Anthology launch

Planet in Peril: Photography, Art and Poetry, edited by Isabelle Kenyon
AND! raising funds for WWF and The Climate Coalition

@ the new larger (and wonderfully welcoming) Garden Linge Creative Space, Enmore Road, Newtown. And the anthology is for sale there, printed in Australia.

My poem in the anthology is 240 grams, based on work on Lord Howe Island, but I also played extracts from a Bushfire Journal, a video John Laidler and myself are close to finishing.

November 9

Cook’s place names were tools of travelling rather than fruits of travel. Paul Carter

Bushfires burn north, south, west. East is at sea.
Bostobrick; Bril Bril; Bald Knob Tick Gate; Doon Doon; Start sunrise video
Shark Creek; Thumb Creek; Muck Creek; Halfway

Creek; Tullymorgan; Woodenbong; Stockyard Flat;
Rivertree; Captains Creek; Purfleet all on fire,
all names new to me which doesn’t inspire confidence,

all recently pinned to the map since fire-stick farming
and expert country management petered out.
A hundred homes lost. One confirmed death.

The sun’s in hiding air poisoned, the sky compressed
to an obese grey birthmark, or death mask whose
features, eyes, mouth, grimace, are being suppressed.

This bushfire sunset is making a fist of glamour aping
Red Studio by Matisse. Now I think of it, the dawn chorus
failed this morning, but we’ll stay and fight for our house.

Home is the pilgrimage, arrival through the garden.
A Southerly woke us after midnight ripping branches,
the small hours heard repetitions of emergency alerts.

Twenty minutes south-west, friends split the nightshift
to watch their damaged hillside spill lipstick-red,
sidling closer, slow-motion ambush until collision.

Images from Lord Howe