2020 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Winner - can any of us do as well?

Did you read the shortlisted poems for the 2020 Peter Porter Poetry Prize? Did you have a favourite?

If you didn't read it and you'd like to do so before I tell you who won (the prizewinner was announced on 16th January) click on this link to the shortlist 

Have you made your decision?
OK so here's the link to  the prizewinner - a wonderful, moving poem that I'm sure you will appreciate. A worthy winner!

If that has whet your appetite for good poetry you might also like to know that the Australian Book Review website also publishes links to past prizewinners. Here's a link to that past winners page. Maybe all those great poems will inspires you to write some poetry of your own that you can share with us on Writers Night.

Creative Doctors Writers Night 2020 is coming up on Thursday March 5th at Moore Park Golf Club with the generous help of Judith Babich from Active Locums. We are all very interested to hear the products of everyone's writing year. We welcome short fiction, non-fiction, excerpts from your last novel, excerpts from plays, lyrics, poetry - anything that, as a wordsmith, you are proud of and would like to share. 

If you are a creative doctor/writer who is interested in presenting your work to like-minded medicos please get in touch.

You can contact us for more information via the link on this blog or at janorman@mccauleysoftware.com

2020 Peter Porter Poetry Prize

The shortlist is out for the 2020 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

The late Peter Porter AO

The prize has been awarded since 2005 and was renamed in 2011 to honour the great Brisbane-born poet after his death in 2010.
The 2020 prize winner will be announced on 16th January. In the meantime you might like to select your favorite poem from the shortlist published on the Australian Book Review website

I'm having a bit of trouble deciding which poem I think should win.

Unfortunately I don't understand Lachlan Brown's "Precision Signs" at first reading - I will go back to it later to see what I can make of it.
I love Claire Coleman's "That Wadjela Tongue" about her lost language and the colonisers who
"dragged my language off the land, scraped
 my tongue they could not bring themselves to cut out".
Her mastery of the colonisers' tongue has become her greatest weapon.
A.Frances Johnson has written a dark and evocative poem about dementia in "My Father's Thesaurus" that is hugely relevant to many of my peers, and probably to yours as well.
Julie Manning's "Constellation of Bees" is beautifully written with a subtle message about what we are doing to the environment. Julie has written my favourite line. It's about the vermilion Tulip Tree which  "blooms with fragrant open cups - nightclub porn
                               for bees"
And Ross Gillett's "South Coast Sonnets", a clever extended metaphor about a marriage in the form of five sonnet-shaped stanzas, is both clever and evocative.

I'm no expert when it comes to poetry and it seems in this case I don't even know what I like! (Well, not what I like best anyway.)
Take a look for yourself and see what you think. (Here's the link to the shortlist again)

I'm keen to see a Creative Doctor on that shortlist one day soon, and I can think of one or two already who deserve to be there. Could it be you?