say, a river

The fifty-two poems in Pam Schindler’s say, a river are concise, sensitive works that celebrate the natural landscapes of Tasmania, Southern Queensland and Scotland with beautiful images washed lightly with colours and a river’s moving waters. The poet embraces and personifies these landscapes so evocatively that the reader is drawn into their presence: a storm is ‘a clot of dark gestures’ like ‘flung brushstrokes’; jellyfish are ‘like heavy-petalled glass flowers’; and the ‘sudden hail sharp around our ears / sang, and flew, and glittered’. The poet’s painterly images come alive on the banks of the Noosa River: I daub-in the tumbling sea roar, distance-dimmed, and on that ground I stub the crow-notes, crooned, effortful, dark paint squirted from the tube. Schindler also considers matters of human love and loss where senses of yearning and absence are heightened by the quiet dignity of her emotionally restrained writing. Natural landscapes feature as means of both consolation and healing. After devastating fires ‘the small creek is singing its stones again’, and later, in different circumstances, 'the wind comes to us with brown arms / with bare sandy feet’. One of the most powerful of these poems of loss is ‘The keeping of your heart’ in which specific features of the natural world - bluebells, a magpie ‘high in a hoop-pine’, a ginger fox - prompt memories of the lost one and form for the poet ‘part / of the keeping of your heart’. The poetic crafting in say, a river is sensitively wrought and deeply elegant. Pam Schindler is the worthiest recipient of the 2025 Tim Thorne Prize for Poetry.

Judges' comments

Tasmanian Literary Awards 2025