A Spirituality that is not One: Australian Poetry, Spirit and Country

Poetry for the Soul presentation given by Anne Elvey, 26th March 2014 at the Carmelite Centre in Middle Park

Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poem ‘Intervention Payback’ is spoken in the voice of an Aboriginal man of the Northern Territory, living under the Northern Territory Emergency Response, or more commonly ‘The Intervention’.[1] Cobby Eckermann’s narrator is a father of young children, who with his wife has provided for his family and, through the stories of ‘tjamu and nana’, has kept them in contact with both culture and their elders’ experiences of colonisation. The intervention brings fear that another generation will be stolen, and income management brings with it problems with buying good food, employment and gambling. The poem opens “I love my wife” and closes on a tense note: the narrator’s wife has taken to gambling her remaining wages—the narrator says “if she spent all the money   not gonna share with me and the kids/I might hit her   first time”.[2]

Lionel Fogarty’s ‘Reality of a Murri Dreaming World’[3] offers a different perspective on living in (post)colonial Australia. The experience can be bitter, sour tasting. There is rebellion, but the rebellion is oriented toward hope. The opening syntax is difficult and perhaps echoes the rap rhythms to which the first stanza refers. As the poem develops, the writing becomes more immediately accessible. The speaker is urban and speaks to an urban audience, but the urban space—the city—is “not here”. The bush persists in this space and with it the possibility of healing.

For me, these poems by contemporary Aboriginal poets, Cobby Eckermann and Fogarty, set the scene for the question of poetry and an Australian spirituality. Spirituality, I hold, is about a situated attentiveness not only to land, but to the kinds of complex—destructive and creative—interrelationships that we live in because of a colonial heritage that continues to infuse our present.

Spirituality in these poems is about kinship, not the idealised kinship with country that has been appropriated from time to time by non-Aboriginal Australians, but a kinship that is about survival of family and culture, in face of the everyday experiences of dispossession, and of cross cultural “encounter” which arrives in Cobby Eckermann’s poem as “government [that] make up/all the rules   but don’t know culture   can’t sit in the sand” or in Fogarty’s as “grog”, “video games” and “machinist”, and the cross culture of the language itself in which the poems are written. Necessarily, this survival is related to (and is lived in relationship to) land—to country.

The poems end differently; where Cobby Eckermann closes with a potential transfer of violence from the colonial Intervention to the Aboriginal couple, Fogarty takes us into a dreamtime:

But I have a reality that you have dreams;

it is a bush home where animals are your friends and living is like

suckling

            off the honey[4]

This could read as an Indigenous longing for a lost paradise, echoed in the colonial appropriation of the noble savage, but the tension in the poem unsettles this utopian imaginary. The difficult opening lines suggest a tense present:

Mean not fasting for a

Bitter sour fowling taster

Real leaving rainbows

            stopping of death[5]

This present is eventually answered by a possible future:

And get to a wilderness

            where you can tame yourselves

I will be there to help you learn to remain

            a Murri of future[6]

Present and future together suggest that this immersion in country is more than nostalgia. As Bill Ashcroft, Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden argue in Intimate Horizons, “Fogarty’s impulses towards utopia are never merely escapist, but are concerned with spiritual, physical and political transformation”.[7] His is a poetics of reclaiming what in non-Aboriginal eyes might be an “eden”, as effective for cultural healing and the survival of kin.

Let me take up some features of these poems, as points of exploration for considering some other Australian poets in relation to this question of spirituality. I will touch on the following: paradise; kinship or interrelationality; language and its limits; attention to place, including urban place; and finally love.

Paradise

Nicola Themistes in her ‘How to not’ begins:

do not chew gum alone; do not ground husks, nor folly amidst thyme & treason

do not evoke

do not suggest or distreaty.

