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 GortonIn 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