Save As
'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 Johnson’s 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 culpa’s 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
A. Frances Johnson is a prize-winning poet, author and artist and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne where she teaches Poetry and Poetics, and Contemporary Eco-fictions. Rendition for Harp & Kalashnikov is her third book of poetry (Puncher and Wattman 2017). The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street (Puncher and Wattmann) won the 2012 Michel Wesley Wright Prize. In 2015, she won the Griffith University-Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize and, in 2017, received an Australia Council residency (B. R. Whiting Studio) in Rome. A postcolonial novel, Eugene’s Falls (Arcadia 2007), retraces the Victorian journeys of colonial painter Eugene von Guerard and two associated solo exhibitions interrogate the construction of knowledge discourse around colonial landscape, agriculture and botany (Geelong Gallery 2010, 2015).
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