The poem continues with a series of negative imperatives interrupted by longings such as “one wish for difference” and affirmations like “i found the hard way around stolen turf”. Further negative commands, “do not attempt to dig your own grave”, and the speaker’s anger—“i am angry, i am an angry person; look at these armpits they are weeping with rage/… my face is a task”—signal a counter utopia, a calling into question of nostalgia for paradise:

even the clouds form factions

even the birds will sing in different keys.

Like Fogarty, Themistes evokes the possibility of transformation:

do strive through tremors of memory & trips of regret

find a moment to stretch out of finitude & touch the abyss.

But ‘How to not’ ends with a series of negative imperatives that counter the violence that steals land, culture and the possibility of personhood:

            do not a gun

do not do, you do not do.[8]

In her ‘Kinsella’, Themistes is keenly aware of the nostalgia for eden, “a promise pregnant with paradise”, and its appearance in the pastoral genre, which she brackets with “the lyrebird’s hoax” and “the balmy (bloody) weather”.[9]

Jordie Albiston, in her alphabetic acrostic ‘Lamentations’ on the Kinglake fires that occurred on Saturday 7 February 2009, calls up Jehosaphat Gully in the Kinglake National Park as a kind of paradise now lost. The first part of the poem mourns, even despairs, the destruction. Part II looks back to a time before the fires, for example:

Picture the creature as he picks out a path, as he circles his hen who scratches the earth: and sings: song after song, all the sounds of the bush: song after song in the place in the bush: in the bush of Jehosaphat Gully.

In Part III we come to the moment of the fire:

Jehosaphat is burning, with fire, and with all the vengeance and imaginings of fire.

Jehosaphat Gully and Masons Falls burn.

Jehosaphat Gully, and Masons Falls, and all of the places along the long road, burn.

Part IV, the final part, takes on a responsorial form:

 rejoice not in her ashes or streets / laugh not along her long road / smile not on her

earth that is black

this is the valley of the perfection of beauty

save all your mirth for another

that we call the joy of the earth

today is the day of the time between moments / today is the time that is come

quiet

undone is she undone is she

quiet

vanquished is she / on this day of the day of the fire[10]

Here a lost paradise functions not so much as nostalgia, but serves as a contrast to heighten the work of mourning the poem enacts.

This mourning for a paradise lost, takes another form in Judith Wright’s early work, for example in ‘Bora Ring’, where the poet laments the absence of the traditional owners of the land, beginning “The song is gone”, and moving between a lament for markers of absence and the presence of the witness of earth—“Only the grass stands up / to mark the dancing ring”—and  human—“Only the rider’s heart/ halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid work”—and finishing, in the reference to Cain, with the sense of having betrayed brother, or sister.[11] The poet will work for reconciliation and treaty. In her friendship with Oodgeroo Noonuccal, she will become aware of the way such a lament for absence can reinscribe it when she writes in ‘Two Dreamtimes’, her poem addressed to Oodgeroo, “Trust none—not even poets”.[12] For Wright, the fissure she experiences as a child of the colonisers is in tension with her sense of kinship with the place where she grew up and the places she came to dwell in, and with other than humans—a sense of interrelationality that also fuelled her environmental activism.[13]

Kinship and interrelationality

For John Mateer this sense of kinship calls us forth into an unsettling space; much as Themistes invites us to “touch the abyss”, he writes in ‘Auguries’:

Their screeching

unmakes

daylight,

has them,

the black

cockatoos

of trespass

as long-

stoking

wings

lifting us

from

void

to void.

‘Auguries’ by John Mateer. © John Mateer, 2013[14]

           

The cockatoos of ‘Auguries’ sketched in these spare lines draw the speaker’s (and the hearers’) eyes upward to the “void” of the sky. But this void is more than simply the immense overhead space toward which the eyes are drawn, and into which the “long-/stoking//wings” presumably eventually disappear; it is also the otherness that the birds—“the black/ cockatoos/ of trespass”—represent. At one level this is the void which inhabits the saying that is the poem, as the poem says (and does not say) the thing to which it refers. Perhaps at another level, the void is an unsettling in the relationship between poet or hearer and the cockatoos whose “screeching/unmakes/daylight”. Kinship between human and bird is uneasy, marked by portents as the title ‘Auguries’ suggests. But what is foretold?

