In a more perfect world (where there are fewer crippling complications) Stuart Cooke’s multi layered and lyrical verse translation of a Traditional Song Cycle would probably be what most of us would like First Nations literature to look like. It is a richly collaborative project bringing together the creative energies of Traditional Owners and a non-Indigenous academic and poet. Cooke’s book is a proud celebration of Nyigina Culture and Language and makes an invaluable contribution to Cultural maintenance.

In publishing his “song-poem as a verse-in-translation” Cooke runs concurrently on each page four versions of the song-poem: firstly there are extracts from the story in Nyigina language; then there are a number of short mediations on the story through the voices of Butcher Joe, Roe or Dyungayan; this is followed by the translation of the anthropologist and linguist Ray Keogh; before finally we are given Cooke’s more contemporary poetic translation. This presentation of the four versions of the song-poem works together seamlessly in what is a stunning collaborative performance.

To further highlight some of the unique narrative continuities/discontinuities in the structure of the original group performed song-poem Cooke scatters his expressive lines across each page and employs such innovative typographical features as varying font sizes and brackets (to suggest space, translation difficulties and “haze” or uncertainties built into the oral texts). Thus the first page of the song-poem begins with a few lines of Language, followed by some interjection by Dyungayan and Roe in Language and Aboriginal English before we are given Keogh’s summary and translation: “Bulu and his rai come out from Wanydyal and contemplate the direction they’re going to travel across their country” (44). These versions of the song-poem, and the way Cooke values them, are integral to the text and beautifully lead the reader into Cooke’s own original and stunning line scatterings of verse translation:

("Verse 1", 44)

This unrestricted song cycle from the Bulu Line is a collection of 17 songs and was received by George Dyungayan in a dream from his father (the late Bulu) before being passed onto Paddy Roe and then onto Phillip Roe (a Goolarabooloo elder). We are fortunate that the custodians of this story have chosen to open it to the world via the conduits of Ray Keogh and Stuart Cooke. The story begins with the spirits of George Dyungayan and his father, Bulu, emerging from Wanydyal (a waterhole). They then travel in a loop, dancing and singing across country, as they encounter various animals and spirits (including a rainbow serpent’s ferocious storm as payback) – this is a remarkably magnetic narrative powerfully and respectfully rendered by Keogh and Cooke. George Dyungayan’s Bulu Line is certainly a charismatic model for the “song-poem as a verse-in-translation”.

Lionel Fogarty’s Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Mobo-Mobo (Future), on the other hand, is an unflinchingly uncomfortable read interrogating colonialism’s crooked paths with devastating impact. Fogarty combatively stakes his voice somewhere between Aboriginal English and Standard Australian English as he confronts the social and political realities of contemporary dispossession, racism and victimisation and the painfully recalcitrant attempts by the non-Indigenous Australian hegemony to address Indigenous injustice and disadvantage. At times his uncompromising voice of indignation and anger verges on that of a rant but the energy and forcefulness of his poetic is, to me, irresistible.

In his long poem, “CAUSED US TO BE COLLABORATOR”, Fogarty writes so memorably a hymn of praise to Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Kevin Gilbert because “Australians need to know, survival by Black writers who talk …sovereignty hits the heart to love” (102). In sections of celebratory prose poetry Fogarty writes:

I witness spiritual reflect of great experiences in they are apart of all our ultimately writer fighters even lovers of the sentences to go on forever.    (104)

And he continues:

They lived near white foe but never stole their ideas or rid to get rips. They were common but differ in how to pawn the way over and around the Miggloo (GHOST people) brains.    (104)

While in “Historical Upheavals” he asserts the right of Indigenous people to speak on their own behalf:

Walk white fellow, as you all can’t write

Our battle just as your sunrise and night sigh ties.

The noble note runs in our native modern now from then.

Black resistance is everywhere now on written,

Face books their door mat roof an in-laws.    (83)

His poem, “Conservative Sells”, returns to the theme of the dangers for First Nation voices who collaborate too closely with the non-Indigenous socio-political hegemony for short-term financial or career security. This poem is very critical of Aboriginal leaders or writers who “play white games” because as Fogarty sees it:

Here is the Modern humorous

Aboriginal best known to be conservatives

And black students who just care bout getting

Their degrees.

Translate this and we get them thinking white

Not all are serious for their people’s voices.    (13)

This is vitally important to Fogarty because as he writes in his book’s closing poem:

Remember the black nights turned white no lights just colour        remembers.

Remember the smell dreams of futures

History is importance

Home me those past of rich remembers.    (122)

First Nations writing is not only important in giving voice to minority peoples; but it is here, in the Traditional Song Lines and in the poetry of such contemporaries as Lionel Fogarty, Samuel Wagan Watson and Ali Cobby Eckermann that we can hear many of the most innovative, dynamic and politically engaged writers working in Australia today. As Fogarty himself so memorable challenges in “VOTE NO? HO”:

Remember 200 thousand dreams and the minds balance houses.

Earth in focus world words around.

Remember to tree in year 3 thousand dreams,

Member those light in side cells life’s death

But always be happy over the horror in ways.    (122)

The twenty-seven short stories contained in John Kinsella’s latest collection of fiction, Crow’s Breath, form an unsettling reading experience. Set across a range of locations, but frequently in the Western Australian wheatbelt region, environmental concerns are a consistent presence but do not dominate the narratives within, which are trained on the intricacies and insecurities of human relationships and identities. A diverse cast of characters and range of personal situations are presented to the reader, but are linked by a common ground of uncertainty.

Central to the human conflicts explored are issues of insularity, alienation, and lack of comprehension, which extend to the world around each character. Multiple voices can arise in the same stories. In “The Little Flower of Forest Pool”, referring to a humiliating nickname for the focal schoolboy narrator, there is a moment of equally delicate and coarse contact between humanity and the natural world by a new, unnamed narrator:

Flowers of the forest can be subtle yet brilliant. The forest is no "bed of roses", but diverse and fascinating. Some of us spend a lifetime studying orchids that flower underground, and blossoms that flourish without exaggeration in the otherworldly canopy. But the Little Flower of Forest Pool is a species constantly fighting extinction … I remember Harry, the Little Flower of Forest Pool, a pressed specimen in the pages of learning. The unlearning of school and its extracurricular manifestations. And I don’t have a thick skin. I will never have one. (61)

The “red flower” of blistered bruises upon the child’s back, caused by crashing into the ice of a dammed creek, becomes emblematic of callous indifference to a child’s developing sense of self and parental/adult assignation of identities at the cost of self determination. The visitation of the forest pool by the unwilling students and detached adult guardians create a sense of ritual, but the “coming of age” is an unwelcome and unfitting one. Any feeling of peace or success that could have been generated in this setting is off-set by descriptions of the environmental space itself, the karri trees’ canopies “different planets” (56).  This particular story is saturated with unattributed dialogue of teachers, students, perhaps the environment itself, organically built into the internal thoughts of the young male narrator. Recurring motifs of height and inaccessibility are shared by the exploitation of the young and the natural world alike.

Amongst the collection are frequent, sharp moments of horror. The brutality and ugliness of racism is showcased in “Golden Gloves”. Death is intermittently incidental, accidental, and intentional across Crow’s Breath. “The Tip” takes a particularly grim twist in this direction, in which a "friendly" rivalry over recycled materials becomes the means for entrapment and murder. Halloween celebrations get in touch with their cautionary, demonic roots in “The Thin Veil”, and more quotidian shows of compassion are shown to seldom go unpunished, especially in “Feeding the Dogs”, though are more optimistically, if confrontationally countered in “Need of Assistance”.

The suffering of animal figures in Crow’s Breath is another point for sternly critical reflection on human interactions with the natural world. The arbitrarily delineated roles of working dog/pet dog, enforced by the blunt patriarch of a farmer in “A Particular Friendship” result in the callous poisoning of all five working and pet animals when these roles are crossed. The farmer’s twin children, responsible for letting the dogs play together, are stricken and rendered in terms similar to the dying dogs when they make this discovery:

So he poisoned them. Strychnine. He killed the kelpies. He killed Bluebell and Captain. He fed them baited meat and watched them die. Their death throes looked like a bizarre game, something the twins would play. It has to be said, his children were odd.

… When the twins, home from school, rushed in calling, Where are the dogs? he just said, They’re gone. And keep away from the old well. The twins stared. They blinked very slowly. They trembled and clutched hands. They whimpered. (73)

Kinsella is utterly critical in his showcase of such arbitrary control over life and death, as well as the inappropriately human means of defining animal communication, behaviour, and value. Notions of value are linked to a narrow-minded patriarchal figure, while the comparatively free-thinking children are there to be inadvertently crushed. Human interference with the natural world has catastrophic results, but is shown to have been heartbreakingly easy to avoid.

In Crow’s Breath, the struggles of the individual human characters are symptoms of a broader scale of struggle for survival in remote communities, or socially disunited spaces, as well as being sharp indictments of more specific human vanities and values. Environmentalist concerns are forefront in the descriptions of much of the settings, but are subtly encoded alongside the more personal struggles of each short story’s feature narrator. The range of personalities and figures presented are visceral in their detail. On a second reading and as a linked body of work, Crow’s Breath is almost like an autopsy: points where life are extinguished or put under pressure are brought under the microscope, assessed, and returned without consolation, but with the underlying demand that more needs to be done. Rather than being an overtly moralising treatise, Crow’s Breath displays a resolute, cautionary undercurrent, rooted in its unoffered resolutions.

Heartsick for Country

When I started work in the Pilbara a family friend of mine spoke to me about mourning in the region. I remember him painting a vivid picture of the first time he saw women hitting their head with rocks until they bled, crying and wailing to show respect for the dead. Although the practice is far less common now, it came to mind when I read the title poem of Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Inside My Mother.

Without doubt, it is a powerful and enduring poem – one with evocative imagery, plain speech complicated by judiciously placed line breaks, and relatable, important content. It is nothing short of a brilliant piece of writing and readers should seek the volume out simply for this work alone. It is also, to some extent, symptomatic of the collection as a whole in terms of style as well as content.

I want to consider, for this review, how land, soil, earth, clay, dirt, ground are represented in Inside My Mother. One could have chosen sky or water, but to me, land is at the root of this. That all of them, and more, are part of "country" is important and in separating out this particular expression I do not want to assume that there is a metonymic relationship. Rather, I want to highlight land because it is central to the cosmology, part of a dynamic multiplicity and playfulness, and because of the ongoing politics of mining. Land is fundamental to Inside My Mother and it is fundamental in understanding us as a people. Afterall, as Eckermann repeats, her mother’s "mother is the earth" (20).

Land in Inside My Mother refers both to specific places ("Ooldea Soakage", "Hindmarsh Island", "Oombulgarri", "Lake Eyre") and is a generalised "thing" ("Clay", "Mining", "Unearth").

Consider for example "Ooldea Soakage", which reads:

the big sand hill is

smaller now reduced

in the memory of

my mother

 

digging down into

the waterhole no

water remains for

the dingoes

 

overhead the sky

continues to shine

mother and daughter

standing together

 

at the tribal camp

we gather old coals

history trapped inside

rubbing charcoal on skin (15)

The specificity of location reminds one of Philip Hall’s Sweetened in Coals, as does the very literal use of "coals", and there are gestures to Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s "We are Going". This is about history and historicication, about witness and ritual, about mother and daughter as indeed the whole volume is. The line breaks give it a lilting irregularity that undermines the fact that this could simply be good prose – no $64,000 words for example – with expected pauses if in the wrong (safe) hands. This is particularly pronounced in the lines ‘smaller now reduced’ and ‘the waterhole no’. There are echoes throughout too, in the form of specific words, certain vowels and the sound shape of language - waterhole/water, sky/shine, together/gather, coals/charcoal. We hear the past (endogenous and real), but a little differently each time. Eckermann is updating our knowledge with each variation. All of this enables the reader to be entranced but not in some altogether derivative way, and not in some blithe comforting way. This sense of history, this return of the oppressed is expressed even more starkly in the poem "Unearth", a powerful primer on history as a discipline and of Indigenous peoples, with its final stanza reading:

boomerang bones will return to memory

excavation holes are dug in our minds

the constant loss of breath is the legacy

there is blood on the truth (37)

Consider now, a poem that is not specifically located. "Clay" reads:

the world is turning to clay

its muddy weight dry on my skin

drags me down below river banks

reducing the sky to a sliver

 

all peripheral vision is blocked by earth

the sky allows a sight that does not end

only my eyes reveal the myopia secret

my desire to live in the sky

 

the sky remains free from blemish

the depth of this view reduces me

shrinking me back into the earth

only the whites of my eyes suggest clouds

 

the clay on my skin has dried and cracks

its earth voice hoarse, now drowned in mud

I retreat to myself encased in knowing

truth is bigger when reduced in size (19)

This work is located in the body, locates itself in corporeality and we get a familiar sense of being underwater coupled with a more concentrated and specific idea of the cultural importance of clay on skin. Like "Ooldea Soakage" we have reference to an epidermal covering. We are embodied and smeared. It is as if the body joins with the earth, surface to surface. One will note too the similarity of voice and style, and the ending that seems to undermine a talking about clay as general thing. That is to say, place "is bigger when reduced in size". As many readers will be aware, clay as ochre, and other forms, is often used in rituals and rites. In the Pilbara, the area I am most familiar with, different language groups have different body markings for different rituals. Here though, clay is coupled with an individual sense that one is overwhelmed by the world and allows us to read the poem with overlapping cultural, emotional and personal possibilities. Eckermann builds a bridge between herself and the audience and we relate to each other on several different axes.

It is not that Eckermann forces non-Indigenous people, including people of colour such as myself, to acknowledge their occupation, perhaps bringing with it an idea of guilt or illegitimacy or un-sovereignty. It is that Eckermann creates a world in which these questions may surface for the reader. As such Inside My Mother is less a work of harassment or protest than a piece of piercing subtlety, even sometimes approaching parable, that approaches difference and voice. As she writes in "Footprint":

the moment you jumped from your boat

and landed on the shore

your footprint stood next to mind

 

in the morning my footprint had disappeared

and yours remained

it would not leave

 

the incoming tide betrayed me

wallowing in water I am drowning

I spy my footprint on the moon

 

the reflection on the shore is boundless

like a warrior sure under the moons glow

your footprint trapped now in a shallow pool (39)

This is you as reader, you as arrivant, you as the reason for my disappearance, you is the one "trapped in a shallow pool", drowning, superficial, unable to swim or leave. This is Eckermann speaking to us, acting as a angel of history and a harbinger of future calamity.

