Moon Wrasse

Judges' comments

Reading the meditative and sensuously woven poems in Moon Wrasse, one is gently but inexorably drawn into its inner world, its immersive lyric time and space, and awakened to the open possibilities and transformations it holds. There are mesmerising lines of image and idea in this stunning debut, seductive measures that take you on intricate and thrilling trains of thought and feeling to ineffable, profound perceptions and insights into the liminal spaces between nature and human, body and spirit, between being and becoming. The voice is unique in Australian poetry, questing, hesitant, humble, and open, attuned to the frequencies almost inaudible, to the ‘bird-note, gently caught / at the very edge of things’.

Rilke and Levertov are Willo Drummond’s tutelary spirits. The poems that pay homage to them, and the collection as a whole, testify to the lessons absorbed and gone into ‘the act of making’ of the lyric voice and the body of the poems. The exploratory note, with its questions and openness to vision and transformation, is discernibly Rilkean, while the organic form, the sinuous lines trellised over the flexible frame of the stanzas, tracking the subtle shifts of thoughts and feelings, is undoubtedly Levertovian. The result is exquisitely sensuous and irresistible, a music of questing, questioning, pause and flow, wandering and wondering that is all Drummond’s own. This is a collection ‘that knows the pace of poem-time’, the poems fully engaged in the ‘work of gathering’, quiveringly alive with sensory details, shimmering with luminosity that is like wisdom.