Judge Pascale Petit’s comments: “The voice in ‘untitled’ pulled me in straightaway. I empathised with the main character and his or her struggle to survive, to be well. That authentic voice is further reinforced by the questing tone of ‘I was trying to ask the right questions / very carefully and slowly, / see past it all, what it was really.’ This poem is attempting to get to the nub of what it’s like to be alive in a bleak emotional landscape in Dublin, ‘black things that fizzed.’ The lean freeform stanzas add to the desolate atmosphere conjured by the sinuous language. The gritty realism subtly shifts into surrealism through images of urban disintegration. Max Ernst’s Loplop even puts in an appearance as Samuel Beckett.”