Judge Tim Dooley Announces The Winner of The 2012 Melita Hume Poetry Prize for Best Debut Collection
Caleb Klaces |
The 2012 International
Melita Hume Poetry Prize
for Best Debut Collection
Judge
Tim Dooley’s Comments
Overall,
the entire shortlist of twelve was impressive and varied.
Winner - £1,000 and publication
by Eyewear 2013.
Bottled Air Caleb Klaces
This
is a powerful and original collection, which reveals its riches and depths
gradually and rewards repeated reading. Klaces is well-read and does not wear
his learning lightly, yet the poetry is not wilfully clever or self-satisfied
but fully accessible – its engaging footnotes integrated into the wit and
imagination of the whole work.
Bottled Air works as a book not
just a collection of poems. It evokes the tragic European past and the global
instantaneous present. At its heart is a wounded compassion and an openness to the
variousness of experience. What he writes in a poem from the central section
(set in a Bulgarian orphanage) is true of much else in the book:
…this is what being human is really,
something plain and unbearably
alive.
Klaces
sets his own agenda as a writer but creates a trust in the reader, which is
unusually well rewarded.
Bio:
Klaces was born in Birmingham, UK, in 1983. He has worked as an environmental sustainability consultant, a freelance writer and editor and a teaching assistant at the University of Texas at Austin. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Granta, The Manchester Review, Lung Jazz: Young Poets for Oxfam and Stand magazine. He is an Eric Gregory winner 2012.
Bio:
Klaces was born in Birmingham, UK, in 1983. He has worked as an environmental sustainability consultant, a freelance writer and editor and a teaching assistant at the University of Texas at Austin. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Granta, The Manchester Review, Lung Jazz: Young Poets for Oxfam and Stand magazine. He is an Eric Gregory winner 2012.
Runner Up - £100.
Frogs and Gods Colette Sensier
Colette
Sensier is a genuine and resourceful writer, whose poems display emotional
intelligence and imaginative strength. There is breadth in subject matter,
control of form and in her best poems a mysterious, almost magical quality.
Highly Commended - £50.
Beds in the East Jason Eng Hun Lee
The
first section of this collection is very impressive with precisely observed
scenes of life growing up between cultures and a real command of form.
Somniloquy Bethan Tichborne
Bethan
Tichbourne is a vivid writer who creates some memorable images and has a highly
original approach to language and subject.
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