‘Intents’ – a myriad of meanings

Anne Elvey and Lucy Stewart

Jennifer Compton and Anne Elvey

Rose Lucas, Angela Costi, Jennifer Compton and the Annes – Elvey, Carson and Gleeson

Beyond our human kin, I have wondered how I am related to otherkind. What do human cultures inherit from stone as well as wind and branch and birdsong? How, as a settler on stolen land, can I respond to this question?

This collection Intents is grounded in a sense of the material sacred, the everyday possibility of deep attention to human dwelling in more-than-human habitats. Here, the claims of justice interweave with the stories of stone, leaf, bodies, wind and water in ways that open to the numinous, but always on another’s Country. Attention to human dwelling embraces the relationality of long story, of ancestry and family, of stone as sibling, and the love and loss that is both familial and ecological.

Anne Elvey

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Poetry shared at its best

.. the launch created such a sense of generosity and community and beauty.

In her own quiet way Anne Elvey has gifted us an amazing collection of poems – most written on and about her much-loved home base – Bunurong Country along the bayside of Naarm. The launch of Intents hosted today at Frankston Library (a ‘FrankTalks’ event) was not only a celebration of this particular collection, but also of the poet’s deep attention to place-time-issue; long commitment to community and collaborative artistic effort; ethics and poetic craftsmanship.

Anne M. Carson was mine host to guide us through a feast. As entrée, poets Angela Costi, EA (Anne) Gleeson and Rose Lucas each read a chosen poem from Intents and paired it with a poem of their own.

Jennifer Compton served the main course of launch, choosing poems and reflecting on the myriads of meaning in the collection (and entertaining us with reflections on intents / intense / in tents / and in tense as alternative titles). And then smashed a virtual bottle of bubbly to declare Intents on the menu.

We finished with Anne reading some of poems from the book and an audience discussion on writing poetry, with very experienced and new poets exchanging ideas.

It was indeed, as one participant said, an event full of .. generosity, and community and beauty.