The collection opens with David Musgrave’s winning poem ‘The Baby Boomers’, which in its easy portraits of a recognised demographic and foregrounding of dissipating aspirations could earn further anthologising in years to come. The prize’s three ‘highly commended’ poems – by Elizabeth Campbell, Shevaun Cooley, and Julian Croft – follow. All have strengths, but Cooley’s ‘Expeditions with WG Sebald’, in particular, offers beautifully paced movement between associated words, ideas and images.

There is no sense of quality diminishing beyond the judges’ favourites; indeed, some of the finest contributions lie deeper within this book. Adrienne Eberhard’s ‘This Woman’ dissects the trauma of mastectomy, in the process cataloguing, with ‘the Buddha’s detachment’, the many manifestations of ‘the breast’. John Foulcher’s ‘This is My Body’ commemorates various clergy, diagnosing how physiological malfunction brings ‘the body to its knees, / slowing your prayers to a trickle’. Kathryn Lomer’s ‘The Love Hand’ provides effortless plays on language in transposing the difficult language of Auslan, and Isi Unikowski’s ‘The Idiom of Place’ is a witty and intelligent distillation of place and history. Set in post-hurricane New Orleans, Roberta Lowing’s ‘The End of the Rainbow’ has something of the surreally dark world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. A few poems labour under the weight of excessively wide reference, and biographical notes for contributors would have been useful, but in this anthology we have a marvellously rewarding paean to the long poem.