Amanda Anastasi
Loggers, Post Fire
Before renewal can begin its certain
work in the tree heads; before new
green can sprout or flourish, again
they enter. From a dark tree hollow,
a glider peers out to a place where
destruction had swept the trees
and marsupials bolted to the hills,
their limbs burning. The machines
now border the remaining tree ferns,
making flat newly germinating plants.
They begin their task of removing
rotting timbre: the food for insects,
the shelter for plants and funghi,
currently nourishing bandicoots.
They make their dent into the way of things,
disrupting soil that will bring the next yield;
the next birth from black. After the shouts
in Fluoro and vehicles have retreated,
the quietude and inevitable stirrings
return to the double-disturbed land.
Amanda Anastasi is a Melbourne poet whose work has been published as locally as the Artist's Lane walls in Windsor to The Massachusetts Review. Her latest collection is 'The Inheritors' (Black Pepper, 2021). Amanda's work has been published in Best Australian Science Writing, Australian Poetry Journal, Griffith Review, Cordite Poetry Review, FourW, Short and Twisted and Right Now. She is a two-time winner of the Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize and also a recipient of the Words in Winter Trentham Poetry Prize. She is currently Poet in Residence at the Monash Climate Change Communications Research Hub, where she is writing poetry to raise awareness about the climate crisis.
Questions for Amanda Anastasi
What attracted you to writing poetry?
I have been fascinated by language from a very young age – its ability to make you feel and to instantly transport you.
As a child who read constantly, I saw that there was always a more beautiful and striking way of saying something. In high school, I wrote for the school newspaper and the School Principal remains upset about some of the articles I wrote to this day!
Poetry became a place where I could wield language to truth-tell without getting into trouble.
I am attracted to the power of distilled language and poetry’s ability to communicate vulnerability and one specific moment in time. I enjoy the challenge of crafting a poem and using the fewest words possible for impact and emotional presence. For me, writing a poem is like carving out a sculpture and chipping away at it bit by bit, leaving it and then coming back to it with new eyes.
In “Loggers, Post Fire”, the doubling of the lines follows the double destruction of the land. How important to you is the physical placement of words upon the page?
I largely let the subject of the poem dictate how it is shaped on the page and where the line breaks are.
One poem where this is demonstrated is in ‘Winter’, (written as part of my climate change poetry residency) and in my book ‘The Inheritors’.
The poem is about the use of snow machines in ski resorts, which has become commonplace due to there being less natural snowfall in recent years. Visually with this poem, I leave little gaps and bits of white space within the block of text to reflect “the receding head of the mountain.”
There a sense of limits to sanctuary communicated by your use of the word “bolted” that connotes both stasis and flight– they (we) can flee but only so far. Could you comment on how this relates to care?
Due to the lack of care provided by humans to their fellow creatures, marsupials are placed in untenable positions.
Our lack of care for the environment has resulted in multi-pronged threats to the survival and wellbeing of Australian animals.
This has included the destruction of habitat due to both logging and bushfire, decreased accessibility to water, and reduced availability and nutritional value of food sources. This also shows a lack of self-care on the part of humans, with monetary profit holding higher value for us than our oxygen-giving forests, the health of an ecosystem that sustains us, and the quality of our food which will inevitably be affected.
Are you inspired by any poets or creative workers?
I admire Australian poets Jill Jones, Maria Tokalander, Joel Deane, Jennifer Harrison...there are really too many to mention.
Ian McBryde’s one-line poems were a great inspiration to me when initially approaching the monostich form. T.S. Eliot, Neruda and Dickinson have been an early and lifelong influence.
Your work is political in the sense that it advocates fearlessly for change in how climate and the ecology of this planet is used. What do you think about the relationship between creative written work and action?
I prefer poems where a few sparks and spit fly from the pen or where there is something at stake, and when poems reflect the time during which they were written.
Truth telling is an important part of activism and I believe truth telling through poetry can be extremely powerful.
I feel the best political poetry lets the images speak for themselves
Storytelling is the most effective form of political communication and the communication of ideas that may be otherwise challenging. It still surprises me when people call my work ‘political’, as I don’t see caring for the planet as political. The science of climate change should not be a partisan issue.
The theme of this edition of A-OK is care – in that it asks us to be aware of how and what we care for and about and how we manage it. What does it mean to you to be care- less? Is there a sense of outsourcing vulnerabilities (say about climate) in your poem – and to whom? And what do you think are the consequences?
An important part of care is listening, acknowledging issues and taking a course of action to alleviate pain or injustice. No action can be taken without acknowledging where the suffering is taking place and to whom.
My poems put the reader into real climate stories that show where care has not been taken and where there is grief, loss or suffering. By facing these stories, we are better positioned to take action and to not enable suffering.
Care, in its truest sense, requires looking uncomfortable truths in the eye and having the courage to do so. Therefore, to be careless is to close one’s eyes to the facts, to the stories on the ground and to see nothing and do nothing. It is to de-prioritise or to minimise. These days climate denial is being replaced with climate delay.
Delayed action on the climate crisis is a dangerous example of large-scale human carelessness.
Do you have any advice for writers or creative producers?
Don’t underestimate your reader and their ability to be challenged and confronted.
Often, the poems I feel the most nervous about putting out there are the poems that end up striking the greatest chord with readers.
People want authenticity and stories that ring true.
The best response you can receive from a reader is: ‘You articulated something that I thought/understood but didn’t know how to say’ or, ‘I wish I had written that’. You can only get this kind of response when you write honestly and without fear.
What is the publication of your writing that you are most proud of?
The Inheritors (Black Pepper Publishing, 2021) which contains much of my climate change poetry, available at https://blackpepperpublishing.com/anastasiTI.html
Poems from this collection have also been published in Best Australian Science Writing 2021 and 2022 (to come), available at https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/the-best-australian-science-writing-2021-125005/
……..and another thing