For those who find Lionel Fogarty difficult at the level of aesthetics and politics, or consider Samuel Wagan Watson’s changes in register to be a sign of inconsistency, but want to engage with issues of occupation, land, self, emotion Inside My Mother might be more amenable. It’s plain speech and nuance cannot be simply dismissed as common, or anything less than finely crafted and impressively idiosyncratic. Eckermann has technical skill and a commanding voice that enable us to come at important issues in everyday language with a deft touch. That is a rare ability and one we can only be thankful for.

Reading Wild is like wandering into a landscape and being suffused in life’s richness. Coming in from the sky are a host of birds and words. Leopards, bears and wolves hide in the thickets of language. The ravens, Huginn and Muninn, whisper their stories through the poet.

Opening with the words of "Bear woman", a poem as heavy as hibernation is long, we feel the rumble of her steps, her "words growl as thunder" (3). Following this, the next poem takes off leaving gravity behind, calling up fire and water. Moving into yet another element, the sea carries its whalesong which Hart compares with an embryonic cry.

One of the delights of Wild is the startling language: "calligraphies of wildlings" (6), "a sulk of rabbit" (9), "a whiff of scent history" (15), "a hive of twisted hair" (22).

Hart’s immersion in landscapes almost makes you feel the cold north wind of the Irish coast, or the sadness of Lake Baikal suffering its layers of pollution, eeking out a life.

I was moved by the poet’s need to build a cairn for the dead bird.

Each long, dark wing splays into crucifix form –

the chamber of his chest cut deep at rib vault

to appease any Doubting Thomas.

 

Exposed bone nests in plumage,

webbed feet have shrunk to black-blooming,

and despite being as dry as parchment

the flies still want him for their own.           (10)

These poems step lightly across the land. They are spare and the space around the poems creates an imaginative space for the reader. It is sometimes that momentary sight which Hindus call "darshan"; it is perhaps "a scripture of flighty birds" (18).

All the senses are heightened, even the man in the seat beside her is noticed because the cologne he wears is familiar. The senses bring forth memories of times and places far away in another hemisphere.

The section called "Murmurations" takes another view. The poet notices the catastrophes, the death of herrings and birds dropping from the sky. The tsunami brings "a fluffer of jellyfish" (31) while debris spreads itself across oceans to other continents. From the tilt of the earth to the "turn of the city" (36) the poet observes blizzards of starlings, a wave of lifting and falling birds over the city of Rome.

So if I chance to talk a little wild, forgive me,

a tempest has set the door sideways,

its feral beast has scratched at the roof.

It now holds my raging heart in a hollow bend of paw.

 ("Augury", 40)

This sense of transformation is a poetic epiphany: it comprises the wildness nearby alongside the question of human interference in the endless cycles of nature. Libby Hart’s language continues to surprise me, as I read and re-read.

In "The book of water"

Its sea-sorrow of kelp, its scroll unbound

ruffling on a dog-eared wave.                      (43)

Hart conjures up the green man who is taking notes on all the carnage. The norns, meanwhile, are thinking up language. It is as if they have taken a line from the final poem, "knuckled to the mother-tongue of music" (61).

I could keep reading this book. Each time I pick it up I find new depths. I love being introduced to new terms, to surprising concatenations of words, to images that take me into unknown worlds. That, after all, is the task of a poet.

Val Plumwood (1939–2008) is a highly original and important postcolonial, ecocritical and feminist scholar, and activist. She writes with great clarity, heightening the drama of her philosophical investigations in wonderfully evocative descriptions of walking, camping and canoeing through places of astounding natural beauty. This attractive book, published by ANU E Press in electronic and print form, might have been more ambitious in collecting together more of Val Plumwood’s published papers but what we have in this volume is a fine introduction.

The book opens with three chapters recounting the author’s Northern Territory canoe and bushwalking expedition to the point where the East Alligator River surges out of the Stone Country of the Arnhem Land Plateau. This experience inspires such rich descriptions of place as:

The energy of that struggle [between the power of earth and sky], amorous perhaps as well as abrasive, between the sandstone sheet and the hot, hyperactive atmosphere, has ground the great stone plateau into strange, maze-like ruins, ever-new disclosures of the infinite variety of the earth narrative that is weathered stone. (9)

It also leads Plumwood to reflect on the value of such "wild" experiences when they are slowed down to a low-impact respectful sauntering:

The intense, intimate and physical bond of knowledge with the earth to be gained by walking opens up a form of conversation with the earth’s great body … through such a journey you come to encounter nature in many forms and in the active rather than the passive voice, and to know the land in the mode of a lover, as a wonderfully elaborated, beloved and communicating body. (31)

In experiencing this sense of place, however, Plumwood is also acutely conscious of the prior ownership and rights of the Traditional Owners. This leads to a sensitive ear for Binitj Language: Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent, whose “power over water cycles is majestic and creative” (9); for the seasons such as Yegge; and for bush tucker and medicines such as waagi or freshwater prawns. And Plumwood laments the colonial approach in so much of the Northern Territory’s mapping and place naming, seeing in these monological practices a “treatment of place itself as a vacuum of mind and meaning, to be filled through the power … of the colonial office” (27). For Plumwood this “deeply colonized naming practice disfigures too much of the Australian map” and it is “precisely such cultural practices we have to take on if we Australians are ever to truly belong culturally to this land” (27). Plumwood rightly argues that Indigenous people see place as "country" not "wilderness": “For them all the earth is sacred and there is no necessary split between use and respect” (31).

The respectful and safe practice of outdoor education in northern Australia requires a very different risk analysis to that elsewhere, as Plumwood soon discovers during her ill-advised trip when she has a nearly fatal encounter with an estuarine crocodile. This experience leads Plumwood to a philosophical investigation into what it means for humans to be preyed upon, to the knowledge that consumption is a prerequisite for life and to a realization of just how damaging the human / nature dualism is in western culture. As Plumwood writes: “It is not a minor or inessential feature of our human existence that we are food: juicy, nourishing bodies” (10). The fact that we deny this is evidenced in the elimination from our lives of any animal that is disagreeable, inconvenient or dangerous to us despite the enormous ecological cost that this so often entails. This dominant human-centred ideology is also evidenced in our funerary practices that “set us apart from the animals and the rest of nature, made, unlike them, in the image of God” (14). The Indigenous animist concept of self and death is far more successful in breaking this ideology by understanding that life and death are about circulation; death is recycling. Plumwood argues that we are in desperate need of stories that confront this artificial human / nature dualism and reintegrate us with ecological literacy. Only then can we begin to “re-envisage ourselves as ecologically embodied beings akin to, rather than superior to, other animals” (16).

In the final four chapters of The Eye of the Crocodile Plumwood continues to deconstruct the prevailing human / nature dualism by developing the ideas of what it means to see humans as animals and all as part of nature, ecologically embodied. She writes a loving eulogy for a semi-domesticated wombat that came to her from the wildlife rescue service and that she shared her life with for a period of some thirteen years. She gives a profound reading of the film, Babe, contrasting the philosophical theories of ontological veganism and ecological animalism, highlighting the savagery of intensive factory farms and slaughterhouses as well as critiquing the various senses of anthropomorphism. The many ideas that Plumwood considers in this collection of essays reach their fullest development in the book’s final two chapters and especially in the essay titled, "Animals and ecology: Towards a better integration". This is a very significant postcolonial critique of what Plumwood describes as "ontological veganism".

Plumwood defines ontological veganism as a philosophical theory that sets human and non-human life forms apart. Because veganism insists that neither humans or animals should ever be seen as edible it confirms the treatment of humans as "outside nature" and therefore reinforces the old human / nature dualism. In the West Australian wheat belt, she also shows how the ecological costs associated with grain production are so high that eating a native low-impact grazing animal like a kangaroo can often carry a much lower animal and ecological impact than eating vegetarian grains.

But Plumwood also criticizes veganism for its cultural insensitivity to Indigenous cultures and for its highly ethnocentric stance that privileges urban Western contexts over all others. In developing this analysis Plumwood is critical of the North American philosopher Carol Adams as a leading exponent of these ideas. For Plumwood, Adams’ feminist-vegetarian ideas are undermined by a false gendered dualism that holds that in Indigenous societies women forage and gather plant material while men hunt and kill animals. As Plumwood shows this is not true; Indigenous women also hunt and kill many small and medium sized animals. But in all or most Indigenous societies food (animal and plant) is also kin. Plumwood shows how this tension is dealt with mythically, ritually and ceremonially.

Plumwood rejects ontological veganism (at least partly because it fails to acknowledge different cultures) preferring what she describes as ecological animalism, a system of ideas that situates human and animal life within an ethically and ecologically conceived universe. For Plumwood this philosophy would argue for a reduction in first world meat-eating and an ending to all factory farming because we need to disrupt the dominant human / nature dualism by resituating humans in ecological terms and reconceiving non-humans in ethical and cultural terms. For Plumwood ecological animalism and veganism both oppose the idea that humans and non-humans should be ontologised reductively as meat but only ecological animalism can combine the rejection of commoditisation with the framework of ecology and cultural diversity.

The Eye of the Crocodile is a wonderful read fusing so successfully a politically engaged autobiography with philosophical argument. As Plumwood shows: “Many thinking people have come to believe that there is something profoundly wrong in commodity culture’s relationship to living things” (77). The way out of this problem, argues Plumwood, is a desperate need for stories that confront the artificial human / nature dualism and reintegrate us with ecological literacy. Only then can we begin to “re-envisage ourselves as ecologically embodied beings akin to, rather than superior to, other animals” (16).

Heart-fat and Will

When I think of epic I not only think of certain classical iterations, but modernist American instances too – Pound, Eliot, Zukowfski, Reznikoff, to name a few. But in each case I think of empire. This is not to say that epic lends itself to building empire in a way that previous critics might have said the novel was a handmaid to nationalism but that a whole set of social relations and contextual situations of epic are implicated with empire. And this seems to be more the case than other forms of poetic expression. In a very basic sense epic and empire loom large; they seem big; they grow and expand outward. They project. This is, of course, not to limit epic or empire or to suggest that epic cannot be intimate, confessional, personal, but that epic and empire display a pressing affinity.

Joshua Corey’s The Barons asks us to think about American empire and epic now. The contours of the epic poem can be seen in each and every school. Avant garde, conceptual, post-conceptual, lyric, conservative, light, serious have their epics to name simply a handful of sub-status groups. We could situate Corey in this poetic milieu for his work cross hatches, intersects, speaks to many of these groupings. We could, quite equally, situate him in the landscape that surrounds him; the material conditions and the material he works on and from. This is an America of war in the middle east, of climate change sceptics, of gun toting, bible bashing, tea partying, hard working flyover states as well as an America of bi-coastal, multiracial, farmers’ market, yoga latte MFAs. The diversity of America is metaphysical, it is empirical; it lends itself to epic. There is then a synergy of poetry with world, which is something endearing and noticeable about Corey’s work. Pop culture, personal experience, poetic archive clash and sing and devise a way to engage with epic.

In The Barons Corey wears his poetic ancestors on his back – "Whitman, Stein, Crane, O’Hara, Rilke, Duncan" are stated as influences on the cover. The most immediately noticeable of those mentioned is Robert Duncan, from whom the epigraph comes ("I write poetry for the fucking stars"), and the opening line is thoroughly Whitmanian ("Epic fail and the man I sing") in the first instance. But as one works oneself into the book other poets come up and not only Americans. I recognised, for instance, a line from Paul Celan’s "Deathfugue" in the section on Joseph Beuys. Taken as a whole The Barons is a sampling of many different styles and voices, and one notices different tendencies in each of the six sections be that fragmentary abstraction, flash fiction prose poems or others.

One section – "Little Land Lyrics" – has a propulsive percussive rhythm and wry observations in twenty-one numbered stanzas. We are pushed along and each stanza has an anchoring and compelling line of tight rhyme of varying degrees of trueness. These rhymes are:

1. smote-port
2. band-sand
3. matted-splattered
4. scheme-genes
5. womaniser-atomiser
6. hill-bill
7. lover-other
8. rap-snap
9. curdle-cuddle
10. words-work
11. hose-throat
12. panjandrum-plumb
13. night-white
14. see-belly
15. rat-hat
16. redeems-teen
17. age-rains
18. extra-razor
19. do-no
20. life-fly
21. particular-cigar

The rhyme acts as a hinge point in each stanza as much as a compelling trait throughout the whole section. "Little Land Lyrics" has line breaks that run counter, or really compound, the fractured images and motifs that recur.

In this, and every other section, Corey is an able stylist too of the short phrase with layered reference and meaning. See for example the following line: "My maw mau-maus me in the mausoleum made from the girly magazines of my youth." (79). The beginning of the phrase with its repetition reminds one of Gertrude Stein in various Tender Buttons pieces, and we get from "mau-maus" not only the sonic echo of "maw" but a reference to the Mau Mau rebellion in British occupied Kenya that lasted from 1952 to 1960. There is too the use of "maus" as German for "mouse", which not only signals the eponymous Art Spiegelman graphic novel but also a type of World War Two Panzer tank. The "mausoleum" once again provides a sonic echo, but also recalls Mao in his mausoleum. From this we could think of Nixon in China or any other set of associations – Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward, Communism – implicated with empire. And finally, we hear of the "girly magazines"; which I read both as a reference to pornography (i.e. magazines of girls) and counter-intuitively as girly magazines like the "girly man" of Charles Bernstein’s poetry collection titled Girly Man from the Arnold Schwarzenegger phrase. This is media as empire, memory as complicated, expression as layered. There are many such passages in Corey’s work, passages that attest to a dense Pandora’s box of reference and relation.

One section I found particularly generative was "Iphigenia / Beuys". This section is one longer poem and starts out in a somewhat descriptive, albeit disjointed and partial, manner. It has a Dada-esque middle where words break down into sounds. It touches on the artist and activist Joseph Beuys’ work – fat, felt, animals – and uses some German cultural references (for example, the Celan reference I noted before). It recounts in an elliptical way things about Beuys’ art and life. Beuys is the object of the poetry. We could take this invocation of Beuys as a starting point. Beuys could be the bones-fat-heart of a wider, more epic poetic project. Through his explicit and implicit critique of Duchamp, Beuys offers us a way of reading Kenneth Goldsmith and conceptualism today. Although Goldsmith has recently taken a spectacular turn (Seven American Deaths and Disasters and "The Body of Michael Brown"), in his earlier work (Soliloquy, Fidget, Day, The New York Trilogy) we see an epic Duchampian engagement with the everyday. Arguably the post-conceptual landscape (Flarf, Alt-lit, Po-con) has failed to adequately think of society and interaction as an organising principle for poetry after Goldsmith. If Beuys advocated "social sculpture" what of social poetry? A social poetry, as responsive, radical and dialogic art praxis-thought-possibility, is something we might advocate from an Australian and transnational perspective. For us here, it could be a poetics (and inseparably a poetry) that considered suburbanism more fully as part of an eco-poetic frame. We glimpse this in the readerly labour of interpretation of The Barons, which takes social poetry as merely one unclosing.

