Ella Skilbeck-Porter

Shortlisted for the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest

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Highly Commended in the Anne Elder Poetry Award

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Shortlisted for the ASAL Mary Gilmore Award 

"Conceptual, droll and formally experimental, These Are Different Waters disposes its wide-ranging materials into an elegant two-part structure: ‘Inflatable Pool’, and the substantial visual sequence, ‘Concrete Pool’. Skilbeck-Porter dares to devise her own weird syntax of hallucinatory profusion, a through-composed ‘ink spell’ of restless, post-Steinian parataxis. Decisive and yet dreamy, its poetic bricolage, ‘a stratosphere of shifting surfaces’, resists closure and passes the baton: ‘The end of my swim, the beginning of yours’."

 

- Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award Judges (Kate Lilley, Pam Brown, Melinda Bufton)

 

"It is rare for a first book of poetry to be experimental and also restrained, yet Ella Skilbeck-Porter successfully achieves both in These are Different Waters. This is an exquisitely crafted volume, where ‘the science and the jut of parataxis’ allows poetry to observe, weigh and value an array of moments and forces. Skilbeck-Porter juxtaposes various kinds of immersion with the evident constraints of poetic forms. Her work takes us around and beyond the borders of pantoums, list-poems, Oulipian restrictions, typographical layering and concrete poetry. These are Different Waters is attentive to the intersections between randomness and familiarity; it is poetry of delicate patina that alerts us to the patterning of
language and the world."

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- ASAL Mary Gilmore Award Juding Panel (Melinda Smith, David Gilbey, Lachlan Brown)

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"Formally daring, Skilbeck-Porter’s debut is a confident collection that moves elegantly and effortlessly through concrete and lyric poetry. Skilbeck-Porter has developed a poetics that feels truly new and invigorating, characterised by both an eye for intricacy and a steady, guiding formal hand. These are Different Waters is a significant accomplishment in form, but more importantly, style."

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- Anne Elder Award Juding Panel (Jeannine Leane, Panda Wong, Harry Reid)

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"ESP does to the pool what narrative can’t: her poetry aligns itself with the visual patterns, petty minutiae, small differences, banalities – a focus that brings difference into relief via the grit of surface. The pool is not a setting for a poem, but rather is a poem. By making concrete pool poems, she partakes of pool literature in which the pool is figured as the antithesis or cure for writing, which we seek in moments of crisis or grief, and yet fails to satisfactorily account for the extremes of emotion. We meet the pool and go silent. The pool is silent too. ESP realises this silence not by writing, but by turning letters and punctuation marks into brushstrokes. It makes me think of Whitman’s invocation for the poet to judge ‘not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling around a helpless thing’ (‘By Blue Ontario’s Shore’). And in this non-judged position, the pool (and the reader) can breathe, and we can hear it." 

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- Water Splendour Review-essay by Gareth Morgan in Sydney Review of Books

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