Cirrus@Austlit

'The first thing to note about Hazel Smith’s book is the title, ecliptical. Is it a real word? Does it matter? As well as the gesture to elliptical orbit, which is the title of one of the book’s sections, the word presumably refers to the ecliptic, which is the projection of earth’s orbit around the sun onto the celestial sphere and the plane of the solar system. The word also bounces off words such as eclipse and ellipsis. It possibly even refers back to Ern Malley’s The Darkening Ecliptic, a work famously generated via a kind of cut-and-paste process, a different version of which Smith also employs at times, as well as being a work that notoriously raised questions about authorship and subjectivity, as well as the experimental.' (Introduction)