Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to congratulate one of my constituents, Mr Robert Shanahan, who recently was given a 'highly commended' award in the annual WB Yeats Poetry Prize for Australia. The WB Yeats Poetry Prize was first awarded in Australia in 1996. It was launched by Declan Foley who was born in the town that Yeats calls home—Sligo. It is of course named after William Butler Yeats, the infamous Irish poet. Winners of the Australian WB Yeats prize are announced each year on his birthday. The prize is an opportunity for Australian poets to put their work into the public domain.

In 2014, the judges noted that all of the poems commended had quality and craft with many of the poems showing originality or careful shaping and reflection. In the end, poems that were most original and best sustained were commended. Judges said of Violence at the Egg that it was an unusual poem that brushes back and forth between life-giving and life-taking energies and all their broken and ephemeral intensities of pain. To quote a verse:

Heavy brooded rain. Shells sprinkled. Moonlight specked.

Thunder drones across the flight ribboned sky. The Nest warm.

Heads hidden beneath the wing. Statue like to the storm. Lightning strikes the eggs

Conjoined. Beaks crack the shells. Fledglings are born into nesty love.

Rostrum's snapping at night air. Deluge deflected by parental Birds

Fervid joy…Night fallen…dancing in feathered love cooing.

From the first pangs…our future warbling throats were stuffed.

(Time expired)