Cirrus@Austlit

'Moon Wrasse is a voyage through transformation and disenfranchised grief: parenthood ambivalence, queer infertility, female-to-male gender transition from the perspective of a life partner; a navigation of identity in a time of climate crisis. It is also a love song to reading in the dialogic tradition of the lyric mode. Alert to questions of intersubjectivity and 'what shapes us' these poems arise from encounters with Australian and international poets ― chief among them, Denise Levertov and Rainer Maria Rilke ― as well as with contemporary philosophy and science, popular music and ecological non-fiction.

'These are poems that speak back, speak to, read with and whisper alongside; that seek to sing the emergent self into being. They are deeply engaged with the notion that we are shaped by the voices around us as well as those we carry within.' (Publication summary)

'This article presents a methodology for the exegesis which has been generated through supervisory practice and experience and writer-researchers’ practices of producing PhD theses in creative writing research, with two exemplary, first person descriptions by HDR candidates of their PhD research journeys so far. The proposal here focuses on the creative and cognitive practices brought into play in carrying out each PhD project, asserting that ‘exegetical thinking’ is enmeshed in both creative writing and research processes in a growing ‘spiral’ of complexity and innovation as connections are made between the thesis components in producing original research.'  (Publication abstract)

'Although ecocriticism has roots in Romanticism, much discourse around ecopoetry has come to hinge on a distancing from a ‘Romantic’, ‘ego-driven’ style of poetry, seen to be unethical. Such positions problematize lyric poetry, given its strong association with both Romanticism and the formal centrality of the self. This paper contends that lyric is often conflated with a reductive view of Romanticism and seeks to uncouple the form from such views. Looking to the work of Australian poet Robert Adamson, lyric is framed here as a performative mode rather than a genre, and is presented as an engaged type of ethical discourse which functions via reader answerability. Maintaining a Merleau-Pontean ontology as regards the lyric subject and the dynamic between word and world, and drawing upon Barthes’s use of the term ‘place’, the paper concludes that the lyric can function as a decidedly ethical ecopoetry, in which the place of lyric is also the place of the ecopoetic.' (Publication abstract)