Kiama-based poet and author Christine Paice has won this year’s ACU Prize for Poetry, one of Australia’s richest prize for a single poem. Her poem, Gabriel in the Playing Fields, describes the end of Paice’s mother’s life.
Paice said she wrote it during in the final months of her mother’s life in the UK, when she was caring for her.
“This poem came out of that experience,” she said. “It’s really normal for me to express one of the biggest events in my family history, the death of my mum, in a poem.”
“I was with Ma, as were my sisters, caring for her until the end, and I always walked to the park over the road every day to get a little head space and breathe in the goodness of nature. As I have spent the last few years writing a [book] about an angel who takes the soul of King Richard the Third to Heaven, and it became a natural adaptation for me to convert one angel into another for a poem. The angel in the story became Gabriel in the poem, a bigger raggedy version of a celestial being with bare feet!”
Paice said the poem is also her attempt to explore the existence of an afterlife.
“I can’t think that this life is all the life that we have,” she said. “I love the idea that there is something else that carries on. How it works we don’t really know, but I like exploring that as much as I can while being on the other side of it.”
Emeritus Professor Margot Hillel OAM was one of the the judges and praised Paice on her interpretation of this year’s theme, Faith.
“Christine Paice’s moving and eloquent poem about her mother’s death opens with a remarkable observation about the nature of illness and death, in that we so often pretend everything is all right when confronted with something beyond our comprehension,” Professor Hillel said.
“While presenting a new and striking picture of the angel Gabriel, she manages to be both loving and challenging, using the imagery of this huge angel enclosing the frail body of her mother. Paice is ultimately saying that her mother is not just disappearing from earth but entering another life.”
Paice’s takes home $10,000 in prize money, and her poem will be published in an anthology including 92 other poems, edited by the Prize judges.
Paice is also a novelist, and the difference between poetry and prose is distinct: “A poem is much more of an image-based endeavour rather than a what happens next question,” she explained. “Writing a poem you want to frame an experience into an intangible understanding that leaves the reader with a question that flows into the universe type of thing.”
“With a novel you also want to achieve that, but as you’re telling a story you need concrete foundations to help you along the way, so the reader isn’t purposefully bewildered more than they are purposefully engaged with the story. So things like chapters, titles and prologues all help to set the scene. Whereas with a poem, the setting is less important. Plus, a novel takes a lot longer to bloody well write.”
“My aim is to live inside a poem”
“For me, poetry is my special secret world I can go into as my reward when I’ve done all the things I need to do,” Paice said.
“I was working on that draft of the poem (about her mother’s death) for months and months. It wasn’t until I got back to Australia, and I was doing work on The Oxenbridge King, that I was able to look at the poem as an act of joy at the end of a long working day.”
“My aim as I get older is to live inside a poem if that’s possible.”
One of her favourite poems is ‘My Blue Hen’, by Ann Gray, a poem she describes as “full of stunning images and a beautiful unfolding of love.”
“[I also like] all poems by Sylvia Plath. I also re-read constantly ‘The Curfew’ by the brilliant Irish poet, Stephen Sexton. Another favourites is ‘After Someone’s Death’ by the noble prize-winning poet, Tomas Transtromer.”
Paice hopes that prizes like the ACU Prize for Poetry will encourage more people to seek out modern Australian poetry.
“Compared to the UK, where poets and poetry are celebrated and revered, I have generally found poetry in Australia to be marginalised in a cultural milieu that favours other things,” she said.
“There are a lot of brilliant poets in Australia but the space in which poetry tries to take its place is a harder one here, I find. Walk into any bookshop in Australia and look for the poetry section. If there is one, where are the modern poetry collections? Where are the poets?”
“The UK has the tradition of championing a poet laureate, that is, the official poet representing the nation and writing poetry to commemorate grand events. This adds heft to the notion that being a poet is a good thing to be, and that a poet can say things on behalf of others in a way that unites people around a subject.”
Image: ACU Prize for Poetry winners Carolyn Leach-Paholski (2nd), Christine Paice (1st) and Jo Gardiner (3rd). Credit: Grey Photographer/Phong Lam.