Maria Zajkowski is a Customer Service Library Officer with the Melbourne Library Services and she has won two very presigious poetry prizes. I was quite moved by her work. Check it out!
2012 Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize
First Prize ($20,000) ‘S.O.S’ by Maria Zajkowski, Victoria.
The Judges said: ‘These fine poems are open, they prod but don't preach, they're full of the unexpected, they carry a sense of human vulnerability, they come from the heart or better the whole self and not just the intellect or the level of cleverness... They have mystery – perhaps something of Paul Celan in them – which is extremely unusual in Australian poetry... They are willing to take risks in order to stay true to how life is experienced and would rather tread this tightrope than sit comfortably on a pedestal... This writing has that kind of imaginative rightness that tells us something essential about ourselves and at the same time is in no way a cliché, [it] reads like something no one has ever said before.’
Posted at Greendoor Publishing:
The elements of one
In all the world, under the rain, through drafty passes and over ice floes once a sea I have only one body to travel in and only one language. Wanting to see in the mirror that I had the traveller's nous I looked for trails under my eyes, beaches on my lips. I searched in my bones for artefacts, proof of my journey and that I existed in more than just the mirror. It is true I was lost on the frozen wave of a mountain, turning black, disintegrating. Had it not been the wind or gravity that made me leave, nothing would. I was alone, existing in a lake of ice, tapping at the world to see which of us was real.
Comments