The Brian Nisbet Poetry Award 2024
Today, 10 December 2024, on the 200th anniversary of George MacDonald’s birth, a favorite author of mine who is considered one of the founders of modern fantasy literature, I am honored to announce that my poem “The Faery Wood” has won the Highly Commended Award, one of two prizes given for this year’s Brian Nisbet Poetry Award.
This year’s theme was the life and multifaceted works of George MacDonald in honor of the bicentenary of his birth in Huntly, Scotland, where the award is based. I could not attend the award ceremony at Orb’s Bookshop, but to have this particular poem of mine commended on MacDonald’s bicentenary birthday means more to me than I can possibly express in words.
My poem was indeed inspired by this summer’s rereading of MacDonald’s brilliant fantasy novel Phantastes (1858); however, unlike previous readings, this year I was led down an unfamiliar path into the realm of Faerie, discovering a different sort of vision that revealed distinctive imagery and inspired new ideas — I was particularly moved by the symbolism and my own interpretations of the shadow of Anodos. Other inspirations include the folkloric enchantments and fairy “spell-craft” of bluebells, especially the associations with death; the metaphorical symbolism of twilight; my travels through Scotland back in May, including a rather inspired moment wandering the gardens of Dunrobin Castle, which seemed to be “abloom / In full azurean glow”; and, not surprisingly, a bit of both Keats and Shelley.
I want to sincerely thank everyone involved with making the Brian Nisbet Poetry Award possible, including Huntly Writers, Orb’s Bookshop, Lynn Rutter, and lead judge Dawn McLachlan. Congratulations to all other winners in each category, including Nicola Furrie Murphy, Miranda Montgomery, Tasbeh Malaeka, Emilija Andriusaityte, and Daniel Limond.
You can read my poem “The Faery Wood” below:
The Faery Wood
“The twilight sank around me, and infolded me with sleep… I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow.”
—George MacDonald, Phantastes
My heart aches, and I seek oblivion
In a Lethean sleep, to drink
Bewitcheries nepenthean and sink
Deep beneath perilous seas, cease to be,
And forget what could never be unseen —
To fall from the sleepless nightmare
Into the nightingale’s love-dream:
Trillings rich with love-sick ecstasies
Are both heard and seen, glamouried
With lush blues by mid-May’s Sapphire Queen
Drowsily I open my eyes, sublimed
By the ungathering darkness that opens
Doorways into the unconscious mind,
And what I find are wonders
Of the other side: a faery wood
Otherworlded by perpetual twilight,
Melting skies of violet Tyrian
Bleed white-fire like liquid lightning
Touched by volcanian red, spellbinding
The darkest, lushest bluebell bed
Lured by the faintly far away abloom
In full azurean glow, splintered light
Wet with spell-craft that falls like shadow,
Drips like will-o’-wisps, leading me home
Ghost-eyed, heart-sore, idealised like Endymion
In the Queen-Moon’s dream of eternal sleep —
But I awoke, I rose, and as I wandered darkly
As one who longs for death, smiles as one fey,
I followed my aching heart
And took the faery wood’s violet way
Like a lithe spirit in lunary limbo
I float beyond the veil of sleep —
Betwixt and between death and ecstasy
The nightingale no longer sings,
Spring’s bluebells die, and this violet sky
Melts to the silence of my own twilight:
A winter’s sunset, quiet, cold, alone,
And my eyes, still ravished by moonglow,
Watch as my soul of souls, opaled and pearled,
Glides in hyacinthine skies of another world.