Clarion

'Clarion' is an eco-poetic suite of words and images written and created by Australian artist and poet Jenny Pollak. It focuses on two extreme weather events since 2020 that decimated a small forest of casuarinas on the western foreshores of Pittwater, just north of Sydney. The poetry speaks in the voice of a woman as she negotiates her relationship with a landscape in crisis. The powerful spectre of the sea as a beautiful and destructive principle sits quietly behind the poems as the instrument of change.

At the heart of the book the casuarinas bear witness, not as impotent victims, but as vital and eloquent mouthpieces, speakers in the complex fabric of place and environment. The poetry inhabits and makes space for these various voices of landscape and elements even as a woman questions her place within it. Pollak's haunting images punctuate the text to heighten and inform the poetry.

"This magnificent collection of images and poems... is a love song, composed in syllables of sand, salt and sticks... Jenny Pollak reminds us that Country is still savage and strong, capable of great compassion. She reminds us that a relationship with Country is still vital and possible." Judith Nangala-Crispin