Burn

Judges' comments

A formidable collection that shivers with wide-ranging and ruminative rebellion; constantly observing, crafting and questioning. Burn compels the reader to reconceptualise their relationship with the world. Libby Hart sifts meaning from the multitudes of daily life, holding both the overwhelming and the spectral, and embracing the uncanny that shapes individual perception to create a collection full of incantatory lamentation and vivid protest.

This collection traverses the broad space between environmental apocalypse and the taste of cowboy dust; it balances anger and the insatiable yearning of humanity. It is the poet’s responsibility to articulate the voice of their time, to speak of the experiences, people and fears that cling to a societal unconscious. Hart has crafted a voice for this time; vast, mystic, tense with anger and anxiety, a voice that speaks into a ‘cursed house’ burning for both the clarity of honest answers and the unfathomable ways of joy. The poems balance narrative drive and evocative imagery with formal inventiveness and lyrical intensity. There is a striving in this collection; language and image push the reader toward revitalised understanding. This is a poet grasping responsibility, asking the reader not only to see, but to think and act.