The Summer King

‘O frabjous day!’ My friend, Joanna Preston, has just won the Mary Gilmore Poetry Prize in Australia for her debut collection The Summer King.

The Mary Gilmore Award, conducted by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and named after the writer and socialist Dame Mary Gilmore, is presented every second year to a first book of poetry by an Australian writer. And the judges had the following to say about Joanna’s collection, The Summer King:

“Joanna Preston’s title poem, the first in the book, jolts the reader with its imaginativeness and dramatic power, and these qualities are apparent in all the poems that follow. A strong grasp of the actual underlies imaginative representations of both the natural world and the humanly made, generating a dramatic intensity, even in the quieter poems. This is a book of succinct, taut writing that displays a depth of imaginative thought.”

And quite right, too. In my humble opinion also, this a wonderful book, filled with powerful, compelling poetry. Last year, when The Summer King was released, I wrote on Beatties Bookblog that:  ” … her [Joanna Preston’s] work is also distinguished by strength of structure; her command over the poetic form, including line endings, metre, and the rhythm and flow of her poetry; the emotional power of her work, and its range, from raw to delicate; also her mastery of the subtle nuance as well as not shying away from more in-your-face imagery.”

A view from which I do not not resile. I am just over the moon for Joanna, who—just by the way—also won the inaugural Kathleen Grattan Award in 2008, which is New Zealand’s richest and among its most prestigious poetry prizes.  In  2007 a selection of her work was published as part of UK publisher Carcanet’s prestigious New Poetries series (in this case New Poetries IV) and Preston’s poem “The Pride of Lions” was selected by Les Murray for publication in Best Australian Poems 2005.

—

About Joanna:

An Australian by birth, Joanna grew up in the NSW hinterland, both in rural small towns and spending time on her grandparents’ farm, Cowarral; she then married a New Zealander, which led her to become a resident of Christchurch, but a three year residence in the UK allowed her to complete a MPhil in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan, which is known internationally for having poets of the calibre of Sheenagh Pugh and Gillian Clarke on its faculty.