Corey’s The Barons offers us a rich, dense, allusive, elusive reading and writing of epic in an American key. In thinking about it as a set of engagements with regard to eco-poetics one may begin to think through the possibilities of empire and scale. If Whitman sang of himself and projected outwards across the continent, assimilating to his vision daisies, men, prairies, in The Barons we might want to think of experiments in form held together by an engagement with the language of the archive as well as the daily language that surrounds us. In its synthesising of past epics we get an insightful take on what exists in the library of epic without ever quite collapsing into the failings of the past, failings that were moral and political as much as they were linguistic.

In Basho’s final haibun, oku no hosomichi, the poet stays at the Yamagata town of Oishida before his cruise down the Mogami River. During the evening, the locals tell him legend holds that the old haikai poetry, the traditional Japanese folk songs and stories, is scattered across the landscape of this region.

In Tim Shaner’s Picture X, it is as if the persona is seeking his own haikai. Or at least, a language, a vocabulary with which to write about the environment he finds himself in. This persona expects that he should at the very least recognise this language when he sees it. He is even a little embarrassed that he does not already have access to such a language.

 – and with

the frustration of not knowing how to write

in such a setting as this one with the nature

all around naturally out west                                   (3)

The search is described in the very first poem of the collection, "A Note on Pictures". It is a brave act to start a collection with a poem as gauche as this one. Shaner makes us feel the discomfort. It is a stumbling into foreign territory, a realisation that the persona is not only an alien here but that there is the real danger that he might take a step to the side and crush a rare orchid or an exquisite butterfly. He wants to understand this natural world, he wants to communicate it, but he does not have the beginnings of the language equipped to do this.

yet dissatisfied with

the words out West, still being used, as if

windows, as it was natural, like some kind

of default mode, and that in being employed

as such I was looking right past the words,

even the windows, for that matter, dazzled

as I was by the nature out West, that kind of

direct sense of being in it, as if I was walking

through the words, as if through them I

might touch the nature somehow                       (3)

The awkwardness is carried by an over-explaining, the use of articles in unusual places and their omissions elsewhere, the enjambment, the constant word-plays (woods among the words, scenes/screens), and a long string of ambiguities starting with the image, West. West seems to mean the wilderness here (no doubt because the Americas were colonised from the east) and this seems to contradict other nuances of meaning. The West is culturally at the forefront of environmental destruction. Other cultures, indigenous or those from the East, have the reputation at least of being more culturally attuned to the environment. But here, East is Buffalo, New York, the big city from which the persona has escaped. Buffalo is the "City of No Illusions" and this suggests that the natural world the persona is invading is not the "real world" but largely illusory.

All the same, "A Note on the Pictures", acts not only as a prelude to the first section, "Nature Walks", but to the entire collection. What follows it is framed by this introductory poem. There is an eerie sense that the book runs backwards and that this starting poem is the ultimate conclusion of Shaner’s stumblings through life, the city, his memories and finally "nature".

If Picture X is an eco-poetic work, then it is within the larger theme of what it is to be human in the 21^st Century.  Shaner quickly establishes in "Nature Walks" that:

the poems are primarily

experiential, i.e. I-centered, however much I

would have preferred reflexively this not to

have been the case                                                   (4)

This does not just mean that he is an observer, a roving camera. This is someone who is active within this alien – that is, natural – environment.

the path is slippery

I nearly slipped                                                        (7)

As such, he is uncomfortable with all the traditional views of the human within the natural world. Shaner is aware of the age-old attempt to divorce humanity from nature, particularly in the West. Humanity is a species apart from all the other species. At its most fundamental level, this comes from the simple fact of being human, we are divided against the natural in the same way that the individual is divided from everything else. All our perspectives are human-centric.

Thoreau is obviously an influence on this writing, although Shaner is quick to reject that influence. He clearly sees the paradox in a man living in an environment that excludes other people. As such, he cannot accept that nature is only safe in areas where humans are removed, the idea that the natural world is the victim in an abusive relationship. He is aware that humans have quarantined themselves from their environment for self-protection and the dangers, real or imagined, are evident to him as he wanders through the forest.

There is

the danger

of falling

trees etcetera

of poison

oak, and

rattlesnake                                                             (17)

He jokes that if he runs

       into a bear

i’ll hand it my

billfold                                                                    (23)

equating the dangers of the forest to the dangers of the city, accepting the irony that both seem to have the same predatory nature.

It is not Thoreau but Sebald and Rilke who become Shaner’s literary guides. Shaner brings to the forest not only his language, but all things human. He is wired to notice human technology in this environment and if that is not enough he brings his memories with him, not just his experiences but his opinions on them. There is more Buffalo in this wilderness than wilderness.

Where Sebald could not walk through the innocuous British landscape without being reminded of past genocides, Shaner is overwhelmed by the way in which human technology has come to dominate even the wildest parts of his planet. Even before he realises it, he is following the memory of the humans who have gone before him. The path, the track dominates his movements and when it runs out, he is truly lost, as incapable of retracing his steps as he is of plunging into the unknown. But the effect of his species on the environment is never too far away. He sees "a high white line", another track, the contrail of an aircraft in the sky. He becomes aware of the orange flags, the drill poles, the Park Boundary signs on blue posts. Apart from the odd bird song, the sounds are all human, the "crackle pop of tires".

a car shakes into action

and with its passing other

human sounds swirl

through trunks and trees                           (13)

The more he looks at the environment, the more it reflects himself.

The poems, he suggests, are written in a skinny, sky-blue notebook, as if the sky only has one blue. He even gives the dimensions of the notebook, 2” x 8 ½” and this fits in with the shape of the poems in "Nature Walks". These affect to be in note form with their text-messaging style of abbreviation.

For Shaner, language is the real issue. It is not the natural world that the persona of "Nature Walks" seeks, it is the language to describe it. He does not struggle for a grammar to commune with this environment but a vocabulary that does not distort, prejudge, pollute or destroy it.  He is aware that our languages have plundered the natural world for their metaphors, just as clearly as humans have felled its forests for timber.

the way to write the nature was

through the language of catastrophe, what Paul

Virilio calls the accident.                           (4)

I could

do so then by planting them, these damaged

words, in the nature scenes, the scenes placed

in these poems, in my skinny sky-blue

notebook, planting them, in effect, in the woods,

among the words found and heard there, as we

walked in the woods among the words   (5)

Shaner does not say it explicitly, but the development of language seems to be the point where our perceived split from the rest of "nature" began. Or as good a point as any other. In one way, language does seem natural. In others, it is the device that developed our memories and made humans the meaning-making animal, intent on interpreting and "improving" our environment. Language is not the way to talk to nature, it is the way we communicate with each other. In the end or in Shaner’s case the beginning, all language is more or less the language of catastrophe.

Ewes lying down with she-wolves

Lupa and Lamb, Susan Hawthorne’s latest pithy collection of poetry, continues her work to break down the separations between humans and nonhumans, with the lyrical savvy that marks her previous collection, Cow. In Lupa and Lamb Hawthorne’s exploration of different possibilities in human/nonhuman relations is hosted by Curatrix, the Director of the Musæum Matricum. Curatrix leads readers through a matriarchal past, brought alive by the wolfish Diana and the lamb-like Agnese, into a party of all time attended by a host of baying baa-barian re-sisters.

Hawthorne’s epigraph from Monique Wittig indicates, not unexpectedly, the deeply political intent of this work. When memory fails, Wittig exhorts, invent your way beyond slavery. The past created by Curatrix involves fragments from antiquity to the current day; a heady mix of the imaginary and the artifact. Like the tourists Hawthorne depicts, chuckling at the power of matriarchy emerging in the peripheries of male curation, readers of this collection may have "eyes already able to see the disjunction" formed through stories made out of a past that will not be silenced (98).

The tone of this text is optimistic. "One by one, change comes" (98). This hope is helped along by the fine dashes of humour that spice this serious book. In “Diana laughs”, the funny bone  of both reader and protagonist is tickled by the idea of being "reborn" and it is good that this sense of fun tingles all the way to the ending of this work, for as Diana puts it, "we laugh at our pain / we laugh to stay sane" (“Baubo”, 145). The music of tender laughter in this text helps readers and its speakers to cope with the cruelties of the past and prepare for the change that is needed.

In the first section of this collection, "Inside Lupa", readers are introduced to the playful Curatrix who navigates readers through the intellectual adventure of these poems. Readers are encouraged to range like a she-wolf and graze like an ewe, from present "mother tongues" (xii), all the way back to La Donna Lupa Paleolitica, a wolf-woman of an age that "deserves respect" (“wolf pack”, 127).  As the narrative of this work unfolds it becomes evident that feminist intent cannot be separated from an ethical requirement to release nonhumans from oppression.

Hawthorne begins her work with an intimate female perspective. After the speaker in “descent” reads with joy the "dark thighs" of her addressee’s "caves" (3), the political importance of the embodied cave is made explicit. In the following poem, “Canis” the promise is given that there will be no shouting from the "pals" that wrote in Grecian didacticism and wrote out women (4). In appreciating the grounded wisdom of the cave, Lupa and Lamb offers a theistic inversion to the religion of rhetorical progress.  Yet Hawthorne’s project is no dreamy return to the lap of the goddess. Readers must fossick with Curatrix through the "ruins of memory" (18) to find contemporary ways of living that might improve the existence of all living things. As readers turn, with Curatrix, to the titular “story stones”, abandoned under duress, opportunities for genuine progression open (18). There is no dead-end essentialism in the living insurgence of this text.

Readers are threaded into Hawthorne’s deft weaving towards party time, well aware of the dangers that come with rebellion. As the lamb draws closer to the wolf, Diana to Agnese, the wrongs done through the consumption of the other are unveiled as integral to the harm of oppression. The she-wolf, the Lupa, refuses to eat meat, Diana will not bring down a "comprehensible sentence" that involves killing "for dinner / or for poetry" (“Sulpicia’s grammar lesson”, 41). This ethical shift is followed through in the next poem when wolverine Diana takes the option to "refuse", re-fuse into a new mode of human / nonhuman relations, saying firmly, "just because I like it / doesn’t mean I should eat it" (“xyz says Diana”, 42).

It is not just the consumption of flesh that Hawthorne questions through Diana. In the next poem, cleverly titled “Diana shears Livia’s flock”, Diana takes her "sharp" shears and draws a reluctant sheep close; "it’s a trust thing / she has to relax" (46). Readers will be alert to the subtle brutality in the "has to"; already there have been stories of physical and sexual harms perpetrated against women (“Sabine women”, 24-25 and “Australia and Italy, lupa girls” 82-83). These traumas are everywhere, every day, from the past of public brutalities to a close-to-present “Australia: sheep town”, where the only "charges of rape" faced by rich boys come through hushed women-talk (86). The crime has no formal record, it is effaced, but it re-emerges, set in stone, through this poem. The need to consider abusive harm done to one human body by another politicises the have-to of shearing. This all-female space, with its suggestion of reciprocity, seems safe, yet there is an inflection of invasion that no amount of anointing, ritual washing and dressing can heal. The "trust thing" is one-way. It cannot be accepted at face value. The needs of humanity are being put before the needs of other creatures, a dissonance made evident in the jarring request for trust.

Readers navigate from this challenging space into the next poem where its "clip" made from the shearing becomes a making of wool, performed by virgin sylphs. These weavers "ease and comb / sing the wool" (48). Readers are taken aback, taken back to the earlier "virgin" wool-making that creates the "sacrosantitas", the "unviolable" (28). Diana’s shearing enters the realm of the sacred, smeared with a description of these weavings as "prayers of power". In response to this trouble, the fibres "sing themselves" in a bittersweet harmony that renders its own song for change (27).

After readers experience this meditational moment, the "precative noted later in the margins as a prayer, a supplication, an entreaty" (60), the collection shifts into its second movement, "Inside Lamb". Diana steps back, Agnese steps up and the party draws closer, seemingly contained within the hierarchy suggested in the shearing. “Livia’s party” is empress-hosted, there is a celestial host of "angels" that are gathering and a growing sense of fear within the flock as it begins to form (54). The chilling poem, “come to kill us”, repeats its title three times in the body of the verses. There is a cherishing of life in this atmosphere of sacrifice (58-59). It is vital that the re-sisters, weighted with the heavy matter of their stories, will survive. The readers, with the speakers, will not let them sink to obscurity, "we have not forgotten you" (59). Reviving the mythic past, these women refuse to be fleeced of their stories. They will weave all the killing and the hurt into an armor that fits all kinds of shapes, in a fabric that does not come with its own set of harms.

The battle is tense. Oppressive theism is gaining ascendency as Curatrix takes her readers closer to the post-antiquity of Grecian patriarchy, but there is no quelling the "barbarian/baa-baa" (55), the black sheep (60-61), the lamb that is prayed upon for its "throwback" oddities, its "cross bred" nature (60). Hawthorne’s words join those of past re-sisters, with riotous links reanimated through Curatrix, creating an irresistible invitation for readers to join les barbes, to be la barbe (60). Reading a text such as this is an irrevocable political act.

At this point readers enter the third section, "Lambda", that follows wolfish change and the hope of the lamb. This final shift is a call to action. Lambda is described as the eleventh letter of the Greek alphabet, the "cold dark matter model … of the universe" and as the "parameter lambda associated with dark energy" (161). It is the eleventh hour in this material cave lined with hardened layers of the past.

This section opens with a fable. A sheep flees into the woods after being warned of a shearing by a horse that the sheep has pitied for its slavish cartage. In the poem that follows, “Lost text: PIE: the sheep and the women”, a "head ewe" negotiates with a woman, perhaps one who is also positioned as a lead, an agent of hierarchy, to speak for others who are silent. It is agreed that shearing will take place only on the equinox and that horses will no longer drag carts. The "woman nods" as the ewe "blares" her demands. A deal is struck. The ewe tells the woman, "I don’t mind sharing" for with the shearing comes shelter, food and protection (120). The trade shows the benefits that come with co-habitation, but it does not occlude the difficulties in responding to unspoken needs and wants. Readers are left to consider the impact of domestication on humans, on the ovine and on the canine.

