Cirrus@Austlit

'Before we’d finished scattering the ashes of trees after the bushfires, a pandemic folded us inside with our grief and confusion and sourdough. Soon enough, poetry started to float out through the windows, across our screens and social media, as if a salve for isolation. Inevitably, when the world is too difficult to describe we turn to poetry, arguably our oldest form of literature, ‘to explain the unexplainable’, as Bruce Pascoe says in Extinction Elegies. Poems speak to us through panic and fences, closed doors, forests, rivers and distanced days. Their atoms lodge somewhere within us and we carry them close, hoping that, in the inferno of loss and uncertainty, the intensity and ambiguity of poetry can salvage something. Whether it’s a memory, a way of undoing the world, the remnants of a life, a new relationship, a forest or community, poems connect us by distilling the personal and universal. So what’s the social impact of poetry in the midst of a pandemic?' (Introduction)