In Kate Fagan’s ‘Authentic Nature’, a sense of kinship has the poet burying “the bones, feathers and skulls/of two magpies fallen/from a nest during storms”, but then she says, “Something about the gesture/troubles me”.[15] As the poet questions her action and its meaning, with reference to Celan’s meeting with Heidegger, she comes to ask about language itself:

    Some kind of transplanted integrity

has taken place, the words

and rhymes of older empires

fraying under eucalypts

and fruitless in a country

    such as this. Here I dig

for a different language …[16]

Language and  its limits

We are reminded again of the limits of language, something Wright calls us to in her ‘Gum Trees Stripping’, where “Words are not meanings for a tree”,[17] except perhaps where words are a human signature on a document she signed agreeing to the cutting down of trees for the war effort, as her ‘A Document’ tells.[18] But in a later poem, ‘Summer’, Wright on observing closely “the jenny lizard”, says “I try to see without words/as they do. But I live through a web of language.”[19]

This “web of language” allows for the kind of attentiveness we read in Petra White’s ‘Kangaroos’:

Always turning to leave, wider to go—

they emerge in dissolving light as if they carry

the Earth in their skins, as if they are the land they inhabit…[20]

Place

This poetic attentiveness to other kind resonates with an attentiveness to place, of which I will pick out 3 aspects in contemporary Australian poetry. First is the realisation that the places non-Aboriginal poets inhabit or visit are already country for Aboriginal people. Patricia Sykes ‘Modewarre—ways you might approach it’ from her collection Modewarre: Home Ground is an example of this kind of place-oriented poetry.[21] With mapping and absence as keynotes, the poem begins with an evocation of loss which echoes Wright’s ‘Bora Ring’, but goes on to document the research process itself, the helpful encounters with the ‘Wathaurong co-op’—which undo the poet’s expectations of ‘revenge’—the assistance of Bruce Pascoe and the Geelong Records Office, and then considers the interplay of languages for the musk duck:

modewarre (the indigenous)

biziura lobata (the colonial)

musk duck (the common)

and the duck itself. Then we come to the question of the poet’s relationship to the place and its totems:

it’s not your Kulin life I’m after

its recovering geographies

but how to go on

from here    my feet

live off bones    my words

play across old veins…

and again the impossibility of language:

….                   poetry

cannot speak for the whole

it is too full of variants

how then to evolve back to water?

The final section of the poem, entitled  ‘the bird as it is found’, concludes:

the ducks refreshed in their feathers

disturbed into moving on

in such safety as is theirs

their waters still historical

still urgent to be read.[22]

Such poetry presses both writer and reader to inhabit, however uneasily, that “web of language” as a space of attentiveness, situated geographically, historically, and inter-relationally with matter—“skin of the plant on which ink//mimics the intrinsic knowledge/of  worms”—and otherkind—“the duck delivers and delivers/ the shining eye of water”.[23]

The second aspect of this attentiveness to place is the recollection of ecological damage, for example, as John Kinsella writes in his ‘Frankenthaler at Jam Tree Gully: (No) Mountain and (No) Sea (1952)’:

remember: colour is fingerprint

      greenly piquant (leaf litter)

archaic uses of egregious

sets the polluted river on its estuarial watch

to suit development collocations (yes, ‘heinous crime’ IS apt).[24]

The third aspect is the reclamation of urban space, somewhat as we heard in Fogarty. We have Ouyang Yu’s The Kingsbury Tales, Michelle Cahill’s ‘City of Another Home’, Kevin Brophy’s evocations of inner city life, Jennifer Compton’s This City and many others,[25] but the poet I find most interesting in this genre is Lachlan Brown. Here is his: ‘Prosperity Gospel’, set in Sydney’s Western suburbs:

In traffic

someone is let into a queue

with a polite nod of the head and the

day sideswipes grace near this part

of the city that is not

the city.

