Claimed by Country
A6 32pp ISBN 978-09805088-6-4
$9.90 including postage
Anne Elvey is a researcher and poet. She wrote her first poems when she was ten, then on and off over many years, but began to write more intentionally in the past seven or eight years, since around 2002. Her poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in a number of journals, mostly in Australia: Antipodes, Cordite Literary Review, Eremos: Exploring Spirituality in Australia, Etchings, Eureka Street, Going Down Swinging, Island, Mascara Literary Review, Meanjin, PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature and Westerly. In 2008 her poem ‘Christmas Holidays at Home’ was placed first in the page seventeen poetry competition and ‘Putting on your boots’ was highly commended in the Max Harris Poetry Award. Her chapbook length series of linked poems Stolen Heath was published in the Melbourne Poets Union Platinum Chapbook Series. She is working on her new book of poetry Material Blessings.
Still very much a haiku novice, she has published a few haiku and tanka in the Haiku and its related forms section of Stylus Poetry Journal. She participated in the on-line collaborative haiku writing projects: Haikunaut Island Renga and the Renku at Issa’s Snail.
Anne’s research interests are in ecological hermeneutics, ecopoetics and biblical studies. She is author of An Ecological Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Luke: A Gestational Paradigm (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005) and numerous articles. Her current research focuses on ecological hermeneutics and the materiality of the text and she is working on a book entitled The Matter of the Text: Toward a Material Intertextuality to be published by Sheffield Phoenix Press. She is an adjunct research fellow in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, and an honorary research associate with the Melbourne College of Divinity.
In addition to her research and writing, Anne supervisors a small number of higher degree by research students for the Melbourne College of Divinity and does occasional sessional teaching within the Melbourne College of Divinity online programmes and for Australian Catholic University.
Anne lives on Wurundjeri land in Coburg, Victoria, with her partner Greg Price and their two young adult sons, Matthew and Andrew Elvey Price.
You can find out more about her published research and poetry at Leaf Litter.
Claimed by Country VII
A thousand ghosts
lift up the corners of
country and shake it out.
They raise the dust
of old wars and despair.
Grit settles in my skin,
pulsing with the cymbal
hum of summer,
the solid intangible
blue and the percussion
of eucalyptus breathed
through, like brushes
against day’s hide. Here
evening brings night’s
surf and morning,
kookaburras’ clock.
From Sale down to
Port Albert pelican
and musk duck
spread out land.
Land rolls beneath
the sky. My footing
falters. Sun gapes
and shadows marble
the tar. It’s
survival day
at Krowathunkooloong
(our vacation) and country
yields a hundred
shades of rest.
[Written after visiting Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place, Bairnsdale, Victoria, January 2008]
