The Future Keepers

by Nandi Chinna

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.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2019

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

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Australian Nanda Chinna is one of a growing number of eco-poets from around the planet. Don’t know what this is? Well, if you are a person of a certain age, you know that one of the time-honored topics of poetry is nature, usually a celebration. Eco-poetry continues that tradition, but in the light of the environmental devastation, it also simultaneously mourns the loss of nature. Or, to put it somewhat differently, eco-poets “honour ecosystems and are the custodians of future ecologies.” And it’s usually personal, as in pertaining to the poet’s local habitat.

Chinna wrote a doctoral dissertation base in part on her walking the lost wetlands of Perth. The Future Keepers is one of several books by Chinna about her environment, and poems of her aging as a childless woman, the loss of a parent, and the mental distress caused by environmental destruction.

Beeliar
Dec 6, 2016

Swan and sedge,
Dugite and tiger snake,
Nuytstia floribunda, fringe lily, woody pear
Marri, mungite, dianella, jarrah, balga, hibbertia
Quenda, yoorna, lerista, skink, peacock spider,
Christmas spider, pardalote, striated pardalote,
Heron, spoonbill, ibis, swamp harrier, little eagle,
Musk duck, pied cormorant, long-necked turtle,
Aquifer, mud, algae, water, donkey orchid, spearwood
Dune, bassendean dune, tadpole, frog, banded stilt,
Pelican, clicking frog, moaning frog,
I call on you to survive.

Malvolio Road Goodbyes

Between what has been
erased
and what has yet to be;
five metres of sand,
one hundred metres of fence,
three security guards,
and a pair of tawny frogmouths
disguised as a jarrah tree.
My body is a banner strung up;
like tensile wire I sing the fence,
voice cracked open snapping and whipping;

and the kind dog-walking woman lays her hand
on my shoulder as the names burn
out of my mouth rusting my body to the steel mesh;
as if names could somehow hold back
bulldozers, and police, and men in white utes
hi-vis jackets, hardhats.

Goodbye woody pear, goodbye Quenda
Goodbye marri, tawny frogmouth, cockatoo
Goodbye orchids, goodbye dugite
Goodbye bobtail, blue wren, purple fringe lily
Goodbye balga, wattle bird
Goodbye ground where my feet have stepped
my ears have listened, my nose has smelled,
my body has lived.

These two poems, back to back, are an invocation to survive, and an elegy or lament for the destruction.

[Saskia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nandi’s way of feeling and seeing and naming the intangible in the world around her is so special and I am grateful to be able to engage with her work. I love the layers of indigenous knowledge, reckoning with colonial values, mourning aging and death and climate collapse, and the integrity with which she lives her life doing something about it, which is all reflected in this collection. Some of the poems make you shiver with their intensity (especially Beeliar Wetlands section), and some make you know where you are for maybe the first time.

Borrow my copy / read it / this is in the Wwim library x

[kaite · Rating 5 out of 5]

a gorgeous collection, some of australia’s best

[Josephine Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finely crafted, cleverly curated. A deep understanding of country; a plea to help preserve it. A West Australian source book. Rich language and layers of meaning.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nandi Chinna is the most amazing writer. I could barely read the sections on the Beeliar wetlands, so intense they are at recalling the campaign to stop the highway through them 3 years ago. The section on searching for ancestors in England and finding only reminders of home is poignant beyond belief. She writes of local landscapes around Perth as if they are bodily, as if being here gives us an earthly body. Chilling, joyful, uncannily familiar and yet foreign, these poems are worth lingering over, and reading over again.

[Holden Sheppard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a masterful collection of poetry, largely focusing on ecological issues but also branching out into other areas including ageism. Some of the most fervent poems tackled the conservation of the wetlands in Perth's south and the Roe 8 debacle. My favourite poem was 'The Boy on the Mandurah Road' which was heartbreaking in what it depicted - a desperate suicide attempt, and the author's attempt to intervene. Nandi Chinna is a truly gifted poet and this collection shines.

[Kate Larsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

An eco-centric collection that transported me home to Whadjuk Noongar Boodja of Western Australia and made me think hard about my environmental responsibility and culpability.

[Kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a lovely love for environmentalism.

[Vannessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immensely beautiful poetry, so evocative of place and the more-than-human world in Western Australia. I really loved this collection.