Yesterday

a truck burst into flames

on the F3, self-immolating like

a zealot or a garbage bin on a bored

summer night.

All of this

speaks to the world

of the human heart. And yet

I am reminded that it’s getting

harder and harder to diagnose

these things.

For instance,

perhaps roundabouts are

breaking out all over Sydney

in response to a

higher call.

Or maybe

graffiti artists have turned

professional, tagging each

colorbond panel with meticulous

precision, like cells in

a spreadsheet.

But now,

as the city pokes its head

over the mangroves, people

are armed with the logic of

poker machines.

They are

exegeting the sketchy car

always parked at Seddon park,

or the wind catching a mullet at

East Hills station.

(and it almost works/ it all most works)

So this

week is meccano week,

and the days click together,

their moods stacking like

shipping containers.

And if

a real estate agent’s flag flies high,

if a pensioner’s roof has been restored,

can you even begin to question

why this city is

so assured,

As though

it were temporary fencing or

a tenacious volunteer at an annual

community event?

Yet in

the rain we miss things: large thumb-drops

pressing each flower into soft earth,

a raised eyebrow like an interrupted cadence

and along each

train line,

Sydney sandstone

weeping, weeping.

‘Prosperity Gospel’ by Lachlan Brown. © Lachlan Brown, 2012.[26]

The experience of the city is multiple and ambiguous, but rather than dismissing the city in a romantic gesture toward a rural or wilderness-focused paradise lost, Brown has the city as a site of grace where the poet, practicing a situated attentiveness, is witness to the “assured” city’s mourning of its “people … armed with the logic of/ poker machines”, and does not miss the “thumb-drops” of rain “pressing each flower into soft earth”.[27] He is, as Freya Mathews would have us: “Singing up the City”.[28]

Love

What I think you can hear in all these poems is love and a refashioning of desire: a calling into question of colonialist desires that inhabit our writing and reading, and a searching for ways of speaking, writing and living otherwise. This is a more than human, perhaps ultimately a post-human, love.[29]

While there are many I could turn to, to talk about a situated attentiveness that is loving or even in love with its complex places and interrelationships with otherkind, I will finish with two quite different contemporary poets: Mark Tredinnick and Michael Farrell. Both have lyrebird poems. Here is Tredinnick’s ‘Lyre, Lyre’:

All afternoon the lyrebird sweet-talks the forest in every voice

                                                                     The forest knows. She talks dirty

                                 And easy as you please along all the mossy streambeds,

And all the way up the roughbarked treeferns into the ashen canopies

                                                                     Of gums; she whispers everyone else’s lines

In your ear at the top of everyone else’s voice. She lights the green silence

Of the rainforest you thought you knew with lies more lovely

                                             In their artifice than all the truths

                                 You’d hoped to stumble over here in their verisimilitude. Like you, love,

She is all five pieces in the three-piece; she is every stone

Goddess in the stone garden,

Every one of their pretty pathologies, their instantiated cries

Of lovingkindness and immaculate despair. Occasionally, too, she is her own

Brilliant unspoken-for self. Right now

She is the beautiful firetail alight in the bracken and the spinebill falling

Endlessly apart through the borrowed winter sunlight. She is

The yellow-browed scrubwren

Turning over old leaves on the cutback at the back of your mind.

She is the broken call of the white-throated treecreeper caught

Like anticipatory grief at the back of your throat.

She is every bird you’ll never see. Again. She steals the forest
from the forest’s

Dream of a quiet life. She constellates the dusk and catalogues every timbre

Of longing in it. She reprises every promise

The Beloved ever made and could not keep.

Which must be almost all of them by now.

