Like to the Lark

Judges' comments

Stuart Barnes brings precise crafting, wit and adventurousness to Like to the Lark’s exhilarating exploration of form. Named after Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, Like to the Lark works with forms including sonnets, sestinas, ghazals, abecedarians as well as new forms such as Jericho Brown’s duplex. From there, Barnes invents his own forms, the terse-set and the flashbang. The playfulness and innovation throughout the collection contribute to its zest.

In an essay accompanying the book’s publication, Barnes quotes AE Stallings who suggests that working with form is not about maintaining control, ‘but giving up control, allowing other forces into the poem’. This tension between holding and relinquishing relates to the work’s thematic content, which spans personal and collective histories of breakage, repair and resilience, including the disclosure of traumatic experience. A treasury of allusions points to the inclusiveness of the work, from William Blake and Judith Wright to ads for Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum, homophobic rantings of public figures, the Bible and The Cure. Through this innovative poetic methodology, Barnes marvellously queries and queers categories of restriction and freedom, silence and music, damage and repair.