2007 winner

After the diagnosis

Today the mountain's strangely luminous with frost,
as if it were made of quartz. A single gull drifts up,
up to the blue: a lost eyelash, an opened parenthesis.

In the warm clatter of a Salamanca café, breakfast
has returned to England: eggs and bacon, sausage and mushroom
but with the requisite chic: pide, pesto, salsa

and heady Columbian dark, swirled with tawny crema.
Her friend will let her order first. If she asks
for poached eggs, they won't speak of it today.

On the lawn's periphery, moth-brown plane trees stand
among the curled remnants of themselves.
They have given up their extremities without a struggle

and soon the Aurora will have disappeared from the dock,
headed south. Antarctica's made of every grey there is, they say,
impossible to capture or remember: the colour of dreams.

Constant and present, gulls rise and rise and again
to their slow slide on the bright, chill air - still too far up,
like the words we need for this, too far away.

     by Louise Oxley

Louise Oxley's poetry has been published in a variety of Australian and overseas journals. Her first collection, Compound Eye (Five Islands Press, 2003), was commended in the FAW Anne Elder Award. She is a previous winner of the Bruce Dawe Prize, having won it in 2004. Her other prizes include the Henry Kendall, Tom Collins and Melbourne Poets Union awards. She is represented in Best Australian Poetry 2003 (UQP) and Moorilla Mosaic (Bumble-bee Press), an anthology of Tasmanian writing. A selection of her poems also appears in the Wagtail series (Picaro Press). Her second collection, which was assisted by a grant from the Australia Council and a residency at Varuna: the Writer's House, is due out with Five Islands Press in July 2008. Louise has served on Arts Tasmania advisory panels and on the board of the Tasmanian Writers Centre. She works as an academic skills adviser to international students at the University of Tasmania.

Shortlisted Poems

Australia on the Beach by Andrew Bifield
this amber land by Jennifer Mills
Yukon Delta 1994 by Alison Thompson
In the Lost World We Slept on Stones by Jean Kent
Descent by Joanne Wade
Ari by Martin Langford
the stones are turning by Nathan Shepherdson