DEPARTMENT of Truth is Stranger than Fiction: A novelist puts a poem of her own creation in her new book. Not just willy-nilly, but as a necessary part of the story. She is not a poet, a fact her publisher makes clear on reading the manuscript. So the novelist goes on a strange search for a poet to pen a bespoke poem for her book. She finds one, a poet she has read but never met. The poet finds the proposition unusual, too, but writes the poem and it is included in the book. It’s a fine poem. A year later, the novelist and the poet share a major literary award. Had the fiction writer come up with such a plot twist she might have been accused of overreach, but it is just what has happened to novelist Ashley Hay and poet Stephen Edgar. This week Hay’s 2013 novel The Railwayman’s Wife, which features a poem written for the book by Edgar, was named joint winner of the prestigious Colin Roderick Award. The other joint winner was Edgar, for his poetry volume Eldershaw.
Hay explains how this odd coupling worked: “I sent him some of the imagery I hoped the poem would contain, a bit about its content and its context, and a bit of information about the character in the book who would be doing the writing.’’ Edgar sent back a first draft of the poem within a week. “What amazed me,’’ Hay says, “was that it not only fitted the voice of my poet so perfectly, and contained all the imagery and ideas I’d sent through, but there were also nods to other elements of the novel that Stephen didn’t know about — couldn’t know about. It took my breath away.’’
Edgar says novelist Michelle de Kretser was the link between he and Hay, putting them in touch after hearing of Hay’s dilemma. He reveals he did not read the novel but based his poem on the one Hay had written, and on the context she provided. “I simply immersed myself in the words Ashley had sent and let my imagination work on them and try to find a new form that seemed to be effective. I found it a very interesting and satisfying process. But I regarded it as something like working on a libretto for a composer — she would have the final say and I would adapt anything I wrote to suit her needs.’’
It’s a lovely story, but we should not forget the poet’s achievement in winning a literary award open to all genres. Reviewing Eldershaw in these pages in June, Geoffrey Lehmann lauded a “high point in Australian poetry’’. The Roderick is awarded to the “best book published in Australia which deals with any aspect of Australian life’’. First awarded in 1967, it honours the Queensland author, critic and scholar Colin Roderick (1911-2000), who was the foundation professor of English literature at James Cook University in Townsville. The award is worth $10,000 to the winner — and in an act of generosity Roderick’s widow, Margaret, contributed a further $10,000 this year so that Hay and Edgar each received the full prize cheque. Previous winners include Ruth Park, Tom Keneally and Peter Carey, but as the ever gracious Hay suggests, this year may well represent a first: “Stephen Edgar becomes, in a way, the first person to win the Colin Roderick twice in a single year, because my book would not hold without him.’’
