posted on 2021-07-02, 00:00authored byMaria Takolander
Trigger Warning is not for the fainthearted, but neither are the elemental realities of domestic violence and environmental catastrophe that these astonishing poems address. Comprised of three sections, the first summons a difficult personal history by conversing with poets – from Sylvia Plath to Anne Carson – whose dramatised confessions trigger Takolander’s own. The second part remains focused on the domestic, while redeeming that scene of trauma through a reinventing wit. The final section of this extraordinary book turns its attention outside, playing with poetry itself in order to confront the Anthropocene and the final frontier of death. This is poetry that balances ruthlessness and lyrical beauty; poetry alive to its time and audience; poetry not to be missed.
History
Pagination
1-100
ISBN-13
9780702263088
Language
eng
Research statement
Writing Personal and Environmental Trauma
RESEARCH BACKGROUND
Trauma literature and trauma theory have traditionally focused on the expression of discrete experiences of human suffering. My practice-led research in trauma writing, evident in the poetry collection Trigger Warning, responds to two limitations in the field. 1) Trauma writing is associated with individual—often pathological—expression, but the materialist turn in creativity studies reminds us how creativity always emerges from individuals working with the specific traditions and materials of an art form. 2) In the age of the Anthropocene, our understanding of trauma must be extended to include intimately painful experiences of climate catastrophe.
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION
Contributing to knowledge generated in 190402, my poetry collection extends trauma literature in two ways. 1) It foregrounds intensely personal subject matter but also the generative power of the field, signalling how autobiographical poetry gives expression to the personal only through culturally mediated practices of creativity. This is apparent in poems that are ‘triggered’ by other poets as well as in poems that foreground form. 2) It extends the trauma of the individual to the environmental and global, giving expression to alienation and grief in ways that resonate with what Kaplan and Woodbury have called climate trauma.
RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE
This collection’s value is attested to by: its publication by the prestigious University of Queensland Press, which only publishes four poetry collections annually; its naming, prior to release, as a 2021 most anticipated title in The Australian; the publication of individual poems in The Best Australian Poems 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and the prestigious US journals The Chicago Quarterly Review and Kenyon Review; and the commissioned setting of poems at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria and in work by the renowned composer Andy Ford (performed internationally).