We are thrilled to announce the winner of the 9th Annual Coniston Prize: Amy Miller. Here is what our judge had to say about this poet’s work.
It’s the love of language that I love in this strong group of poems. For instance, the poem titled “The Church of the Surgeon” ends like this:
Skin is a candle lit,
skin stretched over its bone altar,
washed by water, bared to the knife, o lamb
hold still. This god’s
the only one we’ve got.
He lowers his face to cover the sky.So many associations in close proximity. Skin to bone to knife to lamb. And the rhymes of skin/lit ,water/altar/over/cover, only/hold, got/ god’s. The image of the “bone altar,” the admonishment to “hold still,” and “god’s face,” the surgeon’s face, “cover[ing] the sky.” All of this packed into two short tercets. We can see the poet at hard work here, listening to the poem unfold as it’s written, following the music of language into many meanings.
Her take on the anatomical toy “The Visible Woman” is a wonderful vison of the woman exposed on so many levels, followed by “Valium,” a poem about the internal workings of the body, its centerpiece the heart. “On the Tennis Court” is a metaphor/meditation on skin cancer. These poems are about the body in extremis: “Re-Radiance,” which take us on another whirlwind tour of language—“wisteria, nandina, rhododendron” set against the body’s “tissue, nodule” and the shadows of “radiograph, ductogram.” This final poem completing the metaphor in its last line: “How flowers/even in night/bear up and bloom.”
—Dorianne Laux, Contest Judge