'Lyre is a sonic, sculptural cornucopia of new and startling forms. Stuart Cooke proposes that all kinds of life — animal, plant and otherwise — have their own modes of expression, each of which can each be translated into a different kind of poetry. Ranging across Australasian oceans, coastlines, rainforests, savannahs and deserts, and similarly wide-ranging in its approach to form and lineation, Lyre asks what happens when poems make contact with non-human worlds; in so doing, it welcomes whole new worlds to poetry.
Inspired in part by books like Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World and Barry Hill & John Wolseley’s Lines for Birds, Lyre is the result of many years of research into a selection of Australasian flora, fauna and landforms. The collection asks what happens to poetry when it encounters more-than human life.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'In this essay, the author argues that the appreciation of nonhuman poetic forms, or an “ethological poetics,” is a necessary but neglected mode of ecological relation, and is especially important in the Anthropocene. Motivated by his own creative practice—in particular, the composition of Lyre, a book of poems about different animals, plants, and landforms—he considers important examples of ethologically attentive poetics before outlining how his compositional method attempts to incorporate insights from the environmental humanities and animal studies. Rather than insisting on their essential difference from human worlds, the author argues for an attentive, ethical, and imaginative engagement with nonhuman lives, through which surprising and unusual forms of poetry might emerge.' (Publication abstract)
'In this essay, the author argues that the appreciation of nonhuman poetic forms, or an “ethological poetics,” is a necessary but neglected mode of ecological relation, and is especially important in the Anthropocene. Motivated by his own creative practice—in particular, the composition of Lyre, a book of poems about different animals, plants, and landforms—he considers important examples of ethologically attentive poetics before outlining how his compositional method attempts to incorporate insights from the environmental humanities and animal studies. Rather than insisting on their essential difference from human worlds, the author argues for an attentive, ethical, and imaginative engagement with nonhuman lives, through which surprising and unusual forms of poetry might emerge.' (Publication abstract)
