When you judge a poetry competition, you're always looking - and hoping - for the poem that announces itself as the winner: the poem that leaps off the page, speaks to you in a different and distinctive voice... and sometimes gives you goosebumps.

When I judged the John Shaw Neilson Award a couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to find one of these poems. It was called 'river salvages' and began with these amazing lines:

You purr through the door like a great cat a story tiger generations of river ancestors streaming from your back I discovered subsequently that it was by Patricia Sykes. It was a striking and haunting poem and I returned to it several times - each time finding more in it. And wanting more...

The first thing I want to say about Wire Dancing is that it's difficult to believe it's a first book. The poems are so strong, so confident and so well crafted that they are obviously the work of a poet with the polished skills of long experience. It is certainly one of the most impressive first collections I've ever seen.

The second thing I want to say is that Trish Sykes' poetry is utterly compelling and absorbing - rare in any collection of poetry and rarer still in a first book. This is largely achieved through the economy - perhaps purity - of language, through spareness of form, and through the extraordinary (and extraordinarily wide) frame of reference.

In poems that are at one allusive and elusive, Sykes leaps like an acrobat between past and present, mythology and history, the everyday and the exotic, from Bosnia to the circus. And, dancing nimbly along the high wires of emotion and intellect, she is passionate, witty, erudite and ironic.

This makes for powerful and complex poetry - and often poetry that is confronting and uncompromising. But there are also many poems that are subtle limpid and moving.

The last thing I want to say is congratulations - and thanks - to Trish for Wire Dancing, and to the wonderful women at Spinifex for publishing it. I am sure the book will be a great success for Trish and for Spinifex. And I urge you - even more emphatically than is usual - to buy and read this book so that you can share my enjoyment of what could well be the poetry experience of the year. - Bev Roberts