Ruby Street

I just found an old essay, commissioned by an organisation but never published (slight grump), on the poetry of Judith Wright and, specifically, her Collected Poems. It's a bit overviewy, as that was the commission, however, considering that I'm thinking at the moment about domestic space, intimacy and ecopoetics, these few paragraphs seem to contain some useful reference points. So, here's the extract: "If the poems in Judith Wright’s Collected Poems are approached in a way that does not seek to read Wright simply through themes of, for instance, landscape and nature or dub her as an activist poet or a lyric poet, solely, the poems can offer a broader field for exploration. The poems of her later years, such as the rather spare poems reproduced from the book Alive, allow a focus on the primariness of the lived space, of dwelling and intimacy with non-human space and place. This is exemplified in the long poem sequence ‘Habitat’ in which the poet, among other thing...

I think nearly all my most recent writing has something to do with how ‘the local’, gender and intimacy intersect in a kind of ecopoetics. That ‘something’, of course, can take many different forms, however, at least in my mind, remains connected to those ideas, even if tenuously. I’m not exactly sure what a suburban queer ecopoetics might look like, in general, but to my mind, it’s what I’m doing in my own way. In other words, how apparently mundane locations of ecological shifting and climate change/breakdown can figure in a poetry that recollects or reimagines embodied (human and non-human) locatedness and intimacy. If that doesn’t sound too stodgy. It was certainly what I had in mind with my most recent book, last year’s Viva the Real (UQP 2018), as well as in my previous book, Brink (Five Islands Press 2017). And it is what I’ve tried to work through, making the personal even more personal as well as historical (more on this later), in a new manuscript that’s in deve...