Andy Kissane’s Radiance and Jill Jones’ The Beautiful Anxiety have been shortlisted for the poetry section of the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. From the Judges’ reports:
Radiance is a perfectly titled collection – these poems shine with the wit and emotional warmth of Andy Kissane’s writing. His power of poetic narrative sets up a fine balance between acuity of detail and action. People, places and events are portrayed with a calm yet unexpected strength of compassion, rich with intertextuality and intimacy.
Kissane is a masterful storyteller, playfully creating a dialogue between the poems and figures such as Virginia Woolf, the poets Keats and Shelley and even the characters of Tolstoy. These are lively and highly accessible poems, unhurried, unfussy and extraordinarily generous. The reader comes away uplifted.
The Beautiful Anxiety is an intimate, playful, deeply reflective collection that blends the intimate and the global, and explores the interconnectedness of life amidst the environmental and cultural turmoil of the twenty-first century.
Jill Jones draws on imagery from tabloid newspapers, music, the natural world, traffic and the rain, as well as the language of human connection and absence. Environmental change and the loss of her mother are two substantial themes that recur in this collection.
In the Australian, Fiona Wright praises Beautiful Anxiety for its ‘keen sense of humour’ and ‘experimentation with form and linguistic registers’.