“Enemy Infant,” a poem by Donald Morrill, UT associate dean of Graduate
and Continuing Studies and Dana Professor of English, has been awarded
the 2010 Anne Halley Prize from
The Massachusetts Review. The
annual award, which includes a cash prize of $500, recognizes the best
work to appear in the magazine in the previous year. In addition, a
broadside of the poem will be produced, and Morrill will give a reading
of this and other works at UMass-Amherst this spring.
The poem
addresses a madness of war, Morrill says, where warrior groups consider
small children enemies, as much as they do adult soldiers in the
opposition, because they too could grow up to be soldiers.
“Under
the bane of such ‘logic,’ even an infant is fit for destroying,”
Morrill says. “And the madness spreads out, across lives and tribes and
memory ... and the murdered infant does grow up and return...”
To read the poem, visit
www.massreview.org/PDF/5003/Morrill.pdf.