‘Lyre Lyre’ by Mark Tredinnick. © Mark Tredinnick, 2013.[30]

This is a gentle but wry interweaving of attention to an other and a kind of love that spills between human relationships and other than human ones, so that all love is more than human. The reference to the Beloved with a capital at the end crosses into the possibility of a divine other who has all but failed us, promises perhaps unkept because of extinction: “She is every bird you’ll never see. Again.” The lament is gentle, interwoven with the poem’s riff on the lyrebird’s mimickery, and as always for Tredinnick threaded with a human presence, “anticipatory grief at the back of your throat”. This is part of the poet’s striving to capture an ecotone in language, to write us into an environmental culture, into the habit of ecological ensoulment.

            As a quick search of youtube will show, lyrebirds mimic not only other birds but chainsaws, car alarms, construction work and human voices. Michael Farrell’s ‘A lyrebird’, mimics the lyrebird by performing a poetic mimickry through the repetition of lines. It is further from romanticism that is Tredinnick, nonetheless it engages, as do several of Farrell’s other poems, with love and desire in a more than human frame.

Swift-footed it stops behind a mountain ash.

All genres are destroyed at last.

History, mistakes, swallowed up in a nominal grub.

The slow wild alcoholics of the nineteenth century dare make no reply.

I tip my beak to the sky.

A nest-building lament starts up.

It’s humans taking up too much room.

Swift-footed it stops behind a mountain ash.

The enclosed imagination buys a hunting gun.

All genres are destroyed at last.

Anthems say they love us too many times removed.

History, mistakes, swallowed up in a nominal grub.

Is this ground good ground?

The slow wild alcoholics of the nineteenth century dare make no reply.

The tide’s reach is projectile: look what lands in the bush.

I tip my beak to the sky.

Inside a person’s mind the sandwich crack of axe, and moaning saw.

A nest-building lament starts up.

Somehow we’re used by the earth’s language.

A car rolled here like a sacked politician’s speech.

Swift-footed it stops behind a mountain ash.

Cars learn ethics through becoming nests.

Like a camel that would take what’s in my head!

All genres are destroyed at last.

A rhyme’s a moral that becomes a fence; a fallen-down fence is a joy forever.

The knitters are pulling the grass out by the roots.

History, mistakes, swallowed up in a nominal grub.

Patterns appear: I have no ears.

In the scanty shanty pleasure of meeting.

The slow wild alcoholics of the nineteeth century dare make no reply.

The leaves full of memories of loves long lost, crumble and fade like ornaments.

Industry needs no commentary.

I tip my beak to the sky.

‘A Lyrebird’ by Michael Farrell. © Michael Farrell, 2013.[31]

The poet and the lyrebird are almost fused: “I tip my beak to the sky”. Interwoven in the poet-lyrebird’s song is reference to colonial history and contemporary ecological loss, but also to an ethics of living otherwise: “Cars learn ethics through becoming nests”, yet the nest-building song is a “lament”. There is a kind of ordered chaos in the uneven closed lines that critique human damage—“It’s humans taking up too much room.”—the indications of war— “Anthems say they love us too many times removed.”—and violence—“The enclosed imagination buys a hunting gun.” But the tone of the poem is compassionate and despite the closed lines, it is open to change. In the breadth of a lyrebird’s mimickry, as in the questioning of language in other poets I have mentioned, “All genres are destroyed at last.” We can ask with the lyrebird-poet, “Is this ground good ground?”

Conclusion

I have taken a particular strand of relationship between poetry and spirituality in contemporary Australian poetry, by focusing on what Ashcroft, Devlin-Glass and McCreddin have called a “postcolonial sacred”.[32] There are other stories I could have told: the way poets, such as Gwen Harwood, and more recently E.A. Gleeson and Anne M. Carson, engage with mortality;[33] the way a whole body of work by poets themselves migrants or whose parents were migrants from parts of Asia and the Middle East moves between multiple locations and identities, engaging with Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, and cosmopolitan identities (I think for example of Michelle Cahill’s Vishvarūpa and Ali Alizadeh’s Ashes in the Air); or of the way Buddhism informs the work of Robert Gray, whose poetry is a model of a certain kind of keen attentiveness to place and other kind.[34] But I am interested in the way, a situated attentiveness places us as writers and readers in relation to the ongoing and interwoven challenges of colonisation and environmental destruction where, as Cassidy writes in ‘Figure’: “There’s more remembering to do/ than beauty”, and where, if we are open, what Farrell says might be true: “Somehow we’re used by the earth’s language.”[35]

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[1] Ali Cobby Eckermann, ‘Intervention Pay Back’, in The Best Australian Poems 2009, ed. Robert Adamson (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2009), 37-41.

