Sarah Holland-Batt is one of the three judges for the 2014 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the prestigious W.G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholarship, a MacDowell Fellowship, the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, an Asialink Literature Residency in Japan, and an Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours. Her first book, Aria (UQP, 2008) was the recipient of a number of national literary awards, including the Thomas Shapcott Prize for Poetry, the Arts A.C.T. Judith Wright Poetry Prize and the F.A.W. Anne Elder Award, and was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards for Poetry. She is presently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at QUT, and the poetry editor of Island.
Recently, Island caught up with Sarah and asked her a few poetry-related questions.
What are you working on at the moment, in your own poetry?
I’m actually returning to old poems to revise them for my second book, which will be published in June next year with UQP.
What are you reading at the moment?
Of the books I’ve read recently, I’ve particularly enjoyed reading Roger Reeves’ King Me, Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine, and David Malouf’s Earth Hour.
An impossible question, but what will you be looking for in a poem whilst judging the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize?
The most pleasant thing about judging poetry prizes is that you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it; strong poems come in all guises and announce themselves in spite of your own aesthetics or preferences. I’m looking forward to judging the Harwood prize enormously.
Do you have a favourite Gwen Harwood poem? And why?
I’m very fond of Harwood’s love poems, like ‘Carnal Knowledge I’, with its superb opening line (‘Roll back, you fabulous animal / be human, sleep’); and my favourite of her poems, ‘Thought is Surrounded by a Halo’, which borrows its title from Wittgenstein, and asks the beautiful question, ‘Language is not a perfect game, / and if it were, how could we play?’. Harwood was an elegant philosopher even in her love poems, and I’ve always admired how succinctly and intelligently they interrogate being and meaning while also responding emotionally to the condition of love.
Find out more about the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize