Announcing the Winner of the 2010 Takahe Poetry Competition

The Takahe Editorial Committee and Takahe Collective are pleased to announce that the winner of its 2010 Poetry Competition judged by writer and editor James Norcliffe is Dunedin poet and fiction writer, Sue Wootton for her poem, Haunted. Wootton wins $250 for her poem.

“This is the poem I kept returning to,” Norcliffe says of the prize-winning poem. “There are detonations in this piece, too and layers of meaning. Despite the poised, controlled language the poem fizzes with an urgency of sound effects, short sentences and brief dramatic moments.”

Of her success, Wootton says, “I'm really thrilled to have won the Takahe Poetry Competition. Takahe 43 contains the first poems I'd ever raked up enough courage to send out. I've never forgotten what a buzz that was, nor how much it helped me keep writing at the time.”

Sue Wootton is the author of two collections of poetry Hourglass (Steele Roberts, 2005) and Magnetic South (Steele Roberts, 2008). In 2008, she held the Robert Burns Fellowship. Last year, she read at International Festival of Poetry in Granada, Nicaragua.

2010 Takahe Poetry Competition’s second-place and winner of $100 goes to Tusiata Avia for her poem, Wairua Rd, “a poem which takes the ordinary and makes it strange, numinous,” declared the competition judge. “The poem comprises a series of first-person statements, their simple grammar detonating into surreal images and / or resonances and ambiguities. These tease the mind and the poem lingers.” Wairua Rd will appear in Takahe 72 which will feature Tusiata Avia as the magazine’s guest poet for that issue.

Sue Wootton was also awarded one of the two runners-up prizes, a year’s subscription to the magazine, for her poem Hatch. The other runner-up was Aleksandra Lane, who recently won the 2010 Biggs Prize for Poetry. Lane’s entry for the 2010 Takahe Poetry Competition was entitled The Economist, a poem which Norcliffe called “wonderfully witty and sardonic with astonishing little refrain lines, echo words and snatches of re-contextualised (political/economic) discourse”.

The 2010 Takahe Poetry Competition attracted over 400 entries. The Judge’s full report and Sue Wootton’s winning entry can be read in the current issue of the magazine, Takahe 71 which was released just before Christmas.