[2] Cobby Eckermann, ‘Intervention Pay Back’, 41.

[3] Lionel Fogarty, ‘Reality of a Murri Dreaming World’, in Outcrop: Radical Australian Poetry of Land, ed. Corey Wakeling and Jeremy Balius (Fremantle: Black Rider Press, 2013), 190-91.

[4] Fogarty, ‘Reality of a Murri Dreaming World’, 191. Permission sought.

[5] Fogarty, ‘Reality of a Murri Dreaming World’, 190. Permission sought.

[6] Fogarty, ‘Reality of a Murri Dreaming World’, 191. Permission sought.

[7] Bill Ashcroft, Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden, Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2009), 282.

[8] Excerpts from Nicola Themistes, ‘How to not’, in Outcrop: Radical Australian Poetry of Land, ed. Corey Wakeling and Jeremy Balius (Fremantle: Black Rider Press, 2013), 23. Reproduced with permission of the author. © Nicola Themistes, 2013.

[9] Nicola Themistes, ‘Kinsella’, in Outcrop: Radical Australian Poetry of Land, ed. Corey Wakeling and Jeremy Balius (Fremantle: Black Rider Press, 2013),  32-33.

[10] Excerpts from Jordie Albiston, ‘Lamentations’, in XIII Poems, Rabbit Poets Series, 1 (Melbourne: Rabbit Poetry Journal, 2013), 35-42. Reproduced with permission of the author. ©Jordie Albiston, 2013. http://rabbitpoetry.com/poet-series/

[11] Judith Wright, ‘Bora Ring’, in Collected Poems 1942-1985 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1994), 8.

[12] Judith Wright, ‘Two Dreamtimes’, in Collected Poems 1942-1985 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1994), 318

[13] See the discussion of her work and its critics in Ashcroft, Devlin-Glass and McCredden, Intimate Horizons, 141-63.

[14] John Mateer, ‘Auguries’, in Outcrop: Radical Australian Poetry of Land, ed. Corey Wakeling and Jeremy Balius (Fremantle: Black Rider Press, 2013), 35. Reproduced with permission of the author. © John Mateer, 2013.

[15] Kate Fagan, ‘Authentic Nature’, in Outcrop: Radical Australian Poetry of Land, ed. Corey Wakeling and Jeremy Balius (Fremantle: Black Rider Press, 2013), 159-60.

[16] Kate Fagan, ‘Authentic Nature’, 159. © Kate Fagan, 2012. Reproduced with Permission. ‘Authentic Nature’ was first published in Kate Fagan, First Light (Artarmon, NSW: Giramondo, 2012) http://www.giramondopublishing.com/poetry/first-light

[17] Judith Wright, ‘Gum-trees Stripping’, in Collected Poems 1942-1985 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1994), 133.

[18] Judith Wright, ‘A Document’, in Collected Poems 1942-1985 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1994), 242. See also the discussion in Ashcroft, Devlin-Glass and McCredden, Intimate Horizons, 153-54.

[19] Judith Wright, ‘Summer’, in Collected Poems 1942-1985 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1994), 421.

[20] Petra White, ‘Kangaroos’, in Young Poets: An Australian Anthology, ed. John Leonard (St Kilda: John Leonard Press, 2011), 145. Reproduced with permission of the author. © Petra White, 2011.

[21] Patricia Sykes, ‘Modewarre—ways you might approach it’, in Modewarre: Home Ground (North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2004), 3-11.

