Chris Andrews wins the TLS’s Mick Imlah Poetry Prize (2019)

Chris Andrews, whose Lime Green Chair was awarded the seventh annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and published by Waywiser in 2012 has been declared winner of the the Mick Imlah Poetry Prize for his poem, “This is the Crow with the Broken Caw”. As well as seeing his poem published in in the TLS (December 20, 2019), Chris receives a purse of £3,000. The TLS‘s deputy editor, Alan Jenkins, speaking as one of the contest’s three judges, writes that “This is …” struck us with its play between the mechanical and the natural, between the empire of development (and its ruins), and the ecosphere it is encroaching on; the sense the poem conveys “of human and non-human lives going on at the same time but at different speeds, instigating little eruptions in the narrative”, as [his fellow judge] Karen [Solie] said. All of us took pleasure in the details of this Australian (sub?)urban pastoral, and in its solid construction and vivid phrasing.” Our congratulations go to Chris, of whom his fellow countryman Chris Wallace-Crabbe has rightly said, Alert and sparkling, my fellow poet … has an eye for every small thing in our modern cities: and the words for it.