A tonic for poetry lovers, Tossed Up by the Beak of a Cormorant by NANDI CHINNA and ANNE POELINA is a powerful collection about connection, nature and culture that is not to be missed.
We’ve chosen two poems for you to enjoy.
ABOUT THE BOOK
A stunning collaboration between poet Nandi Chinna and Martuwarra guardian Professor Anne Poelina.
Punctuated by three long poems from Anne Poelina, this book-length collection explores meaningful and respectful responses to place through immersion.
Together, the poems explore the beauty and complexity of the Kimberley region in Western Australia and the importance of a connection to land.
Perfect for poetry lovers who enjoy collections that push boundaries and engage with important themes.
*************************************
On Danggu
The Elders said I should talk to the river,
so I sit on the muddy bank and feel foolish,
tongue-tied, what should I say to this ancient being?
I love you I mutter in blunt English and
feel embarrassed,
until I begin to comprehend that I need to be quiet,
to leave my hat, my clothes and shoes
discarded on the edge and slip
into warm water, brown as clay,
sink beneath the surface into myriad
voices speaking in stone,
speaking in lime, in sediment, in fish scales,
in rain coming down from other countries.
That it isn’t so much about what I say
but what I can hear and see,
my self contracted to a pinpoint beneath time,
beneath the walls of the sky,
enveloped in something huge,
something so old but continually new.
A sea eagle swoops, talons extended,
grasps the river surface and pulls out silver.
A cormorant drops full-bodied
like fruit from a tree
swallowed by the river’s arcane depths.
Inside the reef-caves smell of decades and decay.
A tiny coin-sized turtle turns to meet my gaze,
our eyes held in light suspension
I drift beneath white stone
rippled by antediluvian oceans,
the huge narrative of myself
reduced to one dumbstruck moment
enfolded inside the river’s skin.
*************************************
In the long hours of the night
how many of us are lying awake
mourning for rivers that no longer flow,
for the gaps in the playlist,
so many voices deleted
from the soundtrack of dawn?
How many of us when we finally fall
into a restless kind of sleep,
dream of birds we once knew to herald our mornings,
now reduced to the utter loneliness
of a single unaccompanied song,
or a meticulous drawing in an out-of-print
ornithological journal.
To be the last of your kind, and then the last.
The extant wild river pulses in my temples,
wakeful as her current flashes through me
I’ll hold on through every bend,
each riffle and waterfall, submerged sandbank, and reef cave
as she spreads out across her floodplain
and pummels against the caterpillar legs of the bridge.
There are people on the banks
from Mornington to Derby
whose lives hold the river’s memory
and the brolga fishing in the pebbly shallows,
where will she go when the last wild river is gone?
I wish there was a remedy
for the loneliness of the last wild river,
perhaps only to wade into the flow
to hold the river’s life in our hands
let it pour through, let its worry
become our worry, its survival
become our work.
*************************************
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Nandi Chinna works as a Research Consultant, Community Arts Facilitator and poet. She was born on Kaurna country in Adelaide and currently lives and works on Bunuba lands in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and on Noongar Country in the southwest of WA. Nandi uses mindfulness and meditation, slow walking and immersion in nature to facilitate creative writing. For the last seven years, Nandi has worked with First Nations people on poetry projects about rivers, wetlands and homelands. Most recently, Nandi collaborated with Nyikina Elder Professor Anne Poelina – a Guardian of Martuwarra Fitzroy River – on a poetry project focusing on the Martuwarra River. She is the author of four poetry collections. Her poetry book The Future Keepers was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2020 and was highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Prize in 2019. In 2021, Nandi was awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Writing Fellowship.
Professor Anne Poelina PhD, PhD, MEd, MPH&TM, MA, Chair and Senior Research Fellow, Indigenous Knowledges Nulungu Institute of Research, University of Notre Dame. Adjunct Professor, College of Indigenous Education Futures, Arts & Society, Charles Darwin University, Darwin. Peter Cullen Fellow for Water Leadership.
Anne is the inaugural First Nations appointment to the Murray–Darling Basin Authority Advisory Committee on Social, Economic and Environmental Sciences (2022). She is also a member and Visiting Research Fellow of the Institute for Water Futures, Australian National University, Canberra; and is a Member of the Commonwealth Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water as part of the Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Water Interests (CAWI).
In 2023, she was nominated as Ambassador for the Western Australian State Natural Rangelands Management, and in 2019, she became a founding member of the Western Australian government’s Aboriginal Water and Environment Advisory Group (AWEG). In 2018, she became the inaugural Chair of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council.
Anne has been recognised for many of her achievements and contributions, including receiving a Laureate (2017) from the Women’s World Summit Foundation, Geneva; the Women Taking Climate Action Award (co-winner 2023) awarded by the Zonta Club of Melbourne on Yarra and the Zonta International District 23 Zonta Says NOW team; and the Kailisa Budevi Earth and Environment Award, International Women’s Day (2022) in recognition of her global standing.
0 Comments