In this ambivalent space the imagery of “they call women monsters” expands to include a broader range of species, a long list of "harpies" that include tales of scales and tails and gills and spikes and fur and fire-filled bellies. The monster that is woman includes "Medusa Gorgon Leviathan / Dragon Griffen Grendal / Echnidna Hydra Striga / Lamia Charybdis Scylla / Amphsibaena Sphinx" (108). In this posthuman context "Livia’s party" appears all too monstrously human. The "I" that is Curatrix seems to be in the thrall of language, "gathering stories" from those who speak with human tongues and write with human hands (109, “minder of the lost texts: Angelic: Curatrix”). Influence and power is crowned with all manner of hats as the partygoers head for the "Musaeum Matricum" (111-14, “Livia’s connections”, 110-11, then “Musaeum Matricum” 112-13). However, once readers arrive with the other guests at “tarantella”, it transpires that "Livia’s outdone herself" (115). The individual is outshone by quinces, pomegranates and old fashioned goddesses; the "pageantry" of a procession of women as the party moves into full swing (115). In the delightfully entitled poem “you can teach an old god new tricks”, the women "reassert" themselves with a co-affective good will. The "animal hides" they wear are their own "naked" selves (117). The next poem makes apparent the nonhuman element in this viscous corporeality, the party includes the “many breasted”, the "rabble of banshees" who, as they enter both "howl and call". There is a "vibration in the air rarely felt these past / six thousand years" (119). All who will rise up and reassert are welcome.

This is not to say the party rolls on without the "fear" that "can kill" (116). This collecting of knowledge is tested into action by invading men who would crash and burn this joyous gathering. Their efforts are blown away by the explosive St Barbara, who dismisses them to do their own work. Freed from deathly fear by the explosive force of banding together, the women /  goddesses / monsters "growl", they hold their "wolfish head / ears alert for sound / nose scanning scent" (“Lost text: Lupine: La Donna Lupa Paleolitica”, 130), using the full range of their senses to sing the stories that stretch through time and consciousness towards a divine resistance.

As with a good party, as with a good riot, this good book ends with a call for follow-through. The “tomb of the forgotten women” has been opened and the silence is replaced with a chant that "we have millennia ahead" (134).  Like Demeter and Santa Dimitri who take on "not just Olympus / but the whole theistic edifice" (“Demeter and Santa Dimitri”, 136), the collection reaches its ecocritical conclusion by focusing on replacing the "ambrosia / and breath of immortal fire" with "the gentle art of collecting seed" (139). This shift is necessary, as the poem “future unbuilt” makes clear. Only "the unbuilt and the uncultivated / could keep this planet alive" (141). The party-goers respond, moving from destructive fear to creative resistance. They, like this collection, form a "universal declaration not just of human rights / but the rights of the planet and all / who live here" (“Eleonara d’Arborea”, 142). The work, this party of wild lore / wild law, is complete and the "bus" for change is ready for departure. Ecofeminist readers will be well readied to get on board.

John Leonard’s A Spell, A Charm is a wonderland of meditative reflections on natural habitats, juxtaposed with stark ruminations on ecological crisis. In this, his fifth collection of poetry, the world has never seemed more intimately connected. Leonard reminds us that globalisation draws us together; that the eco-system encompasses more than just our personal location.

Divided into four sections, the first – "The Hope and Trust of the Times" – and the last – "Change Beyond Change" – provide a clever call and response on questions concerning the ethical relationship of human beings to the environment. Grounded in a tradition of American Romanticism and Transcendentalism there is a vivid emphasis not only on the individual, but specifically on the rich inspiration that can be found in nature. In this way, Leonard illustrates that the closer humans are to nature, the greater the possibility for spiritual awakening. Indeed, in the second quatrain of "Becoming Myself", the narrator is in a state of becoming:

If I look out across the valley

I seem nearer to the mountain,

Am closer at the trees to hand

A thrum, woven back into the web.         (20)

The narrator’s perspective changes in relationship to the valley, mountain and trees. It is only when he/she is "woven back into the web" and part of nature again, that harmony is restored in the melodic "thrum". Similarly, in "A Dream", the "jewel" in the Avalonian island is the anonymous "bird calls":

At the furthest edge of the world,

Across a spanless ocean, is a low island

Wreathed in mist,

   And on this island,

Beyond the beach and the grass dunes,

Thick scrub jewelled with water droplets,

And from the scrub a bird calls

Piercingly, itself unseen.                            (31)

Indeed, there are ecstatic, almost sublime moments where Leonard as observer is in awe of nature’s non-artificiality. In "Black-Cockatoos in Autumn" there is "a thrill in the stomach" when the black cockatoos call and the word "piercing" is repeated throughout the book to describe the purest of sensations.

Most importantly, nature’s ability to invoke spiritual values is prevalent most obviously in these first and final sections of the book. Indeed, Leonard’s appeal to the seasons in the first section is all encompassing. Seasons, specifically spring and autumn, are referenced in more than seven poems and suggest transitory and cyclical moments in the seasonal year. The second stanza of "Moments" is reminiscent of Japanese haiku in its reverence for the changing of the seasons:

Think of moments, the seasons’ round,

The staggering holiness of every

Day’s happenings, their grace

And aptness; golden, sunlit wings –

Moments’ pure certainty,

Aching wholeness.                   (4)

In this way, days and seasons are holy and yet, in a darkly Romantic turn, the passing of time – which encompasses the dying of the day and the changing of season – signals a lost opportunity if it isn’t appreciated. Furthermore, the uncanny in "There is Always Another Spider" is reminiscent of Frost’s "dimpled spider" in his sonnet, "Design". In Leonard’s poem, humanity is similarly unprotected from the spider’s bite and renewal is emphasised in the repetition of "It’s the smaller ones that are always new":

You can reach the end of the larger ones:

Huntsmen, white-tipped, Red-backed

(One bit me once, but not hard),

And I saw a Funnelweb, walking

Through the garage on a rainy night …

 

It’s the smaller ones that are always new.    (23)

The familiarity in the narrator’s "spider watching" is undercut by the defamiliarising newness of "the smaller ones". This theme of strangeness and familiarity is perhaps a call to see nature through new eyes; a warning not to take the small thing for granted. Indeed, in "Finding a Place" the strange is welcome: "facts—the smell of a breeze—/Are no less strange, but now/Welcome, in this place of all" (15).

The dark underbelly of abuse in the moral and ethical relationship of human beings to the environment is emphasised in the final section of the book and stunningly prefigured in the first section’s "Nature":

And think of yourself: lame movements,

Dark thoughts and moods, of yours

And of the time, of the time’s desires,

Of the tumour—cells which refuse

To change, to die and be renewed—

You and yours are nature too.                 (12)

In this stanza, the reader is reminded that humanity is a part of nature: "For nature, read where you are".

The second section – "Satires and Grotesques" – provides an important opportunity to discuss those things that lack "groundedness" and the third section "Sadness is no longer Sad" – reinstates this balance with an appeal to the arts; however, they read almost as a second book enclosed within the first. There is something Kunderan about the lightness and weight of these two sections but they are overshadowed by the wonder of nature and nightmare concerning the depletion of the world’s natural sources, predominant in the first and final sections of the book.

Indeed, in the fourth and final section, "Change Beyond Change", death is foregrounded. There is a bleaker outlook that only offers the possibility of change, if, indeed, it isn’t too late. In this way, the long sequence "Forgetting and Remembering" provides a spot of hope:

Breath quiet,

Time stills

To become one,

On the ironbark slopes

 

If we have held

Close the time

And the growth

And changed with change

We will not be lost.                                     (85)

The suggestion in this poem is that if we refuse to change and continue in our ways, there is nothing but death for both nature and humanity. This is foregrounded in the final and most devastating of Leonard’s poems, "The End of Renewal":

… this will end for us,

Renewal will no longer be ours

As before, we no longer witnesses.

 

The story that has been written

Will close, with no-one to know

Pages that cry their grief.                          (90)

It is a stirring conclusion to the book and one that ends with an impending crisis that may be only be averted with change.

There is an incredibly interesting emphasis on language, perception and translation in this book. In "Languages", "there’s the weather’s language, / And that of the seasons, which / I know imperfectly" and "my own language, most irksome … " (10-11). Leonard would benefit from considering this in the form of his poems. It is disappointing that each line of every poem begins with a capital letter and there is no appeal to a different kind of language or poetical form to speak about these ecological crises. Indeed, there is little difference in the poetical form of any of the sections. In addition to this, the book would be further enriched with a greater appeal to ecology. In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton sets out a seeming paradox: "to have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish the idea of nature once and for all". Leonard would benefit from scaling back the appeal to nature to focus on ecological crisis.

A Spell, A Charm comprises a whirlwind of poems concerned with environmental ethics and the importance of time. The initial focus on seasonal moments and piercing bird calls is expertly juxtaposed with warnings about global warming and what Leonard, himself, has identifies as "global ecological overreach". The poems in this book remind us what it really means to live in the world: "time makes no mistakes".

Todd Turner’s debut collection deals mostly with the every-day: weeding, burning off garden waste, lying in the yard watching beetles, driving through the city, growing a bonsai wattle in a pot. The book is arranged in a loose chronology, with the earlier poems about rural childhood or family history, and the later ones set in adulthood in an urban environment – Sydney in at least some of them. The hinge between the two halves is Homecoming, a harrowing poem about the death of a brother.

Many of the poems in Woodsmoke (e.g. "Shelling Peas", which is excerpted on the back cover) consist of finely-crafted description set forth with little comment. The tone is sober, matter-of-fact, precise; and there is a fastidious avoidance of overstatement and verbal ostentation. They tend to regular stanzas, with lines of roughly equal length (there may be a more formal metrics at play):

Whenever my mother took hold of the spade

and handed me the cardboard box, I knew

we’d be doing the weeds. She’d dig, while

I stood there beside her as she threw them in.

("The Weeds" 5)

A few poems (e.g. "Heading West to Koorawatha", "September on Gasworks Bridge", "Leaving My Place on the River") offer the same basic aesthetic, but with irregular stanzas and line-lengths, and are reminiscent of poets such as Robert Bly and James Wright. The final section of "Heading West to Koorawatha" reads:

It is almost dark, and the last of the light

falls onto the canola fields, and onto the hillsides

full of Paterson’s curse.

 

I pull over and watch the sun sink

into a stretch of grass.

("Heading West to Koorawatha" 2)

Nature poets since Wordsworth have been afflicted by the urge to moralise, to view the natural world as a teacher of lessons which it is the poet’s job to interpret. Turner’s collection is, on the whole, markedly free of this tendency. In fact, I found poems such as "The Weeds", "Lot" and "After Chores" a little puzzling: the descriptions are finely wrought, but the emotional significance of the activities described is unclear. Perhaps the determination not to over-state, not to over-write, can go too far.

My favourite poems in the book ("Woodsmoke", "A Penance", "Nocturne", "Fieldwork") are those that break free of the propensity to (stylistic and/or emotional) sobriety. In the title poem, the language is unusually extravagant: woodsmoke

sends up its flag of stored aeons

and multifarious resins in a surly

blue charred blaze.

The poet reveals that he thinks of it

                                                as what

passes for benediction; the tenured

door through which seasons pass,

a time-tempered passage

This poem ends:

            Somewhere lost among the welcome

arms of the woodland trees I see it,

 

adrift in a smock of ribbons, and set

amid the downy blueprint of allegory,

charted, in the aftermath of flame.

("Woodsmoke" 3)

In Naming the Ruins, Dinah Roma’s poetry appears to intone as if emerging from a deep well of consciousness, as a kind of universal bell ringing out and bearing witness to emotion, emotion which is paradoxically fleeting in nature but timeless in effect. The voice emerges both from within and without of the poet, and it is this dichotomy which gives the sense of a voice for and from all time. Love, death, disaster are subjects for all time, but they delicately rest on their consequence, which is a sense of tender, imminent pain. Loss hovers between its particularity and the universal applicability of the original impetus. In the poised and detailed scoring of emotion as narrative, the poetry of Rilke can be seen as a possible connecting thread, as a counterpoint.

The collection is divided into four sections. In the first, the relatively short “The Wayside of Love”, the reader is introduced to the theme of love’s loss, both personal and spiritual. In “The Famine”, the employment of the trope of the journey propels the emotion as narrative strategy identified above. The skillful use of I and they in the poem has the expansive effect of including the subjectivity of the experience with an empathetic objectification into the world:

If I had gone deep

into the winter of their hope

 

where they walked past

the body’s will, his step

 

warming each track for her,

the trees arching over

 

the burden of their days.                     (14)

The second section, “Mercies of Camouflage”, begins with a journey over water. In “Ferry Crossing”, water is not so much employed as aesthetic affect, but as an almost subterranean and unnavigable compulsion, expressing water as a kind of elemental force taking the body on a passage over its surface. It is as if to know nature is to know oneself, in the experience/sensation of its singular quality:

Whatever rest comes to me now

Is simply to know water.

 

The way it holds the earth

Calm in its surface, its slow time

 

Girding islands into archipelagos,

Drifting as the heart does

 

In search of its own depth.

Dark swells from underneath

 

As tides surge for exodus, when arteries

Of rivers part to reveal our own.                     (21)

A personal favourite in this section is “The Naked Imperative”, in which Roma’s evocative skills are at their most breathtaking. Here, the personification of dawn, of dawn as process, reveals itself through painterly effects:

How must time honor her?

The spectrum of tint,

the daub of hues layering

her skin many times over

to get to its life – ivory and umber,

the bond of sun and shade fleshing her,

the rinse of black toning

into canvas eye and soul.                    (26)

In this evocation of dawn’s fleeting nature, we have a sense of thought attached, of dwelling with touch, or sensation.

