'In her memoir Too Afraid to Cry, published in 2013, Indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckermann related how she had been tricked away from her mother as a baby, repeating the trauma her mother had suffered when she was taken from her grandmother many years before. Eckermann in turn had to give her own child up for adoption. In her new poetry collection, Inside my Mother, she explores the distance between the generations created by such experiences, felt as an interminable void in its darkest aspects, marked by sadness, withdrawal, yearning and mistrust, but in other ways a magical place ‘beyond the imagination’, lit by dreams and visions of startling intensity, populated by symbolic presences and scenes of ritual and commemoration, chief amongst them the separation and reunion of mother and child. Though the emotions are strong, they are expressed simply and with a sense of significance in nature which reminds one of the poetry of Oodgeroo Noonuccal, whose successor Eckermann is.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Dedication:
This book is dedicated to my mothers
Mum Audrey Ngingali, Aunty Mabel,
Aunty Lorna, Aunty Lola, Aunty Nura,
who in their passing strengthened me
to know who I am
and to
Mum Frieda and Mum Jennifer
who still remain
my dearest friends
Ali Cobby Eckermann : Inside My Mother : Student Book
Gladesville
:
Into English
,
2020
24871005
2020
single work
criticism
'The Ali Cobby Eckermann: Inside My Mother Student Book is a study of the prescribed poems of Ali Cobby Eckermann, along with several other texts. It has been designed to fulfil the requirements of the NSW Stage 6 English Year 12 Standard Module A: Language, Identity and Culture.
Students have the opportunity to engage in an enjoyable and detailed study of the ways different authors use language to reflect and shape individual and collective identity. Students will engage in close reading of the following prescribed poems of Ali Cobby Eckermann:
‘Trance’
‘Unearth’
‘Oombulgarri’
‘Eyes’
‘Leaves’
‘Key’ (Publication summary)
'This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary Australian poetry, and examines how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in Australian poetics. The metaphor of the threshold as a point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. It is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. During this (w)rite of passage something new is made. For a writer, being on the threshold is at once a place where she can thresh out ideas (receptive), and the site of creative acts (generative).' (Publication abstract)
'This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary Australian poetry, and examines how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in Australian poetics. The metaphor of the threshold as a point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. It is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. During this (w)rite of passage something new is made. For a writer, being on the threshold is at once a place where she can thresh out ideas (receptive), and the site of creative acts (generative).' (Publication abstract)
Ali Cobby Eckermann : Inside My Mother : Student Book
Gladesville
:
Into English
,
2020
24871005
2020
single work
criticism
'The Ali Cobby Eckermann: Inside My Mother Student Book is a study of the prescribed poems of Ali Cobby Eckermann, along with several other texts. It has been designed to fulfil the requirements of the NSW Stage 6 English Year 12 Standard Module A: Language, Identity and Culture.
Students have the opportunity to engage in an enjoyable and detailed study of the ways different authors use language to reflect and shape individual and collective identity. Students will engage in close reading of the following prescribed poems of Ali Cobby Eckermann:
‘Trance’
‘Unearth’
‘Oombulgarri’
‘Eyes’
‘Leaves’
‘Key’ (Publication summary)
