My new poetry collection Leaf published by the exciting Liquid Amber Press is almost out in the world and will be launched online by Shari Kocher at the Liquid Amber Zoom event on Thursday 22 September 2022, from 7.30pm. The launch is part of an Ecopoetics feature focusing on plant poetics with readings from Peter Larkin and John C Ryan. There is also open mike. Bookings are free but essential: https://liquidamberpress.com.au/events/
Many thanks to Pauline Brightling and Rose Lucas for their publishing and editing nous, to Sharon Monagle for the cover image, and John C Ryan and Harriet Tarlo for their recommendations:
Within a human-flora arc, Anne Elvey’s Leaf weaves an entrancing course. Absorbingly polymorphic in arrangement, the collection harmonizes the diverse voices and voicings of plants—affective, imagistic, mnemonic, scientific. This vibrant entry point into the elusive lives of trees and other botanical forms heralds the vegetalization of language—the plant-like becoming of poetry.
John Charles Ryan
Be ‘at leaf’ with Anne Elvey in this drifting book in which this most sensitive of poets seeks a form for what we conceive of as leaf, both in general and particular terms. Poetic techniques and tones shift in this quest, just as different species and individual trees, with their colours, histories and textures, materialise on the page. The lives of leaves are taken seriously here in experimentations in empathy and explorations of our relationships with trees. At the same time, there is a humming awareness of the threat to all our lives posed by the climate crisis: a sense of the significance of weather and water runs through this work, and is related to the specific colonial history of Australia from where Elvey writes. A book well worth your engagement and a powerful addition to the poetry of plant/human relations.
Harriet Tarlo
Sun Glint Drift 