The poems in “Mercies of Camouflage” are in effect a probing of mercilessness, but scored within what beauty can bring to the image. In “Rehearsing the Sacraments”, Roma makes much of the beauty of the bride’s emblematic fragility:

I’ve seen her this way, lovely

out in the sun. Yet why do I shudder

over what can save her

past this moment?                   (28)

and in “Leaf, As Love Poem” poetry is written as breath, with love and leaf falling together, a process born out of the earth:

past what it is able to bear of sap

the intricacies of root and blossom

as it breathes into the world

each time it quivers at the aim of falling.                    (32)

In Naming the Ruins, Dinah Roma displays the sensibility of a poet celebrating the rich voice of the fragmentary experience and its connection to nature’s Heraclitean flow. The fragmentary is taken up, cared for, graced with language and given its proper weight. In Section 3, “Of Mortal Grasp”, this technique encompasses the fragmentary as cosmic tragedy as in “The First Four”, an elegy for the victims of Haiyan:

… The sun will shine on them as

everything else begins to move. Away from the

chaos, detritus. Back to life. Yet they shall remain,

even if buried, tallied. Unto themselves, they

remain. In gestures that forever teach us we are

both of the dead and dying.               (40)

The ambiguities of mortality, their expression into something made, can be seen in a poem dedicated to the blind weavers of Samar, “Paraglara”. The poet connects the weavers’ thread to the image of water and light, and by extension to her own verse:

What their fingers intimate

I feign in the meters of these lines,

the chronicles of the island

I was torn away from –

my root and heritage,

my mother’s past and escape,

of her elders’ dream and despair –

that its unforgiving blue seas

mirror past the empty skies,

and which I capture by this light

freer as it moves through air

and water, bathing in colors

the faces of my world.                        (46/7)

In the final section of the collection, “The Gift Beyond”, the poetry becomes a pilgrimage to the site of art, where the fragmentary, the emotion, the being of the world is expressed (and given form) in art, whether it be through the elements of stone, or of sand. Within (and in fact defining this pilgrimage) is a celebration of love expressed in the exquisite “Reminiscing Rumi”:

Come to me. Come to me mystical.

Reveal me beyond my own phraseology.

Heed the burning bushes in my words.                      (68)

“Into the Plains of Bagan” meditates upon the appearance of form and its dissolution, with “Sandpainting the Dewi” being a fine example:

I asked of his techniques,

those intricate sinews

in which the deity’s glory is hailed

firm by sand …                        (73)

“At 3 a.m.” recalls “The Naked Imperative” in that the time of day renders a shadowy aporia between seen and unseen:

To arrive at this hour forsakes the wandering self.

Time to mistrust maps, and leave earth to its dark

sprawl. Its colors will not guide. Blind to the barren

and lush. Its symbols will not trace out terrains.                    (72)

While expressing the shadowy world of pre-dawn, the poem also suggests a slowly forming crystallization of the image and its imminence. But it is the final verse in the collection seen in “Tak Bat" that encapsulates the world of the book, where a daily activity is captured, restored to eternity, rather like an ancient Greek vase, as the fragmentary of Any Time:

And it used to be that where they saw the sky

lit to half, there they stood and found no hurry

for the next journey or end, still into the morning chill

they walk barefoot, their begging basket filling

with what dwells in the empty air –               (77)

It is indeed this measured tone, this careful phrasing of the valuable that has found the poet to be located and revealed in a realm “beyond [her] own phraseology”.

“May Gaia, our Great Mother, speak through me ... may I be a channel, a conduit for Nature's words!” calls Helen Moore at the beginning of her blog.  Ecozoa, her second poetry collection, speaks to this call.

The book’s very title directs us to a variety of meaning. It links to the Ecozoic era named by Thomas Berry, an age of consciousness expanded beyond the human-only focus we suffer under today. It links to the Four Zoas of visionary William Blake and the desperate "Howl" of Allen Ginsberg. It links to a combination of "eco" and "zoa" (animals), perhaps the next step in our evolution from the original protozoa. Or is Ecozoa the brave new world of our vision?

The contents are intense and passionate.  Moore has published a manifesto giving her views on ecopoetry, which you can read by scrolling down the first page of her blog to the International Times link. I think this collection needs to be read in this context. In particular, we need to note her looking at ecopoetry under four categories, although these are not labelled as the same categories used this book.

In the poetry, she names her sections after Blake’s zoas – Tharmas, Urizen, Urthona, and Luvah; in her prose manifesto, the categories are witness, resistance, reconnection, and vision. Within the poetry, the boundaries shift and merge, and immutable labels simply aren’t possible. Her categories might be expressed as a progression, perhaps to a higher consciousness, but they might also be seen as coexistent and conterminous, but forever keeping an eye on their boundaries.

Moore gives us poems of witness. We have "apples are not the only gadgets", beginning:

jaguar is not a big cat of the Panthera genus, the threatened

feline of the Americas, but a high-performance engine,

exhaust notes a snarl, an iconic car, a vision for our future    (6)

"A History of the British Empire in a Single Object" is a vivid three-page riff on a collapsible Victorian rocking chair, and this is shortly followed by a "Cabinet of Curiosities" containing:

Exhibit A

Moral compass, 21^st century, made in Taiwan …

 

Exhibit B

High horse, old grey nag, not what she used to be …

 

Exhibit C

Pearl of wisdom, 4mm diameter, opaque …    (24)

 There is resistance, indirect and direct, and we are physically present at one protest:

 It’s mud from our boots with which

we smear the cubicles inside the van

where we’re detained like grubs

within the pantry cells of larger prey  (9)

We also see the possibility of  reconnection:

 Plantain pushing through tarmac

Self-heal         insurgent mauve in lawns

she being powerful and mysterious says

with Maria with Anne we find the ancient tracks   (46)

Like Blake and like Ginsberg, Moore is a poet of vision. Her passion is already in the first poem of the book:

… In whatever mortal span

that remains, help me to navigate

 

this crisis in our evolution, to stay

with what others have begun

 

millions of cells rising

in and for our life-source, Earth

 

willing Ecozoa’s birth.    (4)

The final section, Luvah, really ought to have its own discussion to examine how it looks forward from the perspective of the feminine. Briefly, it addresses personas such as the soul midwife, Aphrodite, Gaia, Noah’s girl, and much of its imagery centres on the female body. There is a vision, and it is a vision of light, not of despair. Moore plays with found graffiti, naming her poem "Love is Metaphysical Gravity" and starting:

Down the side of the hairdresser’s, this e-generation

graffito – spontaneous scrawl of exuberance,

 

new consciousness indigo child/late

love-child of baby boomers, a rebel angel,

 

free thinker who’s done drugs to peel

layers of conditioning from his/her mind;

 

also a free lover in the sense of life’s erotic

potential, the faith in love as the highest force

 

for good – not just (or even) God,

but the divine in all of us; …   (66)

The blurb quotes John Kinsella’s description of this collection as “a milestone in the journey of ecopoetics” – and I very much agree.

Before Bone and Viscera, the third of Robbie Coburn’s publications is, like its predecessors, an unsettling read. This slim but intense volume is comprised of a "Prologue" plus ten poems, and explores the dual territory—previously traversed in his chapbook Human Batteries (Picaro Press, 2012), and first full-length collection Rain Season (Picaro Press, 2013)—of the tortured rural landscape of Victoria, and the similarly tortured mental and bodily landscape of the poet.

The title of the chapbook introduces decomposition and regeneration as thematic concerns of the collection, begging the question—what is it that comes Before Bone and Viscera? The answer (given in the epigraph) is “decay”, a decay which “becomes being”. The poems begin, then, at the end, with images of physical and environmental disintegration, such as these, from "Prologue":

the dry end of the trees unearth

here, in a brittle manifestation

 

of husk and bone

endless ruin of dirt

 

hand stone and the distortion inside lingers,

the backbone of consciousness

 

bends into the distance

vagrant colourless grasses

 

and the stench of compost

motion lays beyond the body

 

the roots are plumed, open and featherless

drying out the blood of any water.

 

("Prologue" 1-12)

It is unclear if Coburn speaks here of the body or the land (indeed he speaks of both), and this superimposition of the human subject onto the environment is a distinctive and striking quality of Coburn’s poetry in general, and of Before Bone and Viscera in particular. This almost metaphysical intertwining of the internal and external landscapes further deepens throughout the poem—and the collection—as the human subject merges with his environment:

the broad ground against the dead

weight of the body

 

widening pulses of light radiating beneath

the other veins, absolving a bromine fog

 

interpreting this new proximity, sundried vertebrae

rust divides on rotting skin, a carcass without teeth,

 

hair, carrion

a limitless game littered with debris.

 

("Prologue" 15-22)

This decomposition of a body which is both tree and flesh arises alongside “the wish to have never lived” and serves to drive “the heart out into the fire. so it begins.” The concept of a new self arising from the debris of the old is then explored in the disturbing second poem, "Rebirth", where the speaker imagines skinning himself before reassembling the “old body” into a new skin which fits “better and wore itself in around / my glad eyes and abraded insides.” Here, the spectre of self-harm in the form of cutting begins to emerge: it’s a theme which runs discomfortingly just under the surface of much of Coburn’s poetry, although in this collection it is presented not merely as a means towards a (potentially fatal) end, but, once again, as a kind of rebirth: “This was the beginning, the new became / normal before darkness could be heightened, / loosened into the clear shot of morning” ("Rebirth" 23-25).

Similarly, in "Death Games", the self-harm which has been implied in previous poems is now dealt with directly:

I drive the blade into the plumed vein of my left wrist:

through the edge of a balance ache I emerge

prodding at the trail of blood,

painting with my index finger.

("Death Games" 1-4)

It’s a confronting image, although not necessarily for the speaker, who observes that in the rest of his life, “I won’t feel anything as clear as this red stream”. Ultimately, however, cutting is presented as a dangerous choice: at this emotional low-point the speaker discovers that “poetry has become meaningless” and that he is “ready to commit to losing this long game”. Yet even here death and (self)destruction precede renewal. Just as the natural landscape may be wounded but still harbour potential for regeneration, so too does the body and mind: the “suicidal impulses” which “precede / the day, hidden in an unseen act, / escaping consequence”, morph as the “disturbance” of daylight’s “eye” is cast upon them, culminating in an image of the speaker:

… walking across the charred

plank again

quickly into the inferno,

cheating death and towards life.

("Death Games" 21-24)

Fire, which has long been used as a tool for both destruction and regeneration in the Australian bush, is utilised here as a metaphor to express the phoenix-like rising of the speaker from repeated episodes of self-harm. The image of “walking … into the inferno” and emerging renewed on the other side is an affirmation of both the human and natural world’s ability to withstand and transform hardship—and is particularly pertinent when considering the horrific 2009 Black Saturday bushfires which swept through rural areas of Victoria, close to where Coburn writes and lives.

However, the chapbook is by no means solely concerned with the poet’s own internal and external landscapes, or experiences. In "She is Starving", Coburn explores a different kind of bodily abuse and slow suicide:

face hollowed, balanced on weak pipe-cleaner limbs,

her skeleton breaks then aims to crumble

inside the dark’s window. the floorboards snap her shrunken

legs. I carry the decaying white bones breathing in the unfurling

winds to the tomb her lifeless hands managed to prepare as

she starved, suiciding for years.

("She is Starving" 17-22)

The interior habitats of Coburn’s poems—the houses and sheds—are, like the one in this poem, often haunted places: they shelter and harbour private and familial secrets and sufferings. The lines of this, and many of the poems in the collection, are long and lyric, and the poet eschews capitalisation: his verse, rather than announcing its arrival, glides like a ghost into the reader’s mind, and lingers there: “Sleep now inside your skin of silent ghosts. / your voice will still trace my throat, your absence will starve me / like a famine of memory” ("She is Starving" 23-25).

As in this example (“your voice will still trace my throat”), Coburn’s poems often employ synaesthetic imagery, and his work in this regard is reminiscent of the French Symbolists. In Before Bone and Viscera, Coburn’s use of symbolism is particularly powerful in poems which deal with family and relationships. In these poems, romantic or familial separation is conveyed through images of geographical distance and obstruction: the landscape is a map of internal memory and time, not simply of place. In "Loneliness":

at this distance memory exists only in my head,

miles and years from you

as I foot the clustered pathway back where

all is unchanged and everything vanishes

but the jagged crown of rock parting the heightening mist.

("Loneliness" 19-23)

Here the vast, unforgiving spaces of rural Australia function as symbols for the emotional and temporal distance Coburn wishes to express. Similarly, In "Sororen" (Latin for sister), we find the speaker walking in search of his long-lost half-sister, a figure who haunts several of the poems in the collection:

I woke from months of searching

at a distance that is unimportant.

my still dreaming mind walked a flat

and uninhabited stretch of road

past the hollowed gum trees lining her

property…

("Sororen" 1-6)

However, the distances which thwart the speaker’s desire for reconciliation are closed somewhat in "The Invisible Sister", a poem where he and his sister “grow aware of each other”, and bridges, rather than “burning”, are now “lengthened”—the revelation dawning that it is possible (impossible not to?) “love blood from   such distance”.

This fractured family history is further explored in the poignant poem "Father, Daughter", where, once again, synaesthetic imagery blurs the division between the wounded inner world and the natural landscape:

Father, listen to the years

ploughing the grass at your feet encircling

creases in your skin melded by long winds,

a gathering of drought and memory that knots

in the horizon, a kink in the land you worked.

("Father, Daughter" 1-5)

In this hypnagogic poem, “the gallery” of the father’s “raw mind / shapes the sinking backyard” and “the merciless past floods through” his “interrupted veins”, which harbour the “unnamed wound” of a “nameless half-sister”. For the sister, the father is similarly abstracted, existing as “… a stranger / whose skeleton passes through memory”. As they did for Rimbaud and Baudelaire, objects in Coburn’s outer world function as recurring and deeply personal symbols to express the poet’s mental preoccupations and emotional states. A potent, almost totemic and sometimes paradoxical system of language emerges to describe internal states in relation to the body and the land: blood and sap are memory; bone, roots and trees are family; the skeleton is foundation as well as closeted experience; the skin is both potential union and separation; fire is birth and death; breath is life, and so on. These images are used so often and so reverently that they extend beyond metaphor and fall into the realm of metonymy, simultaneously deepening the hidden meanings of the poems and, in the case of "Father, Daughter", lifting them into the realm of the archetypal:

the longing belongs in the foregathered illusions,

shadows I will watch sweep back into your suspended skin

the distressed close up of a father’s lips stitched into his

daughter’s hair, which the eyes have sacrificed in order

to live. we all dance for less—

it’s nothing you hadn’t foreseen.

