Seamus Heaney Fellow, Fiona Benson, has chosen her shortlist of four for this year’s Moth Poetry Prize, and commended a further eight poems. One of the most prestigious prizes in the world for individual unpublished poems – judged anonymously, and with a prize pot of €11,000 – The Moth Poetry Prize attracts entries from established and emerging poets from across the globe.
“I’m blown away by the extraordinary quality of the work, and to see so many countries represented among the 12 prize-winning poems this year,” said The Moth director, Rebecca O’Connor, “among them China, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, France, India and the United States”.
The four poems shortlisted are: Towards Holkham by Naoise Gale (UK), Raccoon Baculum Good Luck Charm by Andrew Krivák (US), Taipan by Anthony Lawrence (Australia) and The Last Dragons On Earth: A Travelogue by Shelley Stenhouse (US).
Gale’s Towards Holkham is, according to Benson, “an oblique, child’s-eye account of a grandfather’s survival of genocide (’people were starved // to thready wishes, dying of dysentery / and digging their own graves’) and his subsequent trauma, as well as the appalling attempts to ‘treat’ him. I particularly admired the threads of imagery that run through this poem – of beachcombings and shellfish, of dental equipment, of weather fronts; the sectioned grandfather mirrored at a strange and wonky angle as the grandma sections the granddaughter’s hair into braids.
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“Words travel through the poem with strange mutations of meaning. What a spectacularly kind gesture of humour too, at the end of the poem, as the grandfather becomes the observer, not the observed, and declares everyone mad.”
Gale is from Yorkshire and is based in Norwich, where she is a PhD researcher at the University of East Anglia, studying poetry and psychosis. She won the Ledbury Poetry Prize in 2022 and was highly commended in the Welsh Poetry and the Winchester Poetry Prizes in 2024. Her debut pamphlet, After the Flood Comes the Apologies, was published with Nine Pens Press in 2021, and her collection Blue But Not Broken, which focused on autistic girlhood, was released with Femme Salvé Books last year. In her free time, Gale is a deputy editor at Anthopocene poetry magazine.
Krivák’s poem, Raccoon Baculum Good Luck Charm, which tells the tale of a loving, childless couple “has the breadth and depth of an Alice Munro short story; yet it also has the pacing, music and grace of an absolutely breath-taking poem. Its shifts between registers – from the quotidian ‘They were young and just married and only thinking / of children’ to the epiphanic ‘soundless and / at peace through all that lack’ move with enviable fluidity; so too its weaving in of a convincing vernacular, which brings with it such a deep sense of character.
“The shape of the thing is beautiful too, coming back in the end to ‘soundless and at peace’ in a beautiful arc that takes in balloon rides, Stagg beer, gold-plating, a strange fertility charm, a rocket to Venus, and the loveliest moments of affection (’It’s just pretty, like you’).”
Krivák is the author of four novels, two chapbooks of poetry and two works of nonfiction. His 2011 debut novel, The Sojourn, was a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction and the inaugural Chautauqua Prize. He followed with The Signal Flame in 2017, The Bear in 2020, and Like the Appearance of Horses in 2023. His chapbooks include Islands and Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves. Krivák is discussion facilitator for the New Hampshire Department of Corrections’ Family Connection Centre and visiting lecturer on English at Harvard University. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts and Jaffrey, New Hampshire with his wife and three children.
Lawrence’s poem Taipan “has a rare originality – of thought, observation and absolutely brilliant imagery; the father’s snake-bite rash is likened to ‘an early explorer’s map of Tasmania / that darkened like slate in wet weather’; the dog arrives ‘in a cornering broadside scrabble of nails’. I love how the poem comes at grief sideways – a portrait of a dog that turns out to be a portrait of the man who owned him – the speaker’s dead father.
“On this lonely farm the dog is the only living being that remembers her father – dog as archive of the father – dog who pines in the place ‘where he yarded sheep // and poled them under dark water to open the fleece.’ And dog is not just an archive of the father / farmer but of farming practices, this lost farm which is in truth ‘only a reclaimed swamp with signs // warning of unexploded artillery shells on the periphery’.”
Lawrence has published 19 collections of poems and a novel. His books and individual poems have won a number of awards, including the Prime Ministers Literary Award for Poetry (Australia), the Ginkgo Prize for eco poetry, the Philip Hodgins Medal and the Blake Poetry Prize. A major theme of many poems is human interaction with, and intervention within the natural world. Until recently he was teaching at Griffith University in Queensland. Now he is working full time on fiction, poetry and a memoir, What the Field Guide Saw Outside the Field. He lives on Moreton Bay, Queensland.
Shelley Stenhouse’s The Last Dragons On Earth: a travelogue “is epic – in length as well as scale. Flashy and sparkling as the ‘Disney-bright’ waters of the ocean, the poem’s protagonists amuse, but their actions tell a story of rich and privileged tourism – its consumerism, sense of entitlement, exploitation and downright cruelty. The poem was also deeply thought-provoking on matters of appropriation; moments of elegy and beauty (babies are buried in trees) are undercut by random travel facts, accumulated like pearl-strands, like property. The poems’ skewering of these rich tourists is not without nuance however, and the poem won me over with its moments of gentleness and humour as well as its moments of horror. The handling of voice, narrative and imagery were all awe-inspiring.”
Stenhouse recently won third place in Australian Book Review’s Jolley Prize for her story M. Previously, she won the Palette Poetry Prize (judged by Edward Hirsch), the Pavement Saw Press Award for her poetry collection, PANTS, a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, and an Allen Ginsberg Award. She was a National Poetry Series finalist, had two Pushcart Prize nominations (one by Tony Hoagland), and three residencies at Yaddo Art Colony. Her poetry collection, Impunity, was published by NYQ Books.
Benson also commended poems by Toby Campion (UK), Rico Craig (Australia), Tishani Doshi (India), Camille Francois (France), Vicki Husband (Scotland), Elizabeth Morton (New Zealand), Weijia Pan (China) and Natalie Perman (UK), all of whom will receive prizes of €250.
The overall winner, who will receive €6,000, will be announced at a live event on The Moth’s Instagram page at 6pm on Wednesday, April 9th. The remaining three shortlisted poets will each receive €1,000.
Meanwhile, The Caterpillar Poetry Prize, run by The Moth and judged by Kate Wakeling, closes on March 31st, and entries are now welcome for The Moth Short Story Prize 2025, judged by Evie Wyld. The winners of each of the four annual Moth prizes are published in the Irish Times online, while the 1st prize-winner of The Moth Short Story Prize is printed in the newspaper’s summer fiction series.
For more details see themothmagazine.com
