“The Island of Brazil” offers a critique of nationalist historical and spatial mythologies by drawing on the agility and flexibility of creativecritical methods. Operating at the intersection of fictocriticism, memoir and travel writing, the essay is both an extension of the author’s previous writing on South America and a journey into the unknown. This entangled mixture is not [just] an aesthetic exercise; rather, the interwoven analysis, description and narration reflect the author’s concern with transnational histories of colonisation – specifically, those analogous forms and metaphorical resonances which have otherwise been separated by modern, nationalist histories and their restricted vistas of representation. “The Island of Brazil” proposes an antithesis of Australian conquest by recalling a neglected lineage of Australian poetics – here represented by Patrick White’s Voss, a novel that is emblematic of colonialist literature but, in its complexity, contradictions and expressionism, powerfully subverts many colonialist tropes. Like Voss, “The Island of Brazil” revives baroque, counter-modern strategies by constructing a series of coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) and discordia concors (a combination of dissimilar images, or even the discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike). Accordingly, vast distances and times are collapsed or overlaid.

Gordon Bennett, Selected Writings, edited by Angela Goddard and Tim Riley Walsh Brisbane: Power Publications and Griffith University Art Museum, 2020, 216 pp., A$45, ISBN 9 7809 0995 2013

Nonhuman Complexity Poetics: Leaf-Cutter Ants and Multispecies Composition Stuart Cooke Stuart Cooke stuart.cooke@griffith.edu.au Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, isaa121, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa121 Published: 01 December 2020

This essay will argue for the relevance of the ‘neobaroque’ in relation to recent examples of Australian poetics. The baroque and neobaroque are central strains of Latin American poetry, and much has been made of the neobaroque turn in Latin American theory, with the alternatives it proposes to hegemonic, linear narratives of modernity and rationalism. However, despite the fact that some of Australia’s greatest writers have profoundly baroque qualities, the baroque as an aesthetic, ontological and/or political category receives scant attention in Australian criticism. In light of these concerns, this essay will provide an outline of both baroque and neobaroque poetics with relation to Australian, European and Latin American examples. I then address the work of leading Mexican poet Coral Bracho, and consider her influence on the last collection of the late Australian poet Martin Harrison (Happiness, 2015). In examining the relations between Bracho’s neobaroque contortions and Harrison’s ‘late style’, I propose that Happiness is illustrative of an alternative trajectory of Australian poetics, which turns from the discipline and reticence of Anglophone models in order to embrace ambiguity, disorder and incompletion – an imagination of complexity (as opposed to its reduction).

ABSTRACT Drawing on recent developments in critical plant studies, this essay attempts to develop an ethological poetics of trees. I start by analysing four examples of recent fiction, poetry and non-fiction that are each about different kinds of trees – The Overstory by Richard Powers; Translations from Bark Beetle by Jody Gladding; Tree Talks by Wendy Burk; The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage – with relation to JC Ryan’s phytocritical model. In addition to their representation of botanical lives, I also consider how Powers and Gammage understand trees as constitutive of Indigenous kinship networks. Then, I combine the insights gleaned from the textual analysis with work by Michael Marder and others in order to outline key features of tree ontology and articulation, and I conclude by positing a provisional arboreal poetics.

Reclaiming Romanticism is the latest addition to Bloomsbury’s Environmental Cultures series, which is edited by Greg Garrard and Richard Kerridge. Featuring other notable titles on climate change poetics, ecospectrality, radical animism, cognitive ecopoetics and nerd ecologies, Environmental Cultures is quickly becoming one of the most exciting selections of cutting-edge research in ecocriticism.

In this essay Stuart Cooke argues against poetics of place. He begins by outlining three ways in which place-based thinking perpetuates elements of imperialist practice. Chiefly, thinking about place negates the diverse lives and forces upon which a habitat depends. Drawing on the work of Heriberto Yépez, Cooke concludes that place is an “absolutist fiction.” Instead, he turns to the lyrebird (Menura alberti and novaehollandiae) as a conceptual totem for an ethical, Australian poetics. Examining the presence (or absence) of the lyrebird in a selection of late twentieth-century and contemporary Australian poems, Cooke outlines how non-Indigenous Australian poets might learn from the lyrebird an alternative, ecological poetics that is not predicated on the eradication of multispecies complexity. The essay concludes with a brief account of a superb lyrebird’s poetics.

