Earlier this year I trumpeted young ex-pat poet Emma Jones' first collection, The Striped World, and so not only am I happy to announce that it has been awarded Britain's prestigious Forward Prize for a first collection of poetry, but that the judges actually offered a relatively coherent, cliche-free justification for their choice.
Josephine Hart, who chaired the Forward Prize judges, described Jones yesterday as ''an ambitious and intriguing new voice''. Her poems ''are both elliptical and visionary - inhabiting a parallel world of strange, disjointed images within which we nevertheless find echoes of familiar experience''.
What Sydney "critic" Jaya Savige meant by his comments that follow in today's SMH article is anyone's guess. Something about Dead White Males, presumably. Maybe someone should tell the kids at Darlington that po-po-mo is done and dusted, because if there is one thing Emma Jones' collection does not smack of in the least it is any effort to please the professors. In other words, it is genuine and heart-felt and profound. Maybe that's what Jaya meant in his glib reference to the "yellowed pages of tradition".
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