Wrestling with Bees
Evocative and playful by turn, Natalie Cooke’s first collection is preoccupied by Australian landscapes, what we look at in them and what we don’t. A diverse range of forms, from haiku to pattern poems, reflects on ‘palimpsest landscapes of overlay, erasure’ and the flora and fauna living there—including us. Finely drawn observations about magpies and mosquitos sit alongside musings on maps and modernist art in this exploration of our changing environment.
Born and raised in regional South Australia, Natalie Cooke is a Canberra-based writer of poetry and prose. She received an Anne Edgeworth Fellowship in 2020, which supported the development of Wrestling with Bees, and was a Katharine Susannah Prichard Fellow in 2019. Her poems have been published in a number of anthologies and magazines. Wrestling with Bees is her first collection.
