Writing ecological disfigurement: First Nations poetry after ‘the black grass of bitumen’

This article examines selected First Nations poetries, showing how intertextual parodic language strategies, dynamic elegy and polyphonic poetic registers critique proleptic environmental mourning, simplistic apocalypticism compromised visions of political reconciliation – ‘all this potplanting in our sovereignty’, as Evelyn Araluen (2020b, p. 81) describes it. Alison Whittaker, Jeanine Leane, Araluen, Ellen van Neerven, Alexis Wright others are also shown inheritors the environmental-activist poetries Oodgeroo, Kevin Gilbert Lionel Fogarty. I analyse each these poets represents Country a ‘permanently disfigured state’ (Daniels & Lorimer, 2012, 5), bearing witness to environments that exist after settler ‘nature’, dismantling Western theologies nature alongside. To wit, show poems assert temporal vantage points outside linear telos material endgames extractive colonial time, reinforcing enduring intrinsic spiritual fealty with Country, community ‘ancestor time’. In Ali Cobby Eckermann’s words, ‘These taking time. They honouring story’ (2020, 147).