AustLit

'The poems in The Future Keepers honour ecosystems and the custodians of future ecologies. They navigate the poet’s own embodied experiences of change and succession – of family, community and place. From the research scientists, gardeners, birds and plants of Kings Park, to the activism and ecosystems of the Beeliar Wetlands, to the poet’s own inherited landscapes, these poems evoke mutuality and exchange in speaking of the gifts we receive from being open to encounters with other species, and the reciprocity that these gifts imply.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This paper is a response to activism in the summer of 2016/17 when bulldozers pushed a 5km highway footprint, known as the Roe 8 extension, through urban wetlands and woodlands in Perth’s southern suburbs. We argue that the impact of the community campaign to halt Roe 8, and the clearing of this land evoked a form of cultural mourning and loss that can be thought of as solastalgia (Albrecht 2008).  As an increasingly common experience in the Anthropocene, we are interested in how solastalgia can be expressed. In our need to comprehend and articulate solastalgia, we propose that a poetic response to the Roe 8 bulldozing offers a complex and intense a form of mourning which is not restricted to that summer of activism but connects with broader experiences of environmental loss.  Poetry has long been a form of writing that unsettles, that gives voice to the un-namable, to the currents and sinews that run beneath the surface of an often alienating and incomprehensible society. As part of a tradition of activist poetics, this article includes poetry written in response to the physical affect of witnessing radical ecological destruction.'  (Publication abstract)

'Caitlin Maling's second poetry collection Border Crossing (2017) departs from the home terrain of childhood and growing up in Western Australia that Maling so searingly interrogated on her first book Conversations I've Never Had (Fremantle Press 2015), shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and the Dame Mary Gilmore Prize. As the name suggests, Border Crossing moves away from Perth where the author grew up and turns its gaze to the self in exile...' (Introduction)

A sequence of poems following plans to drain a local wetland, and the community protests against it.