'Yuiquimbiang is part of an ongoing project to create an ecopoetic form that integrates political essay and environmental poetics: a project that evolved out of my double life as a poet and environmental activist. It was driven by a desire to develop a radical ecopoetic form that would effectively communicate Australia’s ecological crisis as encountered in two specific regions – East Gippsland and the Monaro – and enact an alternative inhabitation of the land.
'The series of mainly long-form texts in this collection is grounded in extensive walking, listening and research. A concomitant slow reading is encouraged. In the drafts, the work included detailed references that have been distilled here in the notes section at the end. I have spent decades attending to this place, and continue to search for a glimpse of the pre-European grasslands and forests and celebrate their rare survival. The work attempts to defy the continuing colonial violence that permits and supports the undoing of the land.
'‘Yuiquimbiang’ is the first recorded European mishearing/ misrepresentation of a Ngarigu word, written down by John Lhotsky in 1834 as the name of a Monaro run, which later became known as Eucumbene. The Eucumbene River, once referred to as the East Branch of the Snowy River, was excluded from the 2002 intergovernmental agreements to return environmental flows to the Snowy.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Glide
Glebe
:
Puncher and Wattmann
,
2021
21192277
2021
selected work
poetry
'Glide is the second part of an eco-poetic project that began with the landmark collection Yuiquimbiang, which was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2020
'Louise Crisp’s new collection extends her walking interrogation of environmental destruction in south-eastern Australia; stolen land afflicted by the ongoing colonial practices of logging, mining and land clearing.
'Glide is a series of radical long-form poems which attend to specific East Gippsland ecosystems: endangered gliders of the foothill forests, rare grasslands of the Gippsland Plains, a copper mine on the montane headwaters of the Tambo River, and the historic Brolga country of the Gippsland Lakes’ fringing freshwater wetlands in counterpoint to the Brolga swamps and lagoons of south-western Victoria. Crisp creates an intimate and haunting poetics of inhabitation and dialogue with the more-than-human world.'
Source : publisher's blurb
'Read. This is poetry. Both a praise and a lament for Country. Read. There is little like it. Australia struggles with an embrace of the past, but Louise Crisp does not flinch from the intimacy of fact. If there is regret here, there is also hope – hope and a plea to you, reader, to witness the works of those for whom the land is not their mother.' (Introduction)
'Read. This is poetry. Both a praise and a lament for Country. Read. There is little like it. Australia struggles with an embrace of the past, but Louise Crisp does not flinch from the intimacy of fact. If there is regret here, there is also hope – hope and a plea to you, reader, to witness the works of those for whom the land is not their mother.' (Introduction)