("Father, Daughter" 40-45)

Just as the poems in this short collection begin at the end —with “decay”—now the final poem of the collection, "The Blood is only Memory", ends at the beginning—with “breath”. While the speaker’s “… pain / does not fade”, he finds that “this blood / is only memory” when set “against the warm pressure of breath”. In the language of symbols, breath is life, and it is both comforting and uplifting that a poetry collection so concerned with death and suffering should end on this more hopeful note. Pain is still present—of course it is—but something stronger than it exists, and just as our natural environment has the capacity to endure and regenerate after trauma, so, Coburn affirms in these poems, do we.

“Stuck on Repeat”

There is a joke that goes something like the following: the other day I was out birdwatching and saw a Falcon in a tree. Needless to say it was a surprising to see a Ford up that high. It was stuck but not in traffic. We could debate its merits as a joke, especially without the visual form, but from it we see a view of nature as impure, as implicated with the detritus of humanity, as toxic in other words. We could also ask what is the context – is it the car that enters the natural world or is it the natural world that enters the car? To draw such a distinction between nature and its not, would be artificial even if useful. Perhaps we could instead think of their relationship as “dialogic” if we wanted employ a term from Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bahktin.

In introducing this joke I want to set up a way of understanding the poetries of Tim Wright and Michael Aiken. In their two most recent works The night’s live changes (Wright) and A Vicious Example (Aiken) we see, respectively, the poet enter into nature (subjective) and nature enter into the life of the poet (objective). But it is not Nature in either, rather the world of our times. If in The night’s live changes we read of a poet channelling experience in such a way that is evocative, of focusing on the world through a diaristic “I”, A Vicious Example shows us images of a post-Edenic landscape, plastic gems carved from the urban soil of everyday Sydney without an “I” entering into it to such a degree. These heuristics may only be imperatives and organising principles for these two poets, but arguably they can be extrapolated, if not to the (misguided) Nietzchean Apollonian / Dionysian degree, then at least as an understanding of the wider field of eco-poetics where we can think of subjectivity and objectivity on a spectrum.

We see a more subjective approach in Wright’s poetry when compared to Aiken. This is the world as the poet views it. The touchstones are trains, cars, grass and drinking, all related in a way that foregrounds the “I”. At various points Gaza and planes are assimilated to the reverie of the poet so Wright’s work is not without reference to the world around him, including the political. These political references though are not necessarily disruptive. They are held together by an “I” that if not Whitmanian in strength (because of a lack of formal repetition) has perspicacity and judgement. It is a “voice” that sings not so much of itself as a whole continent, as a largesse metaphysical and absorptive, projective and declamatory, as one that is eminently relatable and manageable. It is the diary of a life that is familiar if not entirely comforting.

Take for instance the use of “Nauru” and “Omid Sorousheh / on hunger strike” in the poem “November” where the defamiliarising potency is taken into a more cohesive whole. The labour of the negative that this reference could perform is integrated almost seamlessly into the suburban vision as we are told explicitly: “His name I can’t help hearing as ‘omit’” (27). The reader is not expected to make this aural connection for themself and we are returned to the subject directly, the speaking I, which if not a subject of feeling is one of thinking. We are watching Wright, or his alter ego “the poet”, listen to the hunger striker rather than watching the hunger striker themself.

We should not though think of this excerpt metonymically – it does not stand in for the whole of The night’s live changes. There is after all, the airiness of “sky currently gold’; the compression of “Music Poem”; the visual space of the two page “6UVSFM”; and the meanderingly propulsive 536 line “November” from where the excerpt came. We are brought into the life of the poet not so much by him telling us what he is feeling, but through a showing of things around him, things of everyday life that are seen by his eyes as we read his “I”.

By comparison A Vicious Example, which focuses on Sydney, seeks to leave the world as it is. Even as it protests it does not relocate the poet as central, does not reclaim the I as the way to change the world. The “I” occurs less frequently, save for the very short third and fourth sections. Whereas Wright’s voice is stripped back, if not quite bare, Aiken luxuriates, sometimes, in rich description, which if not lyrical is detailed and felt (see “Beach, with children”, “Sea hare” and “Domestic bucolic” for three examples). Compared to the plainness of Wright, Aiken’s word play is noticeable. This is demonstrated in “The Macarthur line”, particularly the second stanza that reads, in part, “thrust from marsh mud and simmering drums / rusting against cars crushed amongst zelemite / bedrooms, resting beneath tons of ochre”. One immediately notes: the alliteration; the internal rhyme; the heavy, recurring “u” sound; the $64 word (zelemite: a fuse board containing asbestos); and the use of “ochre”, which recalls the Uluru directed epigraph of the whole book (“Theft by discovery (Uluru)”).

Overall the city in A Vicious Example is not the antithesis of the country, but works together with it to create a vision of the contemporary world. This contemporary world is one that is decidedly unromantic, which is not to say modernist or anti-romantic. There are roots to be found not only in experience, but also in other poets from my “reading list” including William Carlos Williams as well as Kenneth Slessor. Sydney as it comes to us though is a place where nature interacts not as a pure, unmediated thing, but as part and parcel of a post-human experience. This is seen perhaps most explicitly in “The Canal” – it is a place of “soiled water”, “styrofoam cups”, “oil slicks”, “sewage spills” that “fills”, “refills” and “unfills” as “street sweepers” and “cuckoos” go about their daily business. Or “Augury” where

A tern

ribs and skin

squalls out lead

as pliers are applied

to the hook.                         (72)

There are however visions of the natural world that seem uninterrupted by human hands such as “Always start with water”, which states:

A creek

quartz moss

living blue crayfish

and drifting clods of fur.   (73)

“Nature” clings to us then despite what we are throwing at it be that acid and oil, phosphates and heavy metals.

We live in a time where foraging has become increasingly popular in the city, not only in locavore food movements at bourgeois bohemian restaurants but here too in poetic work. It is not found material necessarily, though there is that in Aiken’s “Sydney: 1934 1392k1 – 1811 168k2’. In other words there is not a strict application of uncreative writing tenets, but it is finding material and rendering it into a creative piece. Aiken reminded me of Melbourne restaurant Attica’s potatoes, whereby the potato is cooked in soil found close to the restaurant, literally dug from plots that dot the city, and flavoured afterward with garlic and native herbs. It is literally baked into the soil of the city with reference to its Indigenous taste. There is something very local about the vision but also transcendent, worldly and appropriate for our time.

There are though commonalities between The night’s live changes and A Vicious Example. Both have skipping CDs (21 in Aiken, 27 in wright) which could serve as a metaphor - we are stuck at some point then, in the narrative, in the flow, but this is not about denial, of climate change or otherwise. Uncritical and un-self-aware modernism, pastoralism, nature poetry is what is being jammed in its easy teleological drive by these two works (see for instance the wry riff on Slessor and Patrick White in Wright’s “if you’ve read this far”). There is also a long poem in each work – “November” in Wright and “Sydney: 1934 1392k1 – 1811 168k2” in Aiken – that is in both cases central to the poetic project. Aiken also has a 209 line “Sixty Nine Poems”, mainly being micro portraits, or narratives or both, of: cat, fox, moon, lantana, fish, shed, bird, art, street, rats, moon, trees, bird, rain, frogs, roots, garden, ant, car, jellyfish, ibis, footpath, storm, rain, fish, fox, weather, trees, woodchips, sun, puddle, orchard, birds, ibis, tree, trucks, leaf litter, mice, summer, frog, breeze, lilies, frog, earwig, log, ibis, iron birds, rain, sun, cuckoo, birds, art, nature, sparrows, bird, ibis, palm fronds, frog, rat, ibis, sunlight, crab, myself, my slippers.

Taken together Wright’s and Aiken’s work could be said to represent distinct though overlapping and dialogic parts of the ecopoetic register as a whole. With Wright we engage with Western Australia and Melbourne and with Aiken we see Sydney as it currently stands. Both these poets are poets of place, but they offer us distinctive voices, approaches, influences and provide different reading experiences that will challenge and enable us as poets and critics.

Kent MacCarter defies most expectations typically placed on the poet in regard to construction and form. His poems have a freedom of experimentation while his use of language is adventurous and exciting. It’s very hard to define MacCarter’s work or categorise it in any particular genre. In fact, it would be madness to even attempt to do so, as his work scoffs at convention and moves confidently into its own invented genre.

His third collection of poems, Sputnik’s Cousin, is his most realised work yet; chaotic, original, weird and brilliant. It’s important to note that, in their originality and linguistic experimentation, these poems don’t have easily-understood narrative structures or easily identifiable sentimentalities, but that isn’t their purpose. MacCarter takes the everyday and rewrites it is his own voice and commands language to operate in whatever way he pleases.

Much of the poetry reads like a surreal journal of observations, and the apocalyptic undertones of our present society are scrutinized with humour and wit. There is a purposeful blurring within the lines, where images appear in an almost stream-of consciousness fashion:

Daughters knelt in front of taut Chernobyl, a

degustation on the cherry pill which Ms.

Pac-Man ate. Hot, pink bows her coders chose –

raw porterhouse adept in salmonella

(“XX. DINING OUT WITH MS. PACMAN”)

His voice feels extremely modern and speaks to the technology-conscious generation in its language and stylistic choices, while still retaining acute accessibility and appeal for long-time poetry readers.

In “Kissing Frank O’Hara [not on the mouth remix]”, McCarter draws his influences from dozens of obscure places, even referencing the likes of Tom Baker and Neil Gaiman. One of the finest poems in the collection, this unique take on the lyric is perfectly assured and controlled:

I’m ready

for your injection-mould stamping. Get me…

let my polymers cook in your image

(‘“KISSING FRANK O'HARA [NOT ON THE MOUTH REMIX]”)

The most impressive aspect of the work is its readability despite the characteristics one would assume would make this impossible. These poems are bold ventures in language, an exercise in form and linguistics before all else. If poetry is intended to document and analyse the human condition, this collection of “poetry and non-fiction” does so with a uniqueness most writers would fail to outdo.

It’s too much skin for Grandpa Ed. Our lunch undressed

miscast, a maitre d’s escort. The menu steep

[...]

 

Off a gender, sex is parked as product hunger

reverses humans into with trig’s precision

gears.

(“II. TOO MUCH SKIN FOR GRANDPA ED”)

A voice for a new generation of poetry readers and critics, Kent MacCarter reinvents the wheel and drives it in a direction where many fear to tread, and does so with undeniable skill and authority.

Stephen Oliver's book-length historical poem Intercolonial is a journey through cultural identity and landscape, drawing its title from the “trade, shipping and connections between the colonies of Australia and New Zealand”. Oliver's roots lie in both countries, and this serves as a personal expedition through the sea lying between the two nations. Begun in Australia in the mid-90’s and completed in New Zealand, the work, Oliver states, might be considered a transtasman creation, and his list of references allude to the considerable breadth of the project.

The ground covered is vast, drawing on extensive historical research, from Maori tradition to convicts hanged in Van Diemen’s land; this is a work that is close both to the poet and the cultural history of the two nations. The figure of the poet’s great-grandfather, Thomas McCormack, to whom the poem is dedicated, is present throughout the work, and also spent time in both the Australian and New Zealand colonies in the 20th century.

Beginning in Wellington, the journey is accompanied by wonderful evocations of the land; the streets, the landscape and the people:

Tusked cauliflowers and herded carrots, onions in piles,

tumbled pumpkins, potato scree, boxed and stalled in between

scales that swung and creaked from the cream cabin roof

of the Indian greengrocer’s Bedford truck.

Oliver’s imagery is consistently effective in placing the reader within a variety of landscapes, and the precision of the lines makes Oliver’s objective brilliantly achieved.

His exploration of convicts during early colonisation is approached with amazing depth and compassion, and history is shown to reveal a human cruelty often ignored in modern writing. In one passage, Oliver writes of an English man named Solomon, who “worked the Oxford canal boats until sentenced / to fourteen years transportation for forging base coin / setting sail / with 252 male prisoners on the Sarah”, revealing the common nature of such cases during this time. Solomon goes on to be appointed Constable in the colony before becoming a hangman and executing Timothy Walker, “the last ex-convict to be hanged”.

Oliver’s historical documentation, combined with an impressive imagination, is unique, but his narrative skill as a poet is astounding and this is the most striking feature of the work.

In his collection of short stories, Tide, and in his poetic rollercoaster through The Vision of Error, John Kinsella, the activist-vegan-anarchist-pacifist, has written what he might describe as “poison pastoral” but he reminds us that: “as steeped in death and destruction as [his pastorals] might be, they are actually affirming as much as they are condemning … Pastoral in Australia is about confrontation, recognition, conversation, and, one would hope, reconciliation” (Kinsella 2008: 132–33).

Kinsella is certainly combative: in his Vision he writes (perhaps with some self-deprecating irony) that he lives amidst “collaborating wankers”; given “up to juxtapositions”; that he doesn’t “mind being hated”; and that he intends to “lay [himself] down before the bulldozers … pouring abuse from [his] lips”. He is a poet (one of Australia’s most prolific) but not one, he writes in The Vision of Error, that is “hoodwinked by the lyric … nor by epics (or) damned elegies” (10); he does not write “for entertainment” (62). So what is Kinsella’s passion for poetry and short story? In The Vision he recalls a conversation between father and son where the father is asked “Dad, write a poem / to make them stop, to stop / them tearing down the tree”. But, we are told, the son “has more faith in poetry//and people than I have”. So is Kinsella’s Sextet of Activist Poems and collection of short stories, Tide, a poetics of zealous – though impotent – protest; an energetic portrayal of the interrelated public and private abuses of power evidenced in environmental degradation, state sanctioned capital punishment, schoolyard and work place bullying; a requiem for the Western Australian wheatbelt; a poetics of rant against mining companies, climate change, GM crops, land clearance, pollution, gun culture, sexism and racism? How do we read this prolific, highly awarded, university professorial-protestor-fellow?

In Britain Greg Garrard (2004: 33), has written that “since the Romantic movement’s poetic response to the Industrial Revolution, pastoral has decisively shaped our constructions of nature”. For this reason, Garrard (2004: 33) writes, “the pastoral trope must and will remain a key concern for ecocritics”. This is certainly true for Kinsella but what have been his conversations with the pastoral? What is pastoral to Kinsella? In Australia Ivor Indyk (1998: 353) defines “pastoral” as “the poetry of fulfillment and ease, in which the world of nature acknowledges and celebrates the desires of man”. As Indyk (1998: 353) shows, given the difficulties that many experienced in learning to live in the Australian landscape during colonial times, it is hardly surprising to note that there are “not many genuine examples of Australian pastoral”. Kinsella himself has argued that the pastoral can only be approached ironically in Australia [because] “the Australian landscape is not European … if anything, it is really the Storm that belongs. Australia is a place of extremes. Furthermore, a sense of belonging to the land for a non-Aborigine is marred by guilt” (Kinsella 1996: 36–37). For Kinsella, the idealisation of rural life is not possible because the contexts of ecology and colonialism must be paramount; anti-pastoral is about confrontation, recognition, conversation, and, one would hope, reconciliation.

