Product Description
The essays of Apples & Oranges are selected from a decade of sustained enquiry into the possibilities for poetics in the Anthropocene. Drawing on Cooke’s experiences as a poet, critic, traveller and translator, the book traverses Antarctic, Australasian, and North & South American landscapes. New continental, intellectual and affective formations emerge here as hybrids of memoir, travelogue and literary criticism. Or a plethora of songs and signs are rescued from the wastelands of colonial imaginaries. Often, the explorations lead to poems; sometimes they lead to the contours of Cooke’s own life. Indeed, the logics are poetic rather than sequential: allusion, collage, fragment and metaphor compose recurrent, occasionally symphonic structures. As a series of adventures, the book interrogates – and often transgresses – boundaries between poetry & prose, art & science, and human & non-human. As the planet cooks into catastrophe, leaf-cutter ants make symbiotic sculptures, lyrebirds make forest operas, steel becomes sentient, the Brazilian Amazon blends with the Australian Outback, and Roman ruins foreshadow giant bergs breaking from the Antarctic ice sheet.
