Description

In this remarkable book of place and decades of daily encounters in the natural world, Angela Rockel lays out the ways of describing and understanding she has learned through her life. As she writes, she bears witness to this place, which shapes her as she attends to it. The place is southern Tasmania, where she arrived as a young woman from her place of origin, Aotearoa New Zealand. The book is ordered around a monthly set of observations of the weather, of birdlife, mammal life, the life of trees in a forest, and the platypus swimming in the dam. That Angela Rockel is a poet is evident on every page. She writes of the unforgettable meeting with the contingency of things when describing wildfire: all the parts of me ragged in the looming blue of summer, oils going up from the eucalypts, waiting.

Following the here and now, and venturing into family history, too, in that elusive search for belonging, Rockel takes us back to Ireland and to Aotearoa New Zealand to track how we live in the natural world and how we might recover from our old habits of exploitation and dominance in landscapes of living.