Save As

(Paperback)

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'Martin Johnston wrote, If out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry, what / do we make of our quarrels with Canberra Save As works to see these things together: memoir, elegy, politics and a feeling for earth. Its poems are everywhere complicated doubled back on themselves by A. Frances Johnsons excoriating awareness of how poetic language is complicit in the commodification of place: using landscape to furnish a poem with picturesque imagery; with the promise of some lasting beautiful elsewhere mea culpas last egotism: / lazy planetary leave-taking. This is a principled, truthful, fiercely intelligent collection.' Lisa Gorton

'In poetry lucid and compelling, Save As bears clear-eyed witness to the warfare waged against the planet by the captains and footsoldiers of industry. A record of environmental degradation, a tally of mounting human debts, and a catalogue of ghosts, both familial and communal, this collection is an uncompromising vision of our contemporary moment, and a moving elegy for what has been lost, and what is being lost devastatingly, irretrievably in the calamitous present.' Bella Li