'A Gamble for my Daughter takes its title from the final poem in Luke Fischer’s third full-length collection, which addresses the dilemmas of raising a child in a world fraught with political unrest and environmental catastrophe. This contemporary situation is historically contextualised by other poems in the collection, including the five-part sequence ‘Orphic Elegy’ that opens the first section of the book. In its retelling and revision of myths about Orpheus, this poem sheds a unique light on the historical breakdown of a holistic vision of the universe in modernity and the resulting alienation of humanity from nature and the divine. Parts I and II reimagine ancient Orphism. Part III focuses on the integration of art and science in the Renaissance. Part IV centres on the twentieth century and addresses the question famously formulated by the philosopher Theodor Adorno about whether it is possible to write poetry after Auschwitz. Part V revises myths about Orpheus’s magical ability to charm animals (and his relationship to the dead), in connection with the mass extinction of animals that is currently taking place. The poems in the book’s second section speculate in a mythopoetic and embodied way on the possibilities of establishing new forms of interconnection between art and the environment, mind and nature. The third section addresses the human relationship to animals, the ecological crisis, and the violence of colonisation, and wrestles with questions about how to bring up a child in the face of the challenging future that she will inherit. This collection takes the synthesis of poetry and philosophy to a new level of sophistication, insight and empathy previously unseen in Australian poetry.' (Publication summary)
