Background

1. The art of the land: Land Art draws on my ongoing interest in more-than-human agencies and creativity. The poems attempt to evoke living, breathing landscapes in which human participation and observation is only one component.
2. The land art movement (circa 1960-70) expanded the boundaries of art to include soil, rocks, vegetation and water, and sites that were often distant from population centres. Land art extends the older tradition of plein air painting, but for poetry there is little if any discussion of how such practices might also be productive for composition.

Contribution Land Art responds to a wide variety of more-than-human phenomena, and employs a concomitantly wide variety of forms to do so. The title sequence engages with a series of paintings by Paul Cézanne, in which objects become enmeshed in a lively, sensuous world. This exploration leads into the main poem, ‘Bundanon’, which establishes a ‘field poetics’, or a series of poetic fragments and field sketches/drawings. Similar to the photographic documentation of the land artists, this poem serves as record of the land’s art—in this case produced by the land, to be witnessed by the poet.

Significance This collection was commissioned by Calanthe Press to form part of their new poetry list. Many of the poems had been published previously in leading national and international locations. The main poem of the collection, ‘Bundanon’, was composed during a residency at Bundanon Trust. The collection was launched by poet Liam Ferney at Under the Greenwood Tree Bookshop on Tamborine Mountain in March 2022. In his launch speech, Ferney said that the poems aim to “shake us loose from our tired habits of perception,” which “is a crucial step towards responding to the challenges of our climate crisis,” and that the book’s best moments do “more than the laws of language would suggest is possible.”