The prizewinning and commended poems of the Passionfruit Poetry Prize 2023, selected by Amlanjyoti Goswami, are published in this special issue of The Passionfruit Review.
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A note from Amlanjyoti Goswami on the prizewinning poems:
‘A Life in Yarn’ (Shanna McGoldrick) is a majestic poem, with arresting use of metaphor and an abundance of both mystery and domesticity. Threads of stories are whittled into shape and clinking needles become grandmother’s teeth. Yarns are spun with ‘the fusses and gossips of a life’. The stark comparison with the vast outside brings the strangeness home. ‘The land lies dark and still’ as ‘words glide and spill/over the backwaters of time’. The poet’s recounting of her grandmother’s stories knitted from thin air, takes on a life of its own, as all good poems do. In a moment of reckoning, the poet discovers how close she is to her grandmother, as the wheel comes a full circle
‘My Mother, the Protestor’ (Sam Szanto) makes the political personal, as protests are accompanied by ‘singing, dancing and hand holding’. The poet reminisces about her mother marching across the lines to protest the very idea of war. And then the poet realises her mother’s shoes are too big to fill, as she wonders what people would think of her. Her mother, without a murmur of protest, could after a hard day, muster enough strength to make a cup of tea for everyone. Feminism is the exercise of choice. The poem works well for intermixing actual lines used by women protesting at the Greenham Common Peace Camp, with the poet’s own lines about her mother.
‘Touching Leaves’ (Charlotte Murray) is a tiny leaf of a poem, where the poet adroitly brings both classification and feeling into play to create a sense of description and companionship. There is scientific observation mixed with the sheer imagination that only poetry can bring, as the poem moves from classification, to finally, rapture. The leaf of the poem takes shape, quite literally, as the poem becomes skin, and boundaries of human and botanical are crossed with effortless ease.
Read these and the other commended poems below.