The Twilight Observatory
by
Jennifer Kornberger
Publication date
ISBN:
June
2025
978-1-923248-12-0
About the author
JENNIFER KORNBERGER was born in Queensland and moved to Western Australia in her early twenties. She is a poet, writer, and artist based in Walyalup/Fremantle. She employs poetry as her primary practice in public art works and installations. Her first poetry collection, I could be rain, was published in 2007 (Sunline). In 2016, Jennifer won the Tom Collins Poetry Prize and was guest poet at the Perth Poetry Festival. Her writing has appeared in Blue Dog, Plumwood Mountain, Short Australian Stories, and the anthology of the Newcastle Short Story Award (2024). She has been shortlisted five times, and twice commended, in The Newcastle Poetry Prize. As co-director of Theatre of the Sea, Jennifer involves groups of writers and international performers in spoken word installations, notably 22 Pillars (Fremantle Biennale, 2017), Somnus (Fremantle Biennale, 2019), and The Rehearsal (Brink Festival, 2021). Jennifer has lived and worked in Slovenia, developing the imaginative capacities of teachers. She has worked as script editor for a number of First Lights shows in Australia, and was commissioned as script writer for the 2024 Fremantle Blessing of the Fleet Festival. Jennifer has an abiding interest in the scientific work of Goethe—in particular, the optics of colour.
About the book
“The world,” it has been suggested, “is not the place you thought you knew.”
Earth is far more imperilled, far deeper and longer and older and more godly; much more capable of astonishing and nourishing you; stranger and faster and crueller and kinder and more vivid; more urgently in need of one’s tenderness and worthier of one’s long attention, one’s love. This is the world, its places—especially Deep River and Walyalup in southwest Western Australia; imagined places that could be ancestral lands; gardens at night; dream realms; rivers in Tito’s Yugoslavia—that Jennifer Kornberger witnesses and rehabilitates in these astonishing, refined, and limpid long poems, lyric perambulations that reenchant landscapes, call us into more astute and intelligent inhabitation of our lives and histories and places. “Even the most domestic settings are infused with the numinous,” writes Amanda Joy. “You feel the frequency of physics in every line.”
These poems fuse science and art, witness and imagination to school us in seeing, and perhaps in our shared seeing save, the places each of us dwells in and which dwell in us. These poems rewild one’s seeing and being in this savaged world, and they insist on hope. “We had no vocation, just this corroborating,” Kornberger writes in “The Jeweller’s Loupe,” as if what was seen together would live on/ and form the lineaments of another Earth,/ rare but plausible.” This remarkable, delightful and urgent book is such a corroboration; it feels like an invitation into just the kind of seeing with and being with that may make possible a new and sustainable Earth.
“The Twilight Observatory catalyses a new way of seeing the earth we inhabit and the bodies we incarnate,” writes Lindsay Tuggle. “This shattering, gorgeous volume shows us that while our collective decay is rapidly escalating, hope remains, as feathered and furious as a crow on the precipice of flight.
Open to wonder at the same time as being a precise observer, Jennifer Kornberger marries the cosmos with the most everyday of experiences. Hers is a restless poetry that brings in philosophers, scientists, and creators: Plato as a "beekeeper on the ark of lost species" or Goethe as a mysterious suburban visitor. Travel and the imagination are both generously on offer in The Twilight Observatory, a collection which is both a long apprenticeship in wrestling meaning from the world and a catalogue of precise observations of here and now—"the cicadas/ drilling though the tin sky."
—PETER BOYLE
Written from the intersection of poetry and science, The Twilight Observatory animates the eye, catalysing a new way of seeing the earth we inhabit and the bodies we incarnate as both precariously fragile and intricately resilient. The “hygienic body of the forest” and the “shy animal” of the human heart are unified by a chorus of beings and phenomena: ants, crows, comets, eagles, philosophers, physicists, and the Nightself who observes all. Kornberger's visionary poetics is in kinship with Alice Notley's ecopoetic epic and Joyelle McSweeney's necropastoral, yet The Twilight Observatory marks the arrival of an urgent new messenger writing from the frontlines of the Anthropocene. This shattering, gorgeous volume shows us that while our collective decay is rapidly escalating, hope remains, as feathered and furious as a crow on the precipice of flight,
where everything is not yet
blooming, but soaked
in promise,
where even the sapiens are just
fluid hope.
--LINDSAY TUGGLE
This is one of the most potent books of poetry I have read. To write what one is to explore all that makes and informs one’s vision. The Twilight Observatory is Deep Time as fossil photons. Light is measured in aeons here, and even the most domestic settings are infused with the numinous. You feel the frequency of physics in every line. Each meeting point is geometry and wonder. To read this book is to be dazzled with synthesised light, and awed by wisdom, literary and scientific; to be opened, like the poet, to be educated by Country. These poems bristle with revelation and revivify the border between the mysterious and the mundane. Many are written on Whadjuk boodja with acknowledgment and respect. In Kornberger’s travel poems, ironically titled “Waking in Absentia,” the nexus of that knowledge is cut loose from the familiar and walked around the world.
The poet’s sharp vision details images in stunning clarity; her seeing is cinematic in focus and scope. Fierce in intelligence and meticulous with language, Jennifer Kornberger hits a high note with every line.
—AMANDA JOY