AustLit

'This essay focuses on the materiality of breath. Breath is encoded in languages and texts, for example, through the quality of letters/characters, punctuation, citation and space. Breath connects human bodies with their habitats, with air and atmosphere, with ecological exigencies of climate and pollution, and with the entanglements of social and ecological violence. I explore a focus on breath as a way of engaging with the materiality of a poem against a contemporary background where air and atmosphere are strained. In the context of climate change, I offer a reading of three poems by Jill Jones, Natalie Harkin and Susan Hawthorne. I focus on the interlinked materialities of breath and text and the ways a poem might speak into the strained breath of a climate change and pollution affected Earth.' (Publication abstract)

'In poetry, there is probably no such thing as simple or unslanted truth. This is because, as John Gibson remarks, ‘[p]oetry does not earn its claim to truth by mirroring an external world or by stating discrete, correct, “facts” about it’ (2015: 14). Yet, notwithstanding poetry’s aversion to discrete ‘facts’, poets fairly often mention truth in their work and a well-known example is Emily Dickinson’s teasing and ambiguous statement, ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant —’ (1998: 1089).' (Introduction)