Hobart poet Anthony Lawrence has won the 2001 Josephine Ulrick National Poetry Prize for his work entitled 'Rain'.
Anthony Lawrence was selected from a field of 418 competing for the $10,000 winning prize - making this one of the richest poetry awards in Australia.
The award ceremony, which held in association with The Brisbane Institute at The University of Queensland's Customs House in Brisbane last night, was established in 1998 as a tribute to former UQ student, writer, artist and photographer, Josephine Ulrick.
UQ Associate Professor Richard Fotheringham, from the School of English, Media Studies and Art History said the aim of the award is to encourage budding poets.
'Because of this, the conditions of entry are that the poem has not been published, performed or submitted for any other poetry competition,' he said.
The four runners up were Jan Kapelas for 'Egyptian Stone', Jean Kent for 'Postcard Ping-Pong', Ronn Morris for 'Cold Water Coast Poems' and Jan Owen for 'The Fireflies'. They received prize money of $1000 each.
Australian author and poet David Malouf was the guest speaker at last night's function.
For more information contact Dr Fotheringham (telephone 07 3365 3327 or r.fotheringham@mailbox.uq.edu.au) or Joanne van Zeeland at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 7045 or
j.vanzeeland@mailbox.uq.edu.au
The Rain
by Anthony Lawrence
Rain, and driving thoughts of rain, miles
and hours of it, inches and yards of light
and dark rain, where seamless cloud has been
stitched and gathered into a great undoing
of itself, in wind that brings its freeplaying ride
through a highland plateau down into the hair-
pinned, run-off green below Mount Arrowsmith
or Frenchman's Cap, whose faces have gone
to a full-blown curtain of angled rain
and its bright companions, ice and snow,
to make, under the button grass, a blackwater
seepage from a thaw that will come within days,
or less, here and there at rain-mined overhangs
flowering with spillage, and in Queenstown,
where a conveyor belt sounds like a mongrel
dragging its chain against the rim of an over-
turned drum, it is raining still, at the tail-end
of a mining era, on the open-cut towns of Linda
and Gormanston, diminishing under seasons
of rain-blurred windows and the shells of cars
in yards overgrown with absence, on lakes
where the rings of rising trout are one
with the surface-pelting blanket of the rain,
clear and clean as the spittle of a local,
weather-telling prophet who grinds lens glass
and peers at the sky from a roof, rain-hammered
and domed above streets awash with longing,
and further afield, near a moored house boat
on Macquarie Harbour, an old woodcutter
is remembering rain as an all-night, fly-sheet-
testing wall of black proportions, and day
as much the same, with sunlight no more
than a rumour, with running silver on the chip-
flecked sleeves of his oilskin, and now, inland,
with no change to the long-range forecast,
at Cemetery Creek and Laughing Jack Lagoon,
it is raining, and the rivers are full, their black
mirrors bubbling, and even the mountain-fed
torrent between two hydro-electric plants
- its peaks and lines like whitewashed milestones
tumbling end over end - is driving the blood-
made turbines with its own internal rain.