[22] Excerpts from Sykes, ‘Modewarre—ways you might approach it’, 6, 8, 9, 11. Reproduced with permission of the author. © Patricia Sykes, 2004.

[23] Sykes, ‘Modewarre—ways you might approach it’, 4, 7.

[24] John Kinsella, ‘Frankenthaler at Jam Tree Gully: (No) Mountain and (No) Sea (1952)’, in Outcrop: Radical Australian Poetry of Land, ed. Corey Wakeling and Jeremy Balius (Fremantle: Black Rider Press, 2013), 170. Reproduced with permission of the author. © John Kinsella, 2013.

[25] Ouyang Yu, The Kingsbury Tales: A Novel (Blackheath: Brandl and Schlesinger, 2008); Michelle Cahill, ‘City of Another Home’, in Vishvarūpa (Parkville: Five Islands Press, 2011), 38-39; Kevin Brophy, ‘Australian Street, Summer’, in Walking,: New and Selected Poems (St Kilda: John Leonard Press, 2013), 51; Jennifer Compton, This City (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2011). With several poets, and here Cahill and Compton provide examples, the attention to place is both local and international, evoking the complex relationships to place that accompany migrant experience. See, also, Lyn McCredden’s readings of the city poetry of Vincent Buckley and Sam Wagan Watson, in her Luminous Moments: The Contemporary Sacred (Hindmarsh, SA: ATF Press, 2010), 75-87.

[26] Lachlan Brown, ‘Prosperity Gospel’, in Limited Cities (Artarmon, NSW: Giramondo, 2012), 63-65. Reproduced with permission. © Lachlan Brown, 2012. http://www.giramondopublishing.com/poetry/limited-cities/

[27] Brown, ‘Prosperity Gospel’, 64, 65.

[28] Freya Mathews, ‘CERES: Singing Up the City’ [online]. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, no. 1 (2000): 5-15. Availability: <http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=758422922060153;res=IELHSS> ISSN: 1443-6124. [cited 14 April 2014].

[29] See for example Bonny Cassidy’s beautiful evocation  of “our beloved protons … finding one another” in her ‘Final Theory’ in Young Poets: An Australian Anthology, ed. John Leonard (St Kilda: John Leonard Press, 2011), 44.

[30] Mark Tredinnick, ‘Lyre Lyre’, in Bluewren Cantos (Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry, 2013), 74-75. Reproduced with permission of the author. © Mark Tredinnick, 2013. http://pittstreetpoetry.com/mark-tredinnick/

[31] Michael Farrell, ‘A Lyrebird’, Southerly 73, no. 2 (2013) [Lyre/Liar, ed. David Brooks and Elizabeth McMahon, with guest co-editor Teja B. Pribac]: 131-32. Reproduced with permission of the poet. © Michael Farrell, 2013.

[32] Ashcroft, Devlin-Glass and McCredden, Intimate Horizons.

[33] See for example, Gwen Harwood, ‘Sunset, Oyster Cove’, in Selected Poems, second revised ed. (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1990), 199-200; E. A. Gleeson, ‘Burial Choices’ and ‘Funeral Rites’, in Maisie and The Black Cat Band (Carindale, QLD: Interactive Press, 2012), 39-41; Anne M. Carson, Removing the Kimono (Melbourne: Hybrid, 2013).

[34] Michelle Cahill, Vishvarūpa (Parkville: Five Islands Press, 2011); Ali Alizadeh, Ashes in the Air (St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2011); Robert Gray, Certain Things (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1993) and Daylight Saving, The Braziller Series of Australian Poets (New York: George Braziller, 2013). Another poet of marked attentiveness to place is the late John Anderson. See his the forest set out like the night (North Fitzroy: Black Pepper, 1995, reprinted 2013).

[35] Bonny Cassidy, ‘Figure’, in Young Poets: An Australian Anthology, ed. John Leonard (St Kilda: John Leonard Press, 2011), 27; Farrell, ‘A Lyrebird’, 131.