Dazzled by David Adès, an Adelaide poet who now lives in the United States, is a poem about the inspiration to write, told through the prism of a busy day in his life as a father and poet in Pittsburgh.

Adès, who arrived in Canberra on Monday for the ceremony, described himself as jet-lagged but ecstatic to win the vice-chancellor's Poetry Prize.

He said Dazzled came about after he read a poem by another poet, Joy Katz, and felt inspired to respond to it. "I couldn't get it out of my head," he said.

But the inspiration to write had to compete with a visit to a friend's house, a party, a dachshund, snow, and tired children.

"It was a very jam-packed day, full of people and events and noise and activity," Adès recalled.

"[And] when, finally, everybody was asleep and quiet, I lay in bed thinking about [the other poem] and thinking about responding to it. It was one of those nice things where despite all the activity of the day and the inability to be fully attentive to everything going on, the inspiration that her poem gave me pushed itself upward to manifest itself in a desire to write something."

The prize's head judge, British poet and novelist Philip Gross, praised Adès's poem as "irresistible" and "a generous and subtle celebration of the way a poem can infiltrate itself, coming to fruition slowly, among the swarming details of a life observed with appetite".

Adès moved to Pittsburgh with his family so that his wife could pursue an academic fellowship and divides his time writing poetry and caring for his two young children.

He said that the Pennsylvanian city's landscape had worked its way into his writing and he had written more poems about Pittsburgh than his home town of Adelaide.

"I didn't really know anything about Pittsburgh when I went and one of the things I didn't know and have been amazed to find out is the extent of its poetry - it's an absolute poetry hub with hundreds and hundreds of poets doing amazing things," he said.

The $5000 runner-up prize was won by Melbourne poet Debi Hamilton whose poem What Big Plans You Have weaves together the fairytale of Red Riding Hood and environmental issues.

More than 600 poets sent in 1050 entries for the poetry prize, which was started just this year and is one of the richest of its kind in the world. The total prize pool was $25,000.

The judging panel included poets Jennifer Harrison, Brook Emery and Judith Beveridge.

Dazzled, by David Adés

A song swelled, caught the wind like a sail, billowing.

I was learning the cold again: brisk, penetrating. Winter's breath. I breathed it in

and out, felt it on my nose, my cheeks, seeping through my gloves. Walking along

Forbes

and South Dallas to your house little clouds of breath drifted and dispersed. I

checked myself, wary of unseen ice. Hard packed snow crunched underfoot. Slushy

ice filled

the intersections, treacherous. How beautiful the cemetery: headstones, graves,

mausoleums all pristine under their white coverlets, sleeping, trees' quiet in their

white

skeletons, everything at peace in the bridal white of the day. I sidestepped a snow

plough heaping snow off the pavement skirting the cemetery, hefted my daypack, a

bag

of bagels. In the warmth of your home I found it in a stray glance, read it twice,

quickly, amid a noisy scattering of children. All those fragments of conversation,

started then —

You hunted for the book I asked you to find. Your friends from out of State arrived.

On the back roof, workmen slowly unrolled a black mat, softened it with their

blowtorch. Piper, your little dachshund, pitter-pattered out to the front yard,

suffered the snow, chewed with doggie single-mindedness the carrots and prunes

once adorning

the snowman, left the snowman's corpse and droplets of orange. The aesthetic

pleasure of seeing your poem in a calendar, on a page normally reserved for

paintings or

photographs or other more visual arts. Your conversation with yourself, the jousting

about faith, the paradox of your disavowal of God whilst invoking God, even as your

poem in its every facet shone with faith. The imaginative leaps, the surprise of being

led so deftly from here to there, as if you were vaulting the heavens, mapping the

shortest

way between stars with wormholes of light for others to follow. Afterwards, I went

to a party celebrating the birth of a baby girl. I arrived knowing only my wife and

daughters,

talked amid a noisy scattering of children, left, hours later, having found my

reflection in a new pair of eyes. The car slipped and skidded on an icy road, my

daughters sitting

tired in the back seats, one singing to herself, the other screaming about a lost

bracelet. Later still, when finally everyone was asleep, I lay in bed in the quiet of a

winter night.

What struck me then was how your poem sang to me in a voice I never knew I had

missed, how it swelled, caught the wind like a sail, billowing, its irresistible linear

progression – despite the surprises – to the final word that could be no word other

than 'dazzled' and how, dazzled, I lay in bed with my voice

swelling, beginning to sing my reply.