Poetry ~ Kristen Lang
When I write poetry, it's you I have in mind. The person who will find the words I have worked on. Will we understand each other and what will happen inside you as you read? At the same time, I'm tilting my pen towards the ecosphere in which we are embedded, wanting my words to connect everywhere, and deeply, to the more than human world.I am writing to you from Tasmania, Australia. There is a mountain behind me, trees around me and a dog snoring lightly to my right. Our lives will be different, but poetry offers a way for us to listen, in this turbulent world, to what we also share.The poetry on these pages has been written in response to relationships that are central to all of us - relationships with ourselves, with those beside us, and with the Earth we are part of. It seems more urgent than ever that we find ways to honour all of them.
Poems from the books I have published - ecopoetry, poems about love and family, poems for the anthropocene, poems for the billions-of-years history of Earth - can be found under the titles below.Best wishes, Kristen
Earth Dwellers
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The Anthropocene – what can poetry do in this epoch defined by human impact? The poems in Earth Dwellers challenge our human-centred world view, embracing perspectives which set the intimate delicacy of life forms against time scales that span millions of years. These are deep-breath poems, full of touch and awareness, consolidated by their commitment to the ecologies that envelop us. Asked where we come from, the poems speak not of nations or tribes but of mosses, mountains, oceans, birds. Asked where we are going, the poems refer not to rockets or recessions, but to the biome and our relationships within it.“These strikingly original, beautifully crafted poems reveal a profound, delicately self-effacing talent gifted with a finely tuned sensitivity. This is truly a must-read collection of fresh, haunting poems.” Peter Boyle
Long-listed for the International Laurel Prize, 2021
“This is rich, strong and vital work, full of concise, finely conceived and surprising images, its macro lens as extraordinary as its telescopic one, poem after poem here offering a deep wisdom, an engrossing meditation upon our profound interconnectedness, the world and all its history alive in Blake’s proverbial grain of sand.” David Brooks
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“Kristen Lang’s patient and precise language is a potent testament to her relationship with nature. It’s a connection both considered and felt, cerebral and embodied, at once infused with ripe wonderment and honed by deep respect.” Heather Taylor-Johnson
Click the image to hear
"The roar of it".
Earth Dwellers contains 87 pages of poems and was published by Giramondo Publishing in 2021.The book is available from the author, via PayPal, for $24 (AUD), including postage. It can also be purchased from Giramondo (see link above).
The Weight of Light
“Few Australian poets have fused the mystical and the real with such skill and audacity. The Weight of Light is a collection to savour.” David McCooeyWe are present beside others, amid the complex sublimities of the natural world, and within the weight of our flawed yet exquisite sensitivities - the poems in The Weight of Light are a giddy exploration of the self in relation to the world and the stars beyond. Here, even the smallest sources of light carry hope; music and love, snow after fire, a heartbeat, a squirrel and the skull of a wombat receive equal adoration.“Kristen Lang’s affinity for the natural world pulses everywhere in The Weight of Light like a drumbeat.” Sarah Holland-Batt
“The Weight of Light asks you to listen with your bones. It refreshes you
with its intelligence, care and clarity.” Jill Jones
The Weight of Light contains 88 pages of poems and was published by Five Islands Press in 2017. It was long-listed for the Margaret Scott Prize in 2019.The book is available from the author, via PayPal, for $20 (AUD), including postage.
SkinNotes
Through poems about family, love and being human, SkinNotes digs intimately into the strengths and fragilities of our closest encounters. "Blood harmonies", "The fragile mind", "Being here" and "The heart" are the chapter titles of a collection as generous as it is inquisitive. These are tender, revealing, and probing poems.“Hearing these poems sing off the page is like listening to Pablo Casals play cello.”
Gina Mercer“Readers will surely delight in the subtle, varied command of SkinNotes.”
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
SkinNotes contains 116 pages of poems and was published by Walleah Press in 2017.The book is available from the author, via PayPal, for $20 (AUD), including postage, or from Walleah Press.
Let Me Show You A Ripple
Poems and Photographs
“Kristen Lang is a poet of astonishing intelligence and outstanding lyrical warmth. When I think of what she has already achieved and of what she will achieve I experience a beautiful moment of quietness: she is a gift to the world, and we need her. She has shown me a ripple in a way that makes me realise I’ve never wholly seen one before. Let me show you a ripple –visually and linguistically– is a purely beautiful achievement. It is a book I would give to every friend to whom I wished to give something that expressed essences, essentials.” Peter Bishop
“Kristen Lang’s work is reflective yet humorous, immediate yet questing.” Jill Jones
“an assured and original talent.” David McCooey
Let Me Show You A Ripple measures 20.5 by 19.5 cm with 148 pages of poems and colour photographs.The book is available from the author, via PayPal, for $15 (AUD), including postage.
