiction, and a CNZ Louis Johnson Bursary. In 2014 she was Grimshaw Sargeson Fellow, a Visiting Writer at Massey University, and a resident at the Michael King Centre. Her first full collection of poetry, The Limits , was published simultaneously by Shearsman and Auckland University Press in 2014.
Vona Groarke writes: 'The "I" and "We" of Alice Miller's poetry are rarely familiar and never predictable. The same is true of her poems, which are fully-charged and teem with surprises of imagery, narrative and language. Nothing moves in a straight line in this work: instead, the poems tend to turn on small pockets of beguiling mystery. Characters emerge out of an apparent nowhere and do the darndest things before they slip off again, as if in secret, out of the sightline of the poem. It all makes for an intense and intensely involving experience: the lines are so well managed and the narrative so deftly and subtly manoeuvred as to leave one ruffled, but pleasantly so. What might seem like aphorism turns out to be a strange and complicated proposition, as in "Saving" where, "some of the moments we cling to most / are the futures we never let happen". This is work that turns on a sixpence, and that manages each of its fascinating turns with assurance and aplomb.'
Ashleigh Young is a Wellington-based poet, essayist and editor, who graduated from the MA programme in 2009. Her first poetry collection, Magnificent Moon was published by Victoria University Press in 2012 and recent work appears in Sport, The Griffith Review, Five Dials, and Tell You What. She co-teaches a workshop in science writing at the IIML with science writer Rebecca Priestley, and she blogs, mostly about cycling, at eyelashroaming.com.
Vona Groarke writes: 'Ashleigh Young's poems defy their tight spaces to offer expansive and resonant narratives. Hers is a poetic world that derives great charge and vigour from proper nouns – named people and places – and specific, beautifully delineated detail that, as in flash fiction, sparks an entire world to life. People talk to each other in these poems, and whole lives get encapsulated in the kind of language that is as exact as it is vivid, as careful as it concise. Take for instance, "Electrolarynx" with its arresting line: "Then our silence made a condemned building of us all", or the opening of "Become road": "When the car stops we are beginning already to become road". These are poems that begin with the familiar, and then carefully walk it to the edges of perception, where it catches the light in arresting, singular and finely memorable ways.'
The three finalists will read in a free session at the Auckland Writers Festival on Sunday 17 May. Vona Groarke will announce the winner at this event.
The Sarah Broom Poetry Prize aims to make a substantial ongoing contribution to supporting poetry in New Zealand. The value of the prize is $12,000 in 2015. Entries were received from almost 200 New Zealand poets - both emerging and established.
'The Sarah Broom Poetry Prize is about celebrating poetry,' says judging panel member Sarah Ross. 'The diversity of the entries received, and the tonal and formal complexity of the best work, its deftness, its moments of insight, poignancy, and humour – all of this has made the judging process enormously rewarding. So too has working with the generous and perceptive Vona Groarke.'