The Welfare of my Enemy by Anthony Lawrence

JUDGES' COMMENTS

The Welfare of My Enemy is a haunting record of loss and disappearances conveyed through the memorable figures who chart the sad and scary landscape of the missing: families left behind, perpetrators of the crime, the dead, the law, those looking. Other Australian poets have written crime fiction, but Lawrence is markedly different. He challenges the darkness to be its most rotten. He doesn’t use humour or invent likeable villains to make the subject easier on the reader. Lawrence’s use of rhyming couplets brings no lilting relief from the tales he weaves; rather the rhymes lure us deeper into the poem.

Lawrence’s poems are compressed and then broken to emphasise how missing never ends, how vanishing is inconclusive. Like the unknown identities of those who are missing, the poems have missing titles. An asterisk announces a new voice and we are hooked on his descriptions and snippets, and engaged with the activities of the missing and those who miss them, their chilling and honest confessions.