David Holmgren with Isabella G. Mead. Photo: Morgan Williams
Congratulations to Isabella G. Mead for writing the winning poem of the 2024 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize, Melt Ice.
Here is what judge Tim Loveday had to say about the poem:
Melt Ice is a work that speaks back to our colonial inheritance with an acute and painful awareness of how our complicity as white settler-colonialists perpetuates the destruction of the world’s ecologies. Through its rapid temporal, geographical and psychical shift, it juxtaposes that which is being catalogued and exotified – a perpetual othering – with all that is the contemporary: an everyday stratification and compartmentalisation of the world, an embodied abstraction of self. This wilful ignorance, met by our long ignored histories, collects the bit-pieces of our surrounds like collateral, racing us – similarly to the image of a car dodging trucks on the Monash – into a pseudo-reckoning of systems far more complex and dangerous than we can possibly fathom from the inside.
The block text of the prose poem denotes the static and often grave certainties of the archive itself, knowledge contained and qualified within the paragraph. No line then is without measurement, no moment without a refrain that re-situates the body as agent and agency-less—a continual symmetry in imagery and idea that takes us closer, and simultaneously further away, from the knowledge that we might well be too late. In this, the poet gestures toward the futility of writing in response, recounting first their grandfather’s notes and then later, toward the end of the poem, ‘a blank white space’: the myth of a country, a space uninhabited, voiceless—what they write as a ‘salt inheritance’. A colonial legacy.
And yet, despite its sobering intensities, the poem is sombre without being nihilistic. Here, each line contains within it multiple refractory and reflexive meanings, expansions that seemingly counteract those contractions we experience on first encountering the poem. There is the potentiality, perhaps, that within this ‘melt ice’ reckoning, our histories, our truths and even our connivances might finally be thawed.
As such, the poem reveals in its concentrated syntax, intricate mechanics and deeply philosophical examinations of self, a poet of rare and exceptional calibre, one with a profound understanding of language as something that binds us to the world and to one another. In such a crowded and competitive field, Melt Ice was the clear standout winner.
The judges highly commended the following poems: Tree From Which One Cannot Descend by Mitch Cave and Dinosaurs at a resort impact the community and have flow-on effects on the economy by Kathryn Reese.
Here is Mitch Cave reading his poem:
Here is what judge Jodi Vial had to say about the poems overall:
The poems submitted for this year’s prize reflected a deep level of engagement with the unfolding climate catastrophe, conveying the intensity and wrath of its impact. The strongest poems were able to find delicacy and nuance in portraying this, locating points on a personal compass and correlating them with the wider environmental and global repercussions of human behaviour. The winning and commended poems were able to address the calamity while also conveying some small sense of hope and optimism – or at least, the role of human agency and self-reflection in finding our way forward. Congratulations to all.
A huge and heartfelt thank you to judges Tim Loveday and Jodi Vial for their time, wisdom and energy.
Thank you to all those who entered this year’s Venie Prize, and all those who attended the Prize announcement event at the Words in Winter festival on Sunday.
