The $1,000 Bell Gully National Schools Poetry Award 2004 has been won by Poppy Haynes, a student at Chilton Saint James School in Lower Hutt.

Judge Glenn Colquhoun (pictured) said:

There were a handful of excellent poems. The winner, Had I an intelligent dolphin by Chilton St James student Poppy Haynes, literally leapt out of the pack. It was a small tunnel of words to escape through and not out of place among the best poems I have read this year. Every time I read it, it stood out for its simplicity, imagination, precision and joy.

Chilton Saint James is a ‘prestigious, traditional, private day school for girls from preschool to year 13’, and one of New Zealand's top performing private schools. It’s regularly placed in the top 2% for national examinations. We don’t know what they put in the water there, but it seems to be working.

You can read Poppy’s poem here and Glenn’s report here.

While we’re on the subject of Victoria, it’s worth checking out their Best New Zealand Poems section - a series based on the US annual series The Best American Poetry. According to VUW's Bill Manhire, BNZP ‘gets a vast number of visits, well over half of them from beyond NZ - which means that the site is fulfilling something of its original plan: namely, to get NZ poetry across the seas.’

Bill has five weeks left to go in Menton (hope you’re making the most of it, Bill). As a postscript, he provides an interesting story here about mysterious goings-on in his Katherine Mansfield Room at the Villa Isola Bella …