2026 Venie Prize winner

In such a conjectural, estranged times, this year’s entries arrived, not coincidentally, from a multifarious array of the environmental poetry index — the polemical, the elegiac, the embodied, the observed, the incidental, the expansive, the everyday, the touched, the sensory, the deeply felt & on gentle occasion, in quiet ceremony.

In reading these poems, one is always conscious of the tradition this prize sits within. Venie Holmgren wrote from inside out, most often with unfeigned visceral carry, never shying from a high emotion, disruption and resolve. As in life, she was never content to sit beside, her poetic was to be involved, unmistakenly present, almost to the point of exhaustion, and usually the you before I. Venie would reckon rather than fold, even into the closing light of her years. You almost hear her determined will, mind and fist thumping. She had in-print & purpose.

Venie would have so enjoyed this years’ brood, even in critique – which she didn’t mind a bit of – as these poems & vast entries over the years, encapsulate a moving toward, not away. Even the human act of writing itself. As I said in Venie’s obituary, her own work involved, ‘a resolute, honest seeking for human understanding and ultimately parity and restoration in the world that lay before us’. Venie wrote with clear articulation, high ambition and an insatiable itch. And now vicariously, she would have been delighted that people still wrote with such undertaking and resolute output.

Venie was always looking for the next poem. If she were here, Venie would tell all us poets, and any other, that literary quality, or more specifically, our dedicated poesis, is to be found in the doing; never loose your grip, push the word out to the world, even if, like her, in later years, your bunioned feet no longer permit sustained physical stance. The mind, soul, body, life, the earth itself, is always capable of renewal, locating new meaning & possibility. To my mind, this year’s entries would generously fill Venie’s edict and in this, the final year of the prize, provide a wonderful salutation to the poetic of life, energy and word.

We heartfeltly thank and acknowledge you all.

Judging alongside my good friend, Dr Patrick Jones, a remarkable poet of his own life-making, we easily adjoined to the behold of one poem, that being the eventual winner, to which I will announce shortly. But before so doing, I will precede with our two highly commended works.

Here is what judge Patrick Jones said about the highly commended poem The GP asks about pins and needles by Kailum Graves:

This poem earns its high commendation by never once announcing its environmental theme. It reads, on the surface, as a domestic narrative of a father’s cognitive decline — the biscuit tin of tablets, the expired prescription, the repeated stories, the argument about a towel — and it is a restrained piece of that kind of writing, exact and unsentimental, willing to let silence and non-sequitur do the emotional work rather than any commentary from the poet.

But underneath the domestic plot runs a second, buried narrative: the culverted creek beneath the street, put underground decades earlier by the father’s own work crew (“Roads and Drainage … before the new car park went in”), which he now, in his confusion, sets about digging back up beside the shed.

The poem lets the two declines — the father’s memory and the suburb’s buried watercourse — run alongside each other without ever forcing the parallel; it trusts the reader to notice that “water moving inside his left leg” and the water the soil has quietly reabsorbed from an unfinished trench are the same water, surfacing where it was told not to.

The GP Asks About Pins and Needles was also selected by the Holmgren Design office staff as the winner of this year’s Packing Room Prize.

Here is what Peter O’Mara said about the second Highly Commended poem, Praise by Martin Langford:

Praise skilfully inhabits natural decay directly, and does so through a form as old as the Praise poem itself — a structure that in other hands or poetic undertakings is usually reserved for what is whole, bright, abundant, exemplary or celebratory. The poem often uses lists, repeated phrases, and vivid, concrete details rather than abstract flattery. However, here the poet redirects such devotional wording toward that which falls apart, “regolith,” “the ash of burnt ericafolia,” “the scurf and detritus of twigs,” “the dried-up mosaics of the mud.” A decomposition in the cadence usually kept for blessing.

Essentially, that is the poem’s contention stated plainly: decay is not the opposite of vitality but its condition, and the praise on offer is not consolation for loss, or human destruction but recognition of a cycle. Ultimately, a highly relational, layered register; unfolding into symbiotic return.

Here is what Patrick Jones said about the winning poem, Bogong by Russell Buzby:

When will an AI poem be written that sends a chill through me as a reader? It’s possible that a machine could appropriate great poetry and spit out something that stirs the guarding emotions of the soul, and no doubt will catch out some literary prize judge somewhere at some point, if it hasn’t already. But it seems inconceivable that ‘Bogong’ is machine learning. The poem haunts acutely the material before us as moderns, while travels in mythic time, acutely and ethereally. This is the only poem in the 155 entries that pierced the regions of my soul. I don’t know why, and I don’t want to reason with it. I trust the primal tellings it conjured in me. I’m in gratitude to the poet.”