Abstract In this essay, the author argues that the appreciation of nonhuman poetic forms, or an “ethological poetics,” is a necessary but neglected mode of ecological relation, and is especially important in the Anthropocene. Motivated by his own creative practice—in particular, the composition of Lyre, a book of poems about different animals, plants, and landforms—he considers important examples of ethologically attentive poetics before outlining how his compositional method attempts to incorporate insights from the environmental humanities and animal studies. Rather than insisting on their essential difference from human worlds, the author argues for an attentive, ethical, and imaginative engagement with nonhuman lives, through which surprising and unusual forms of poetry might emerge.

In an attempt to respond to the West’s general obliviousness to nonhuman semiosis, this article proposes a method for appreciating nonhuman poetics. By combining the critical tools of poetics and literary theory with insights from ethology and biosemiotics, Stuart Cooke outlines a method of criticism for nonhuman creative compositions. Drawing on the work of Gerald Bruns, Elizabeth Grosz, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Cooke begins by theorizing a poetics that attends to the ecology of forces that produce, and are produced by, a work rather than the intentions of a single artist. Cooke proposes that an ethological poetics emphasizes the expressive capacity of materials across a range of written, musical, visual, and performative structures. By studying these expressive forces, Cooke argues, we can extend our appreciation of art and poetics into multispecies domains. The challenge is not to focus on the “meaning” or intention of nonhuman artworks but to study their disruptive, and exciting, forces. The third part of the essay is a case study of an Australian songbird, the Albert’s lyrebird, whose remarkable performance Cooke reads in terms of an ethological poetics. Producing an operatic complex of song, instrumentation, dance, and stage design, the male lyrebird’s composition is thoroughly entangled with the flora and fauna of his umwelt. Resistant to categorization by any generic label, Cooke argues that the lyrebird’s composition is best approached in the terms of transgressive, avant-garde performative and sound poetics—although it escapes such terms, thinking about the bird’s composition in this way compels us into a relation with its territory.

In an attempt to respond to the West's general obliviousness to nonhuman semiosis, this article proposes a method for appreciating nonhuman poetics. By combining the critical tools of poetics and literary theory with insights from ethology and biosemiotics, Stuart Cooke outlines a method of criticism for nonhuman creative compositions. Drawing on the work of Gerald Bruns, Elizabeth Grosz, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Cooke begins by theorizing a poetics that attends to the ecology of forces that produce, and are produced by, a work rather than the intentions of a single artist. Cooke proposes that an ethological poetics emphasizes the expressive capacity of materials across a range of written, musical, visual, and performative structures. By studying these expressive forces, Cooke argues, we can extend our appreciation of art and poetics into multispecies domains. The challenge is not to focus on the "meaning" or intention of nonhuman artworks but to study their disruptive, and exciting, forces. The third part of the essay is a case study of an Australian songbird, the Albert's lyrebird, whose remarkable performance Cooke reads in terms of an ethological poetics. Producing an operatic complex of song, instrumentation, dance, and stage design, the male lyrebird's composition is thoroughly entangled with the flora and fauna of his umwelt. Resistant to categorization by any generic label, Cooke argues that the lyrebird's composition is best approached in the terms of transgressive, avant-garde performative and sound poetics-although it escapes such terms, thinking about the bird's composition in this way compels us into a relation with its territory.

«Мы ехали через Долину Смерти, американо-австралийка и два коренных австралийца, по живописному маршруту из Лас Вегаса в Санта Крус». Этот многоголосый отчет о множестве видов живых существ, встречающихся по дороге, есть некий интеллектуальный вызов шутливого и юмористического рассказа, который является вместе с тем очень серьезным и теоретически провокационным. Путешествия привели в такую местность, которую Донна Харауэй называет зоной контакта: сферой взаимного признания и реагирования. Территория контакта – это место важных вопрошаний: «Кто вы и кто тогда мы? Вот мы, и, стало быть, кем мы должны стать?» События были всем в этой экологии игры, в которой движения всех акторов включали материальное поле во всей его полноте: танцы приближения и отстранения, танцы, возникающие непосредственно, перефразируя Брайана Массуми, из динамического отношения между мириадами заряженных частиц.

This article outlines a transcultural fluctuation between indigenous poetics from Australia and South America in order to respond to some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary ecocritical discourse. I propose that we might turn to indigenous knowledge systems not as part of a reactionary, anti-modern form of Romanticism, but as an alternative, syncretic understanding of the contemporary, in which the past is partner to the present in the formation of future possibility. I outline key features of Indigenous Australian and South American thought, including the centrality of language and poetics in the maintenance of country, before outlining an Indigenous philosophical poetics that spans the Australian and American continents. Indigenous knowledge systems, while to some extent understandable with generalized terms such as "The Dreaming" or "Pachamama" ("World Mother"), are thoroughly localized conceptions of much more extensive, transnational forces.