Earth Dwellers

by Kristen Lang

The Anthropocene – what can poetry do in this epoch in the Earth’s history defined by human impact? With its immersion in powerful wilderness landscapes, Earth Dwellers challenges our human-centredness by embracing perspectives which set the intimate delicacy of life forms against time scales that go back millions of years. These are deep-breath poems, full of touch and awareness, consolidated by their commitment to the ecologies that envelop us. Asked where we come from, the poems speak not of nations or tribes but of mosses, mountains, oceans, birds. And asked where we are going, the poems refer not to rockets or recessions, but to the biome, a place where consumption is a relationship and not a right. This is ecopoetry – where the natural world is primary, and humans have to find their place in it, rather than the other way around.

The crags do not notice
if I have come from stone or am becoming stone
or am merely part of the weather.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2021

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took my time reading this collection on the tram every morning, to allow my morning to start quietly and reflect on nature and human place within the world - not apart/above it.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection reads like a series of Australian lullabies, you can feel the sway of the trees, the preening of the blue tongues and the plomps of the raindrops throughout these poems. The nightmare flashes of tree “bodies chipped and pressed and weeping” or “chicks that cannot feed, or move, crammed with the smashed up crumbs of our consumption” hit incredibly hard when interspersed like this. Must read beautiful Aussie poetry.