Cirrus@Austlit

'This article explores literary practices placing the writer in dialogue with the places he has inhabited recently while researching the Australian novel. This includes a fictocritical engagement with place-based Australian literature (via Xavier Herbert and Randolph Stow) and a maverick whizz through deconstruction and genre studies. Written in an elegiac mode punctuated by an environmental humanities countersignature, this example of period rhetoric embodies autobiography in the Anthropocene, the event horizon of human signature.' (Publication abstract)

'This book takes the work of three contemporary poets John Burnside, John Kinsella and Alice Oswald to reveal how an environmental poetics of place is of significant relevance for the Anthropocene: a geological marker asking us to think radically of the human as one part of the more-than-human world.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This essay examines John Kinsella’s prize-winning poem “Bushfire Approaching.” Drawing on Brian Massumi’s work on anticipated disaster—in particular his attention to trauma-survivors haunted by “the smoke of future fires”—we analyze Kinsella’s treatment of debates surrounding climate change in Australia. Fire in ‘Bushfire Approaching’ is both symbolic and real, representing burning in the past, present and future. The poem’s articulation of place, space and time captures oppositions between the willed amnesia attributed to many fire survivors, along with a vision of a future punctuated by repeated climatic catastrophes. Deploying affect theory and close reading through an ecocritical lens, we interpret the bushfire as a signifier of the complex relationship between climate change and custodianship of the land. This approach situates Kinsella’s poetry within a broader discussion of the bushfire as a natural phenomenon, while we also consider the poet’s deep respect for fire and its role in Australian ecology.'

Source: Abstract.