What is John Kinsella “confronting” in The Vision of Error and Tide? With careful attention to the ecological detail, and in moments of great lyrical imagism, Kinsella evokes the world of the Western Australian wheatbelt and coastline as ecologies of intense – but damaged – beauty: “to hear the sea … to watch fish swim the shallows, waders test the foam, skimmers take the surface, pollution’s oily film rainbowing a still, fine day” (Tide 121). While in The Vision:

the header comb strikes quartz and sparks and fire

runs through wheat like Crete where fire has left

earth bare so it is here, bare of scrub.

(43)

While later we are told that:

… we are turning this place into the sands

of Egypt. The canon is a crown of death –

seventy-foot high York gums

rustling like dragonflies

 

over the waters

of the swimming

pool;

 

leaves too dead to write on…

(62)

But for Kinsella the cost of “the Big Australian eating / his country out of house and home” (31) is not only environmental but also psychological – “SOLVENCY IS MUTE” (30) – where:

What cruelty in a place of shrines tossed

over, like boulders toppled from the arena,

 

monumentally heavy and impossible to make

upright again, spiritual icebergs leisurists

wrecked themselves on without knowing

they’d sprung a leak, dragged us to the bottom.

(29–30)

The costs of collusion are degrading to our environments, our relationships, and our inner lives: we are all made “bullies”, “semi useful foot soldiers” and “collaborating wankers”, “watching seven-year-olds / that beat up ‘our’ seven-year-old, eye of parents, / repressed in their freedoms” (10). So:

show your weapons, count calibres.

Adults don’t kill children, says

the seven-year-old. Not ownership

but pastoral care amidst sheep

bred for flesh not wool: meaty meat.

(85)

In degrading our country we degrade ourselves: “I know the reality. And there was the war. It is eternal. There are no armistices, no sides. All is war. We don’t seem to be able to get beyond it. And there’s childhood. And there’s the factory. And there’s the Sound” (Tide 123). Kinsella confronts with so much beauty, the ugliness we do to our environment, each other, and to ourselves by our abuse of power.

What does John Kinsella “recognise” in The Vision of Error and Tide? Like Judith Wright before him, Kinsella does not shy away from confronting the consequences of his own family’s environmental decisions. In The Vision Kinsella records how his “family / crossed the oceans – freely – to be in the vicinity” and how quickly they were “among the jarrah, the clearings; / his [grand]father’s team scouring and planting / pine trees’ (Vision of Error 55–56). But Kinsella’s poetry of dwelling is as informed by postcolonialism as by ecopoetics. Kinsella tells us that “some people remember ‘the old people’ and the names / of goanna and parrot, trees” and that “the other law troubles” while:

In the dry bed of the South Mortlock River

we see through red-green eyes

  the white trail of the farmer;

downriver, a bright flash

  of the serpent’s tail –

serpent escaping salt’s

  ghosting of water,

embouchure split harsh

  through hakea.

(73)

In these beautifully descriptive and fragmented lines Kinsella evokes the various layers of Indigenous and non-Indigenous land settlement; seeing within the current water management practices of farming communities a human induced salination – a palimpsest of “white” over the Indigenous Knowledge of rebirth and seasonal rain encapsulated in Stories of the Rainbow Serpent. In Australian poetry there have been few more beautifully lyrical acknowledgments of Country.

What “conversations” does John Kinsella initiate in The Vision of Error and Tide about the costs and interrelationships of the abuses of power on personal and public levels? He asks us to remember that “towns / in the goldfields and Pilbara / aren’t just there for extraction, / but perpetual colonisation” (Vision of Error 35). In addressing climate change – in a region where so many remain “deniers” – Kinsella tells us that:

there are thermometers everywhere

here: in the house, on the veranda, in the shed. It is compulsive;

so the sun activates flight.

(38–39)

This is keen, intimate, observation rich in its sense of place; and in another juxtaposition he asks us to consider further “how the plans to make an abattoir… / are progressing? How they are working out, / public submissions in, votes taken, planning done”. And he reminds us, ironically, that “sheep / somewhere waiting in line … / shorn before slaughter” might “know” (107). Kinsella asserts that the state might “deploy violence / to thwart [protest]” (47) but “remember where you’ve come from” and “join up / to make little difference” (33). In Tide Kinsella creates thirty-two character sketches in richly evocative and descriptive prose; these are heartbreaking in the way they show the costs of not “joining up to make little difference” as we experience and exercise power – we are left isolated, vulnerable and damaged, living amidst all the bullying, teasing and humiliations; always reaching for an intimacy that is somehow unattainable:

I leant across and pulled a long strand of hair from her eye, wet with perspiration. She moved my hand gently away and said, We are all falling to death. All of us. Even Four Eyes and Tender Terry. They are falling as well, and it’s terrible. (Tide 202)

But there is always the possibility of a “little difference”; amidst the threat of fog and storm there remains the hope that:

Sanctuary is at hand. We’ll follow the light and when we reach the shallows, I’ll step out and drag us in… The fog won’t matter a damn – we can lead each other up the beach by the hand. (Tide 129)

What is John Kinsella “reconciling” in The Vision of Error and Tide? If power corrupts, Kinsella – in his prose and poetry – examines the manifestations of the abuses of power. The degradation of the environment is one expression of this abuse. In Kinsella’s creative world there are numerous others: sexism, racism, a refusal to acknowledge First Nations, gun culture, work place and school yard bullying, state sponsored capital punishment. Sometimes the zealous nature of Kinsella’s exposé might verge on a poetics of rant (and I find it difficult to take as seriously as he does his melodramatic rant against infant male circumcision – but then I have Jewish and Indigenous family and a history of self-harm) but the energy, breadth of referencing and numerous moments of great lyrical beauty just catch me up in their magnificent tide. Kinsella compels me to reflect on my decisions regarding power as I accept his invitation in The Vision to:

Remember where you’ve come from

and the general fixedness of celestial bodies: flaw

therein worth a life-change

or realigning

 

as purpose is to accolades,

ministries to choirs

 

mosquitoes thicker

near the river

conserved

so join up

to make little difference, thwarting

mortgage-ocracies, national corporatism

rejigged as mountain ducks

on sandbars

   dugouts

saplings

planted out

up on the hill where native growth

isn’t rekindling

 

   navigate via call

of male white-winged triller

(33)

The clever use of juxtaposition is a Kinsella feature; and the fine attention to detail and naming remind us of Gary Synder’s (1995: 171) request for an ecopoetics that is “nature and place literate: informed about history (social history and environmental history)”. Kinsella’s “poison pastoral” in The Vision of Error and Tide is a magnificent model for what this politically engaged ardent tour de force to save the planet – and ourselves – might look like. This is “Captain Planet” making himself vulnerable and riding a tsunami of “little [but all the] difference”.

Postcolonialism’s Primacy in Place

George Seddon (1998: 105–9), a major multi-disciplinary thinker and pioneer in the study of place, describes place-based writing as a “literature of intimacy with places, with country”. The Lake’s Apprentice can be described as belonging to this genre of place-based literature. Weldon’s “place” is the Yalgorup National Park, located on Western Australia’s south-west coast. It includes the magnificent chain of lakes between Mandurah and Bunbury (this is Bindjareb Noongar Country). Weldon’s beautifully presented book is a collection of lyrical essays, poetry and photography. Weldon has described the purpose of this art as being one that is “attending to the individuality of things, the hidden essence of their specific details, their dynamic processes … Through profound attention, something may be called into presence” (74). She quotes Murdoch University’s Professor of Sustainability, Glen Albrecht, to elaborate on this idea: [this is a state] “where the boundaries between self and the rest of nature are obliterated and a deep sense of peace and connectedness pervades consciousness” (74–75). Is Weldon’s apprenticeship to “place” successful in achieving this lofty “calling into presence”; as a nature writer is she a “faithful witness” to the “wonder that lies in the detail, and in the harmony of the whole” (112)?

Weldon begins her book by introducing the parameters and contours of her project with the following sentence from Mark Tredinnick’s, The Blue Plateau: “There is a practice of belonging and it starts with forgetfulness of self” (viii). Following this quote is the wonderfully imagist and finely observed poem, “The Practice of Belonging”. Here Weldon elaborates on Tredinnick’s thoughts and describes her “discovered country”, “folded like a hinge between twin skies” where:

… the sleeping boobook

becomes a wood carving, enters the tree

and leaves without a wing-beat, dissolving

 

in a shadow-screen. Look, you say to me

at his way of belonging – this gradual

arrival that begins with letting go.

(viii-ix)

In this preface to her project, Weldon invites us to “linger” because “slow parting tastes sweet as a vine’s late grapes”. These are beautifully expressed sentiments but what do they actually mean? For a writer inhabiting a landscape to which they earnestly want to belong, what does it mean to “forget self”? Is it to write as “anonymous”? Surely not! And couldn’t the world just as easily sing back the lyrics of Skyhooks: “Ego is not a dirty word, don’t you forget what you’ve seen or you’ve heard” (pretty useful advice for a nature writer). So how does Tredinnick develop this idea in his text, The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir? After writing the sentence that Weldon chooses to quote above, Tredinnick continues: “Don’t come to the plateau to find yourself … come to find the plateau”. And he continues:

Belonging is a practice, not a birthright … Attachment grows if you abandon yourself, if you let a place in … this practice [of belonging] is performed best when it’s an accident of one’s being and staying somewhere, making some kind of a life and some kind of a living from the country. (Tredinnick 2009: 169)

For a non-Indigenous twenty-first century writer to continue with these speculations without thinking to prioritize the custodianship of the Traditional Owners and their Culture is astounding. How can a non-Indigenous person have any sense of “belonging” in a settler place like Australia without remembering and interrogating the colonial past? But Tredinnick rides through his “landscape memoir” on the horse’s back with his family of pioneering colonial timber-getters, cattlemen and road-makers. He smudges the reality of dispossession (because it is always others who committed the violence: 23–27) to romanticize how hard (and heroically) these men worked to stake their land claims, dying from work accidents (154–55) and “exhausted by sixty-six years of claiming a valley” (43–44). As he later writes: “Clearing has been the great Australian project” (119) and with no sense of postcolonial irony Tredinnick describes this clearing:

And in the valleys below the cliffs where the mallee ash and the clumpy conifer hang out, farming the trees was a way of making a living. When you cleared, you left standing the marketable trees. When your cattle money was not enough, or when the price of wool dropped too low, you could harvest those trees and sell the timber. You could push the forest further up the slopes. (2009: 119–20)

So while Tredinnick is sensitive to the critique of ecocriticism the real hero of his tale remains Les: a tree-feller who was also a “sculptor on a tractor” (he was “erosion itself … with his gift for whispering a dozer”, 159). But it is Les who “was the valley’s prodigal son. He was the one she [the valley] loved best” (223). “Not one thing – not fire, not flood, not snow, not heavy morning frost, not broken drive arms, not a half-broken back – stopped the man husbanding the valley” (232):

Les loved the [valley] the way a man loves his wife … In the valley he shot more snakes and dogs, more parrots and wallabies and wild horses, he dug more dams and made more roads and cut more timber and blew up more old huts than was strictly necessary. He shaped the ground and altered the grasses and put out more superphosphate than the valley would have liked. He diminished the valley he loved. (Tredinnick 2009: 236–37)

Tredinnick may regret Les’ “diminishing” of the valley but the reader is still positioned to cheer Les on as the pioneering hero who the valley “loved best”. In Tredinnick’s “valley love-in” the Traditional Owners and rightful Custodians, the Gundungurra, are dispossessed yet again. Tredinnick may only spare a few thoughts for this treatment of the Traditional Owners but he writes at length of the harassment of the inheritors of the pioneers by the agents of National Parks and Water Board as they seek to extend state control in the valley for the greater good: “They dammed the river and they flooded the Valley, so that a city on the coast might take the water that falls on the plateau” (18). The choppers of Park Rangers and the Water Board circle us: “And riding off, back in the trees, free of them, we were our own men again.” (97). These agents of the state were forever “locking gates” and “all this proved was that this country had been taken from these men. It was not theirs to ride anymore” (98). But as if to counter any postcolonial objection to the values embedded in his landscape memoir, Tredinnick, in his epilogue, concedes that while living in the “Blue Plateau” he “spent too little time … in the company of the first people’ (260). But by then it is too late.

Why does Weldon choose to foreground a quote from such a colonial text in her project? And does it really matter? The poet and philosopher, John Charles Ryan, would certainly think not. In his recent Cordite article he asks: “Can ecocritical over-thinking taint the pure delight of the poetic well?” (Ryan 2014: 1). Tredinnick is an exquisite writer (especially of poetry) so is it really of consequence what values he embeds in his landscape memoir? It is dishonest for a non-Indigenous person to claim to have any sense of belonging in Australia without first remembering and interrogating the colonial past. As John Kinsella (1996: 37) writes: “A sense of belonging to the land [in Australia for a non-Indigenous person] is marred by guilt … The European rural is laid over the Aboriginal land, working hard to obscure and obliterate memories of the past”. Judith Wright (1994: 140) would add that if the creation of a place-based literature does not highlight the perspectives of what we have come to call postcolonialism it is just another discourse "come of a conquering people".

I think, therefore, that it is a curious decision that Weldon makes to prioritise Tredinnick’s text in her own, especially as she is so careful to situate her work within the vital program of postcolonialism. Weldon writes beautifully of Bindjareb Noongar Culture and Story and respectfully seeks the permission of the Traditional Owners to write of their Country and share the Language names for seasons, bush tucker and medicines. When starting her residency at Yalgorup National Park she seeks out an Indigenous guide and mentor to “welcome her to Country” (10–11) and orientate her walks and musings: “George Walley was, from the beginning, a cultural guide and mentor; the first to recognize and affirm my growing attachment to his country” (3). It is George who leads Weldon to the site of the Murray River historic Pinjarra Massacre of 1834, a “very strong place” where the “trauma of old wounds is deep” (8–12). The memory of this site lingers throughout Weldon’s essays, poems and photographs, as does the continued guidance of George. When looking at Weldon’s thrombolite photographs George smiles: “there are portals everywhere at Yalgorup, and you’ve found them already. Just be there with an open heart” (8).