Reviews
Dr Willo Drummond reviews Earth Dwellers for Plumwood Mountain:
“This is profoundly ecological work […] These poems are asking us to remember the phenomenological experience of our entanglement with the beyond-human, even if we might have forgotten its texture.” Earth Dwellers “asks us to look, to consider, to reframe. It asks (no more and no less of us than) to love, and to recall, in the middle of the pulsing, feeding world, that we are not alone.”
Martin Duwell reviews Earth Dwellers for Australian Poetry Review:
Earth Dwellers “doesn’t play the contemporary game of blame or adopt the contemporary tone of outrage. Instead, its poems try to explore what the new sensation of the fragility of the natural world actually feels like. One of the keywords here is 'entanglement' […] I read 'Wading with Horseshoe Crabs' as a poem not content with the truisms of human evolution but an attempt to make us confront the emotional, behavioural and social consequences of it. Two poems before 'Wading with Horseshoe Crabs' is 'The Roar of It', a less expository and more visceral recreation of someone’s sense of the endless changes that surround us from the subatomic level to the human level 'Sand sucked out of rivers / into more New Yorks, more Bangkoks, more / Luandas'. In a sense the roar is the roar of entanglement in action.”
Lucia Moon reviews Earth Dwellers for Sydney Review of Books:
“Lang’s collection resonates with the philosophy of [Deborah Bird] Rose and the encouragements of [Joel] Spring, to listen deeply with revitalised ecological awareness. It contributes to a growing network of contemporary Australian poetics which move outwardly – like a slow-blooming creeper – across the colonial foundations of ‘modern Australia’ toward an emerging, revitalised landscape.”“If the collection figuratively lays down within the infinitesimal, it simultaneously traverses the topography of the land and arises to all Earth’s magnitude. … Lang skilfully negotiates a metaphorical push-pull between the microscopic and the macro.”
Jonathan Shaw reviews Earth Dwellers:
“I can’t begin to tell you what a relief Kristen Lang’s poetry was, what balm for the soul […]
In these poems, the non-human world isn’t there as a metaphor or a mood indicator: there’s a consistently humble attempt to be present, to be aware of being part of it all: ‘We were never alone’ is how she puts it in ‘Wading with horseshoe crabs’.”
Daniela Brozek Cordier reviews SkinNotes for Plumwood Mountain:
"SkinNotes is a wonderful book. It might very well herald an epistemological shift into a different way of looking at humanity’s place within a vast, beyond-human world. In ways that remind me of Virginia Woolf’s writing, Lang seems to offer such an accurate portrayal of humans and the world that encloses them, that much will always remain to reward future reading and re-reading."
Martin Duwell reviews SkinNotes and The Weight of Light for Australian Poetry Review:
"Kristen Lang is a terrific addition to the cast of Australian poets, someone in whose poems we can feel the pressure of complex thought and who is craft-sophisticated enough to explore the best ways of making poems out of embodying these ideas."
Amelia Walker reviews The Weight of Light for TEXT review:
"The Weight of Light matters to our world and in it. Without ever preaching to its readers, it reminds us of all we could be doing to live more gently, more sustainably. It is a book that needs to be read and re-read. I recommend it most especially for courses in creative writing and/or literary criticism, where it could serve as an illustrative example of how contemporary poets address crucial issues of our fragile, precious world."
Alison Clifton reviews SkinNotes for StylusLit:
"This is a poetry of the here and now, present in soul or spirit, and encased in the warm contours of a breathing body. …Kristen Lang is an urgent poetic voice singing a salutation of love, recognising her kin in the breathing and beating of the souls and hearts around her. The triumph of this collection is that it holds in its tight clutch of imagery and themes so much variance, so many truths, so much nuance. This is a fresh, dynamic poetry for the reader to return to again and again."
Nathanael Pree reviews SkinNotes in Cordite Poetry Review:
"One characteristic of complex and original works is their confidence to operate outside established genre. SkinNotes contains Confessional and Imagist overtones without being dependent on either sensibility, creating enough space to manoeuvre and draw breath. ...[There are] moments of spellbinding clarity and quietude that stop the reader short in sheer admiration. ...a resonant tour-de-force."
Mary Cresswell reviews *The Weight of Light" in Plumwood Mountain:
"The poems in this collection have an extraordinary range of topic and of voice... Reading the book we drift through various stages of being without any noticeable jolt as we go from one space to another. Everything makes sense in its place."
Contact
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