Swamp: Walking the Wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain

by Nandi Chinna

Chinna uncovers the lost places that exist beneath the townscape of Perth. For the last four years the poet has walked the wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain – and she has walked the paths and streets where the wetlands once were.

Chinna writes with great poignancy and beauty of our inability to return, and the ways in which we can use the dual practice of writing and walking to reclaim what we have lost. Her poems speak with urgency about wetlands that are under threat from development today.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Nandi Chinna works as a research consultant and Community Arts facilitator. Her poetry publications include: Swamp; walking the wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain (Fremantle Press, 2014); Alluvium, (with illustrator Andrea Smith, Lethologica Press, 2012); How to Measure Land, (Picaro Press, Byron Bay Writers Festival Poetry Prize winner, 2010); and Our Only Guide is Our Homesickness (Five Islands Press, 2007). She is also represented in many journals and anthologies including, The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry; Eds John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan, Fremantle, Fremantle Press, 2017, and the Australian Poetry Anthology 2018.

Her latest poetry collection The Future Keepers, is forthcoming from Fremantle Press in 2019.

In 2016 Nandi was Writer in Residence at King’s Park and Botanical Gardens in Perth, Western Australia. She won the 2016 Fremantle History Award for her History of Clontarf Hill, and was shortlisted for the 2016 Red Room Poetry Fellowship. She has had several residencies at Varuna The Writers House in Katoomba NSW.

As a creative writing facilitator Nandi has many years of experience in a variety of settings including community, schools, and festivals. As a community Arts facilitator Nandi works with diverse communities including the Nyoongar community, seniors, people with disabilities, children, and CALD communities.

Reviews

[Anica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chinna takes the reader on an impressively molecular study of Perth's vast environment, paying homage to the land and its layered history. Specific standouts include the poem "Drain", a meditation on the world lost to us while "we are running bent double", "our whole lives poised above our heads", and an earthly eulogy to the suicide of engineer CY O'Connor "awash with estuary, his body a nightshirt detritus lapping against the shore."

Other favourite quotes:

"...the refrain of a cantus firmus country
composed by wind and time and people on foot,
carrying maps in their throat." (The Waterman, 47)

"Exactly what ocean it splashes in
I do not know, as all oceans collide
and wash particles of one country
into the orbit of others." (The Fish, 106)

"Where the history of a creek
meets the future of a river
these vernaculars collide inside the echo
of a drainpipe delivering its conclusions:
arsenic, mercury, lead, pH, 4.0." (The Language of Drainage, 121)

"The Swan River is a steady gaze
bearing the weight of its biography,
still excavating its future." (Banks to Bardon Pathway, 123)

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chinna is a fabulous wordsmith: lyrical, wicked, botanical and literary with a sprinkle of irony. She charts the legacies and destruction of wetlands with science and feeling in perfect poetic form.