Non-Essential Work

Judges' comments

Of his poetics in his prize-winning collection The Lost Arabs, Omar Sakr avows: ‘I write toward unbelonging, toward a sense of non-ownership, where I can be my most complex and open self, far from false certainties. It is here I feel most free.’ This uncompromising honesty and courage, the passionate intensity and fierce intelligence, the interweaving of the personal and the political, are also in full evidence in Non-Essential Work. Sakr’s signature traits are further honed, deepened and made more compelling with the experiences of love and loss, and with the assured mastery of poetic craft and form. These are searing, moving poems that have come through the furnace of intense experience, tested and forged into powerful documents of trauma, grief, love and salvation.

One doesn’t just read a Sakr poem, one experiences it; as the poet says: ‘I must put my body where my poetry is’. The Sakr poem is grounded in the body of experience, and the experience of the body, with all its burning questions, its human contradictions, desires, love, hate, and longing. From the first line to the last, each poem in this collection immerses us in its rhythmic flow, its passionate pulse of thought and feeling, and its cogent lyric cadences. The engagement and commitment are total, the imaginative lines of affiliations and empathy extending from personal loss, displacement and grief, from elegiac and haunting glimpses of the poet’s father to a cousin ‘shot in the head’ in Bankstown, to unspeakable tragedies in Kashmir, Gaza, ‘our Uyghur brothers and sisters’ and ‘two Afghan boys whose throats were opened by Australian men’. These poems ask difficult questions and interrogate poetry’s relevance and efficacy (poems that ‘mistake grief for care’). In haunting lines made possible by deft and beautiful handling of form, image and rhythm, Sakr answers the question that Heidegger has posed: ‘What are poets for in these destitute times?’ Non-Essential Work is an important, essential work, its passionate intelligence and lyric intensity making powerful, memorable music of the key themes of belonging and home, politics and grief, loss and love.