Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry Announced
Verb Wellington is proudly supporting the Friends of Lauris Edmond. Below is a Press Release announcing the 2020 Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry. Read on to discover three new poems by the 2020 winner, Emma Neale.
A Birthday Celebration: Dunedin poet honoured in biennial poetry award
Dunedin poet Emma Neale is the 2020 recipient of the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry, a prize given biennially in recognition of a distinguished contribution to New Zealand poetry.
Emma Neale
Emma Neale is the author of six novels and six collections of poetry. Her most recent novel, Billy Bird (2016) was short-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham NZ Book Awards and long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award. Her new book of poems is To the Occupant which was published in 2019 by Otago University Press. Emma is currently editor of the iconic Aotearoa literary journal, Landfall.
On receiving the award, Emma says: “I’m incredulous, happy and stunned in my tracks, as if someone has thrown a surprise party – the way friends did when I was nine, and they waited to jump out at me until I was standing near the host’s swimming pool. All the other nine-year-olds were hoping I’d fall into the water with shock. I didn’t. So here I am, dry, a bit disoriented and also delighted again, and remembering that Lauris Edmond was the first poet I ever heard give a public reading. When I was 16, I caught the bus alone to a Book Council lunchtime lecture during school holidays in Wellington, and went to hear her talk about her writing career. I have a feeling I’d sneaked out of the house to do it – as if my interest in poetry and my aspirations to write it were somehow going to get me into trouble, and my parents and friends shouldn’t know. I sat and listened on the edge of my seat, as the poems and the talk opened a portal that meant I could glimpse the green and shifting light of hidden things. The portal was still a long way off, but I was convinced that poetry and literature were going to carry me into an understanding of intimacy, identity, time, ethics, deeper metaphysical questions.
I still think of Lauris Edmond as a kind of poet laureate of family relationships; her work was immensely important to me as the work of a local woman poet I could not only read on the page but also hear in person. I am just sorry that I can’t thank her face to face for what her work has meant to me, and I’m enormously grateful to the Friends for reading my own poetry and giving me this generous award. I’ve pinched myself sore. I actually feel like leaping into a pool.”
Established in 2002, the Award is named after New Zealand writer Lauris Edmond who published many volumes of poetry, a novel, a number of plays and an autobiography. Her Selected Poems (1984) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.
The 2020 award was announced on 2 April the date of Lauris Edmond’s birthday. A ceremony and birthday celebration was due to take place at National Library of New Zealand in Wellington on 3 April to honour Emma, however due to COVID-19 the event is postponed and will take place in collaboration with Verb Wellington later in the year.
In the meantime, the Lauris Edmond Memorial Trust and Verb Wellington encourage everyone to eat cake and read Emma Neale’s poetry: We have two never-before-published poems by Emma Neale for you to enjoy:
Pas de deux
Outside the city’s central swimming pool
under the slow ballet corps of cherry trees in bloom
a young father and small daughter dawdle.
He smiles, reaches for a dark branch as if for a bell-rope.
Palms up in stunned wonder, she turns and turns
as he rings down hundreds of air kisses
that pirouette to her skin in gauzy pink drifts.
(First published in the Otago Daily Times, 21 March 2020)
The grasshoppers
Back when the mind could meander
down side alleyways of lucky-go-happy
drawn on the fresh air’s loose leash
we could stroll and call out to sweet anyone
hey, how are you? and they’d answer,
sleek as cats licking gloss along their fur;
nowhere to be, nothing to get done,
nobody to pine for, let down, or grieve
time felt weightless as grass-heads a-swim on the breeze
or gauzy as cicada wings glittering in a lettuce-head chalice
love stacked full harvest in a cool dry barn,
sorrow like a minor god from a half-lost myth;
his feet dandling from a tree, too scared to climb down
frightened by hawks and wasps who plain ignored him
his dolorous eyes the colour of greywacke
lovelorn for some nixie or patupaiarehe
he’d heard singing in the river’s rills
princeling of mistakes we’d never make
being progress, us lot, surely,
scions of science, a fine and gilded step
on the way to immortality, believing,
not in rumours of what had gone before,
but in the spilling present,
running like clover-white honey
from the daylight’s silver moon
plunged like a scoop into a blue rain barrel;
that moon that looks now like a chip of bone
exposed in a cracked, dry river bed.
Like the albums on rotate in your first year away from home
He didn’t ever love her
the way she wanted to be loved
but he kept her first letters
inside a concertina file
that held a polished spiral shell
a wooden comb painted
with a heron-white faced woman
discontinued coins, keys to forgotten flats,
and written on the backs of concert tickets
things she’d said beside the docks
where her lips and eyelids glittered
like sealight chiseled by the frost
things that rang still in his memory
like tenets, truths to live by
so at fifty, through the brandy
and then the whisky
and then the midnight bitter ice-field
of a working dad’s insomnia
he had to wonder, he wondered
as the years came surging forward
why they couldn't take him with them,
couldn’t take him with them.
All poems by Emma Neale.
A Brief History of the Award
Lauris Edmond died in 2000. In 2002, a request came to Frances Edmond, as Lauris’s Literary Executor, for permission to use Lauris’ name in the establishment of a memorial award. The Canterbury Poets’ Collective (CPC) was instrumental in its establishment with the Award jointly administered by the CPC and the New Zealand Poetry Society (NZPS). The Award was first presented in July 2003 at the ‘5 Poets Reading’ in Christchurch. The inaugural recipient was Bill Sewell, who received the Award posthumously. Subsequently, the award continued to be presented at The Press Christchurch Writers Festival's '5 Poets Reading' under the meticulous guidance of Ruth Todd.
Over time, the Award structure evolved. The CPC bowed out in 2009 and I took over the management of the Award which is now jointly administered by the NZPS and the Friends of the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award, of which I am the chair. The Friends are literally and literarily old friends of Lauris, along with representative from the NZPS and VUP. (Lauris was Patron of the NZPS when she died).
The friends are:
Laurice Gilbert (for the NZPS)
Dame Fiona Kidman
Professor (Emeritus) Vincent O’Sullivan
Professor Harry Ricketts
Fergus Barrowman for VUP
Frances Edmond (for the Lauris Edmond Literary Estate)
Ruth Todd retired in 2012, thus requiring the Award and its presentation to find a new home. Wellington, as the city Lauris lived in and loved, seemed the logical choice and from 2014 to 2018 the Award was presented as part of the New Zealand Festival’s Writers Week. In 2016 Victoria University Press (VUP) became a second sponsor of the Award (along with the NZPS) and VUP publisher, Fergus Barrowman, joined the committee of Friends. In 2016, I was invited by the Todd Trust to apply for additional funding and a further $1000 per year for the next five years was offered, bringing the total for the biennial award to $4000.
The full list of recipients are:
2003: Bill Sewell
2005: Jenny Bornholdt
2007: Dinah Hawken
2009: Brian Turner
2011: Diana Bridge (awarded in Wellington, after the 2010 Christchurch earthquake resulted in the cancellation of that year's Festival)
2012: Riemke Ensing (the Award was presented in consecutive years to align with the full Christchurch Arts Festival)
2014: Michael Harlow
2016: Bob Orr
2018: Anne French
2020: Emma Neale