Divine Wings: Literary Flights between the Cyclic Avian in Emily Brontë’s Poems and Oblivia’s Swan Song in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2016)

A readerly aesthetic of ecological consciousness, outlined in recent ecocritical scholarship, has led me to connect a number of Emily Brontë’s poems (from an oeuvre created between 1835 and 1848) to the swooping turns in Alexis Wright’s third and latest novel The

Otherness: Essays and Studies, Vol. 5 No. 2, 2016. (Image: journal cover)

Dream Writing beyond a Wounded World (2015)

If it is accepted that pro-environmental actions are related to positive perceptions of the external environment, then it can be argued that literature has the potential to shift readers’ preparedness to act for constructive ecological change. Texts that discern communications from nonhuman …

The Human Place in the Natural World: Essays on Creation and Creatureliness, Fordham University Press, 2015 . (Image: book cover)

Meltemi (2014)

Always I liked Spiros Metropolis, but Mana hated him for all his life. You know why? Because his family were on the other side of politics to us. You think that doesn’t matter? It did. It was all about politics then. Mana …

Australian Love Stories (Inkerman & Blunt)

Bovinity (2013)

My devotion to the bovine is part of an ongoing internal ethical debate, which leads with different pulls from my mind and my body. It is a debate informed by my past, my writing practice and my ecocritical engagement. To get to …

Southerly, vol. 73, no. 2, 2013. (Image: journal cover).

Claire-Louise Bennett 2015 Pond (Picador)

Nails, like me/us, sullied with scrabbling from those ‘dank and wretched’ (17) ditches that life creates. The expressiveness of jam stains, soaring shifts in syntax. I am the protagonist’s friend, I  put my loving hand on this book, declare myself ‘ensorcelled’ (151).

Beautiful. But it’s the matter under the surface that’s sublime