The Lake Clifton thrombolites, we are told by Weldon, are “rocks of deep time” (31); “lacustrine fossils formed by an accretion of residue from photosynthetic bacteria at their living edge” (17); they are “complex communities of microscopic organisms” (19); “they look like low circular columns broken off at the base, edges worn smooth and round by the water and wind” (19); they are “responsible for raising the Earth’s early atmospheric oxygen levels through their photosynthetic processes, thus enabling other life forms to exist” (6); “they grow just 0.1–1.0 mm higher each year” (17); “they have lived at Lake Clifton for thousands of years due to rare and successful adaptation” (20); “they are living fossils and critically endangered” (68); and they are known to the Bindjareb Noongar as “Woggaal Noorook … eggs laid at Yalgorup in the Dreamtime by the female creation serpent as she travelled south” (21). Along with George Walley, it is the thrombolites that are the true heroes of Weldon’s creative recording of place. They teach her “to slow down” (95). “In stillness [Weldon writes] I have become more receptive to nature’s sacraments, aware of its orders and anomalies, attuned to the cadence of creation” (95–96).

In Weldon’s creative responses to Lake Clifton’s thrombolite reefs it is clear that she is a “faithful witness” to the “wonder that lies in the detail, and in the harmony of the whole” (112). She writes equally well of the Indigenous knowledge of seasons (see for example 8–9, 25–27, 67, 103, 160); of Melaleuca (see for example 28–29); of bush tucker and the relationship between Indigenous food gathering and ecology (see for example 42-43, 50, 124-129); and of the natural history of turtles and of the role of vocalisation in their adaptation (see for example 124–31, 142–43). She also explores the role of science in park management, such as in the measuring of nutrient levels and the possible impacts this might have on the thrombolite reefs (45), on attempts to regenerate the tuart trees throughout the park (99–102) and on the release of calicivirus as a control on rabbit populations (137–38). As Jason Cowley (2008: 9), the editor of the British literary journal Granta, has written: “the best nature writers do not simply want to walk into the wild, to rhapsodize and commune; they seek to see with a scientific eye and write with literary effect”. Weldon over-whelmingly deserves this highest praise.

There are some unfortunate times, however, when she anthropomorphises nature with lazy and sentimental results. Trees are not “generous in the habitat they provide to other life forms, often at the cost of their growth”, (101) – they are trees. And her description of a population of splendid fairy-wrens is particularly silly. Weldon writes that these small birds were “deliberately showing off … pivoting to catch the dappled light, so that it flashed on … their courting plumage”. She ends this rhapsody with the following banal reflection: “These are companionable birds, and when they fly alongside me in the bush, singing melodiously … I feel as though I am being welcomed and watched over” (107). Natural History tells a far more interesting story of the role of vocalisation in establishing group bonding and in aggressive territory display. These birds were not welcoming Weldon; they were “aggressively” warning her off! Weldon’s use of descriptive language can also be at times over-done. She is a little too often “overwhelmed”, “astounded”, and “acutely conscious” as she “thrills to nature”, while witnessing another “unforgettable night” and “nursing a profound disorientation”. But these are quibbles in what is a remarkable achievement. As Weldon says herself: when responding to place “we navigate by science but also by story” (24).

Weldon’s lyrical essays are enhanced by her photography, which is generously positioned throughout this part of her book. It is strange, therefore, that the poetry is sectioned off by itself with none of this colour and visual display. Part 1, which is made up of “essays, photos and nature notes”, is certainly where this book’s confidence and achievement rests. The poetry is more uneven. Much of Weldon’s poetry is rich in visual description, such as this evocation of Lake Clifton’s thrombolite reef:

By midsummer my lake is a sculpture

park lapped by sun, receding

water, bleached shores of thirsting

microbes that survive by sipping

groundseeps …

(180)

In another poem she describes the Yalgorup National Park as: “indented coves, salt-bitten / scrub, scoured dunes – / litanies of names for periphery” (216) while the trees: “say it slant, sinuous / pale limbs sky-flung / haloed in winter sun” (221). These lines are finely observed and demonstrate Weldon’s keen eye for visual imagery and ear for the cadence of language. But too often the poetry is didactic, teaching the scientific facts that Weldon has researched about the reef; so when standing before the thrombolites Weldon reminds us (yet again): “I breathe in, we / are breathing oxygen they release” (180) and “imagine, microbes exhaling / and ozone translating sky / blue” (210). And we shouldn’t need to be told that the thrombolites are “sacred stones” (180). Occasionally she resorts to cliché in her imagery, such as when responding to a massacre site, she: “holds her pen like a spade, to disturb / the surface” (187), or when she attempts to capture moments of the “sublime”. In “Homing”, for example, Weldon resorts to cliché in an attempt for profundity:

Essential in Zen landscapes

white space

separates earth and water.

 

Blank page or salt-edged lake

it is a place to which

thoughts flock.

(192)

While in “Hooded Plover” she writes:

Weeping is permitted in the ruins

of her scrape.

 

Fragments of unfledged line the sand hollow

where promise died.

 

A shallow grave for broken shells.

 

See how they point

to fragile, empty skies.

(208)

This description relies so heavily on sentimentality and plainly observed didacticism that it sinks into pathos. This is a great shame because, apart from these moments, this book has so much to enjoy and admire. The University of Western Australia’s press – UWA Publishing – has housed Weldon’s creative vision superbly. And Weldon’s respectful postcolonialism and homage to a “place” of such astounding cultural and ecological significance is exemplary. The book she constructs is not without need of some renovation but it is a dwelling I am pleased to call “home” while inhabiting her space. The Lake’s Apprentice is a significant contribution to the growing genre of place-based literature.

Hunted by cowards who claim they are men,

Slaughtered and butchered, left writhing in pain.

How long before their final amen?

A. Renard, “A Villanella of Indifference”, 92

For Rhino In A Shrinking World is an international anthology that was created to highlight the plight of the rhino: that three out of the five remaining rhinoceros species are classified as critically endangered. It is a collection of poems that speaks of the violence of humankind, the beauty of the rhino and nature, and as a warning for our future. A warning not just of a rhino-less world, but also of the harm an anthropocentric nature can do to ourselves and the environment. The editor, Harry Owen, immediately introduces the reader to the violence that humankind is inflicting upon the rhinos with their illegal poaching, where “criminal gang of cowards ... mercilessly hacked the horns from their faces with axes and pangas (machetes) and left them to bleed slowly and agonisingly to death” (“Introduction”, iii). Throughout the collection his helplessness and need to do something about this genocide is evident and is mimicked by each poet in their own distinct way. The collection is divided into sections, such as, “Meetings”, “Nature Speaks”, “Extinction” and “Connections”, to name just a few. Sally Scott’s captivating ink and charcoal illustrations offer an added depth to the rhino’s “voice”.

The collection of poems range from showing the reader an anthropocentric species who believes they reign supreme: ‘[t]he trick’s lining him up in your sights ... you need to take his horns’ (R. Elkin, “Shooting Rhino”, 18), to the wistful imagery of when a rhino

nudged my shoulder.

So I sat

– scared to break the spell –

while he rested his horn-crowned head

beside me,

fine, furrowed, crepe-like skin

N. Morrissey, “Lord of Life”, 27

The poems become a canon; they can traverse the ages and continents. Not only do they speak for the rhino, but they speak of, and for, all of nature: from the crickets, to the bluefin, to the elephants, the toads, the giraffes, a spider or even a tick embedded in a hide. Not only do they speak for the voiceless sentient beings with which we share this world, but they can be transposed onto any injustice or oppression. And several of them do just that: they scream for the loss of compassion towards our own species, they cry out to the world to listen and stop and change our actions before it is too late:

I’m angry we as a global village don’t give a shit about our children

And that we knowingly fuck them up the arse by not tearing down those in power who

refuse to make brave bold decisions

R. Slater-Jones, “AngerPoem”, 104

The ecopoetry spins a web that connects the rhino, elephant or the tick to humankind, nature (or potentially, lack thereof) with our past, present and future. As a result of humankind’s actions we are undoubtedly placed within a world where “all that’s left for us to poach are eggs of kites and vultures pulling / at the putrid flesh of roadkill corpses” (H. Owen, “Your Tour Guide Speaks”, 122). Whether our actions are malevolent or benevolent, humankind is deeply embedded within this natural world that the poetry has created and most of the poems communicate the same message: humankind has created “this age of war and waste” (S. Banoobhai, “Prayer”, 171).

Each poem highlights the plight of the rhino/nature and humankind’s relationship and interactions with our ecosystem. Some of the poems weep for the pain and suffering that we inflict upon the sentient beings, while other poems focus on the aftermath of such evil. For example in Agnes Marton’s “Rhinoceros” it is obvious that humankind is now far removed from nature:

I keep googling

for the best horn shape

but all I find is foghorn.

I get off-line,

scampering from the room (55).

Humans, due to our societies, constructed ideologies and maybe even the belief that we can do it better, have been conditioned to look for a replica or the simulacrum of nature to interact with, rather than the organic. We, personally, may not swing the machete on the last rhino’s horn, but by choosing the inorganic we are removing ourselves so far from nature that we can no longer identify with, or show compassion towards, other sentient beings and our environment. The poetry becomes a warning for our future; our parasitic ways have destroyed nature and it is too late, there is no nature left to interact with.

I am not scared of you,

you know.

I am scared for you.

Your scarring,

warring,

killing ways

will one day,

swallow you whole

B. Chatterjee Dutt, “The Rhino Speaks”, 41

Several of the poems highlight humankind’s anthropocentric nature and our belief that we are superior to the other sentient beings. Valerie Laws’ “Best Selling: Father and Son Hunting Package Deals” confronts us with the idea that “[t]he world is big and wide, son. / It’s ours to rule and ride, son” (85). Encompassed within that anthropocentric nature the poems also expose the insecurities of humankind, such as when Laws highlights ideas about masculinity: “And when you’ve learned to kill, son, / You’ve learned a manly skill” (85). Laws eloquently challenges the idea that to be the “superior being” one must be able to oppress and dominate, otherwise you are less of a being. Other poems also reinforce these insidious self-doubts, such as Lance Fredericks “Curved”:

I am a man, my Jambiya proves it ...

Our Men, after all, are defined by these trinkets ...

Stroking its bejewelled handle.

Satisfied. At peace. I smile.

Defended.

Secure

(119)

While on the surface these poems comment on the arrogance and cruelty of humankind, they also speak of how weak we really are when compared to nature. Governments and corporations have to create weapons to dominate and oppress the ecosystem that they refuse to live in harmony with. There are those who have to destroy an “other” to make themselves feel better. They have to create justifications for their actions:

It’s a kind of conservation, son.

These beasts need preservation, son.

So we shoot them on reservations, son,

So you can take your son

V. Laws, “Best Selling: Father and Son Hunting Package Deals”, 85

The poem questions humankind’s ability to simply exist in the world, in the here and now, as the other sentient beings do.

The poems compiled in For Rhino In A Shrinking World ask the reader to question, not only the active violence done to the rhino, but also the guilt of the rest of humankind in their complicity and ignorance. Marc Vincenz’s “Crushed Dragon Bones” highlights two different beings that are both as guilty as the poachers. Firstly, there is the apothecary lady who “[g]rinds the mixture in mortar humming some old love tune”. There is a duality to the lady, she may simply be trying to make a living to support a family we do not know about. Yet, at the same time, there is an insidiousness to her selling: “Hey you, big nose? Want me to check your pulse? ... She fiddles a powder, rattling grains / from that draw, granules from another. All marked in red” (76). We cannot blame her for not knowing the murder and torture behind the “medicines” she sells. Yet, how can we not question her and whether she is aware of the violence behind her profits. The poem also asks the reader to question whether her need to provide for her family is more important than a rhino’s life or even the survival of an entire species. However, the real villain in the poem is the man creating the demand; the one who buys the “[c]rushed dragon bones for the little man inside ... This will keep me going all night” (76). Just as Vincenz’s poetry offers the reader the chance to question humankind’s place in nature and our responsibilities, so too does Marry Mullen’s “Vexed”. Humans are the “predators, oil execs, bankers, fiddlers, / Bigots, control freaks, honkies; you happiness poachers, / Liars, pretenders ...” (178) and “[g]rinding the horn will not make you hard. / Softness does that. Whisper a sweet word” (178): abusing nature will not save our lives. Rather, she implores us to work with nature, to enjoy nature simply as it is: unadulterated.

All the poems anthropomorphise the rhino. It is impossible not to, when it is our words, values and meanings that are being used to create an image. However, it is the degrees to which they anthropomorphise that creates the different meanings to the poems, all working to raise awareness of the torture and murder of the rhino. For example, the anthropomorphising in Phillippa Yaa De Villiers’ “The Mouthful” highlights the burden of being a voice for the voiceless or trying to empathise with them: “my muscles stiff from carrying the heavy horns of an animal identity” (31). While Dan Wylie’s, “Be Bounteous and Kill Me”, anthropomorphising metaphors create a heartbreaking image:

I awoke at dawn, my rump stinging, finding

a whole strake of my consciousness missing ...

but my thighs have turned leaden with doubt ...

The long hand of my compass is broken,

I see nothing before me

and there is nowhere to go

(38)

“Compass”, “my rump stinging” or “consciousness missing” are all very human constructs and ideas, yet, the thought of the pain from the wounded flesh or the unbearable agony of a horn that has been hacked off is all too vivid. While we can never know what it is like for a particular animal to be that animal, the aesthetics of these ecopoems can push the critic/reader to identify and empathise with this violated species – or any oppressed or dominated being – and allow the reader to acknowledge that animals share with humankind the desire to live, avoid pain and enjoy pleasure.

Given the transformative effects of language, these poems occupy a powerful position, enabling the reading audience to question the (mis)treatment of the rhino, as well as the chance to bear witness. While it may not be possible to actively prevent every act of violence towards animals, it is possible to understand the atrocities inflicted. And bearing witness to an injustice, whether it is a vigil, protest or a piece of poetry, creates a space for that wrong to be exposed and to provoke discourses to bring about change. Harry Owen’s anthology of poems is more than a vigil; it is more than a protest; it is a loud and desperate plea for humankind to question their ideologies and actively help save these rhinos, nature and our future:

Watch extinction take place live on CNN

Just leaving behind a guilty bloodstain

They were hunted by cowards who claimed they were men

Who just laughed as we breathed their final amen

Renard, “A Villanella of Indifference”, 92