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.