Emily Dickinson Poetry Award 2003
First Place Winner:
“Naramata
Road” by Rishma Dunlop.
Praise for “Naramata Road”
Judges Notes:
“Naramata Road” is a fitting poem for the Emily Dickinson Award in Poetry because its strengths and themes are similar to Dickinson’s. This poet, like Dickinson, is passionately engaged in questions of belief and doubt, loss and redemption. As in Dickinson’s poem, “There’s a certain slant of light,” in “Naramata Road,” the landscape animates and “unfastens” the speaker and sets the soul and body “to music.” Both poems are paradoxically poems of despair and praise, spiritual transformation and alienation. This poet also has a kinship with Dickinson’s wild, unhinged imagery, as in “the skeletons of/trees dangle gifts, Golden Delicious earrings abandoned to the wind.” And the music and breath of the poem are in full harmony. In short, this poem meets Dickinson’s standard: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
Aliki Barnstone, Final Judge
Rishma Dunlop
