Congratulations to Audrey Molloy on being selected for the 2025 Peter Porter Poetry Prize shortlist. Also shortlisted are Sarah Day, Jennifer Harrison, Claire Potter and Meredith Stricker.
Presented by Australian Book Review the Peter Porter Poetry Prize is one of Australia’s most prestigious prizes for a new poem.
Read ‘Notes from a Room’ by Audrey below. Each of the shortlisted poems is available to read here.
Notes from a Room
This beautiful sound. Like you’ve thrown a plum
and an orchard comes back at you.
— Richard Flanagan
by Audrey Molloy
Irena arouses the room.
Deep in the bath, considering
the decline of her flesh, the woman,
giving up on her mortal body, starts to hum
the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria — holy music —
and the room joins in on one low note.
Even walls offer resonance. While every other note
dies off, this tone is amplified – it makes the room
vibrate. One rogue tone, and she has conjured music,
as though the bathroom were an orchestra of strings,
as though she’d plucked – when she began to hum —
an instrument, a marble harp. This woman
doesn’t care for physics. In the glass she sees a woman
rising from the steam, warbling a note.
Across the tiles, down the stairs, Irena hums,
still dripping. At the old piano in the drawing room,
she taps the keys, their hammers ring —
C, C-sharp, D; the walls rebound no music.
That’s how it goes: a signal sent out, seeking music,
the off chance of an echo; it’s how a woman
comes to fathom that this far-flung life-ring
for the drowning — this hurtled little note –—
is everything. Almost nothing resonates; a room
is just a room, no matter if you hum.
She floats her cargo back upstairs, hummed
inside her head – throat music, sinus music.
Right where she left it is the glassy room:
each feels the other pulse — walls and woman —
strange company, naught in common but this note.
Irena’s pale reflection smiles, remembering
the flare of synchrony — like the firing
of a matchbook; hot light, then nothing but the hum
of phosphorous — her story, now, a footnote
in the book of stories. From the street, distant music
drifts through the window, through the ears of a woman
straightening a photo of a bride and groom.
Lowering the window sash, she drowns the music;
where once there was a perfect hum, there’s just a woman,
and where there lived a holy note, a silent room.
Audrey Molloy grew up in Ireland and has lived in Sydney since 1998. Her début collection, The Important Things (The Gallery Press, 2021), won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize. The Blue Cocktail was published by both The Gallery Press and Pitt Street Poetry in 2023. Her forthcoming collection, Fallen, will be published in Autumn 2025.
