We’re pleased to announce the joint winners of the July WWWC: Valerie Volk and Mike Ladd! This is the first time we’ve announced a joint winner for the WWWC. It’s also the first time that poetry entries have taken out the top prize.
Read Valerie’s winning poem, ‘Moonrise’, and Mike’s winning poem (and accompanying prose), ‘Glimmer of Light’, below.
Both authors were inspired by natural light: Valerie by the moon, Mike by the sun. The judges found it impossible to choose a favourite out of these two entries, but if you have a favourite, let us know in the comments!
Valerie Volk, ‘Moonrise’
A thin and fragile moon
hovers,
in all that tranquil blue
of summer end of day.
It drifts, a pallid wraith,
wallflower at the ballroom edge,
unwelcomed and unwanted.
Its time, like hers,
is still to come
when blazing rivals have departed,
leaving the darkened scene
forlorn, and waiting a new presence,
the promised glimmer of light.
*
Valerie Volk is a former secondary teacher, tertiary lecturer, and director of an international education program. She has won awards for poetry and short fiction and has published widely in journals, anthologies and magazines. Her first book won the Omega Writers CALEB Poetry Prize in 2010. Her fourth book, Passion Play: The Oberammergau Tales, reflects both a love of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and also her fascination with the infinite variety of human beings. Her following six books include historical fiction novels, such as In Search of Anna, travel writing, short story collections like Bystanders, verse novels and poetry collections.
Mike Ladd, ‘Glimmer of Light’
On the bed of a river
sunlit in winter water,
stones shiver.
We see a glimmer,
a fifth of a fourth
of what the world can deliver.
This minimalist poem is the kind of thing that comes to me on my walks beside the Torrens/ Karrawirra Parri, something I’ve been doing for half a lifetime. Yesterday on a stroll by the river near Royston Park, sunlight was playing on the surface of the water and striking down to the stones on the bed. I stopped and stood in a kind of trance, which is a semi-permanent state for me and perhaps a liability – friends and family have often wondered just where I’m at. I was transfixed by the apparent movement of the stones under the water, an illusion caused by refraction of the light. I was absorbed by how the stones appeared to shimmer and dance, so that I could never say exactly where they were at any one moment. This lead on to a general notion about the relativity of our perception, how we only perceive a fraction of the world due to the limitations of our senses. All we catch are glimmers. My sunlit river revery became Ontology, questioning how we know anything. No wonder I’m such a dawdler.
*
At the age of seventeen, Mike Ladd began reading his poetry at Adelaide’s renowned Friendly Street and his poems started appearing in local and national publications. His first book The Crack in the Crib was published in 1984 followed by eight collections of poetry and prose.
Mike was the editor of ABC Radio National’s highly respected Poetica, which ran for eighteen years. He currently works for Radio National’s features and documentary unit, and he and his partner Cathy Brooks have been running projects that put poems on street signs as public art. Their latest collaboration Dream Tetras, a book of images and essays, is due out from Wakefield Press in December.