Amanda (A.) Frances Johnson – March 22 2020

Earth Hour – March 28 2020
Switch off your lights for an hour at 8.30pm and raise your voice for nature.

Amanda is a prize-winning poet, author and painter. In 2012 she won the Michel Wesley Wright Prize for The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street and in 2015, the Griffith University-Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize. Amanda’s poetry has appeared in many anthologies including Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008 and Best Australian Poems 2009, 2010 and 2011. In 2017, she received an Australia Council residency at the B. R. Whiting Studio in Rome. Amanda’s paintings have been exhibited in Australia and internationally. Her postcolonial novel, Eugene’s Falls, retraces the Victorian wilderness 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). Amanda is currently Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne where she teaches Poetry and Poetics, and Contemporary Eco-fictions.

The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street
Puncher and Wattmann, 2012; ISBN 9781921450525
In this stunning, visionary collection, A. Frances Johnson offers cautionary threnodies that muse on environment and the endurance of theme park notions of the natural, in spheres poetic and beyond. This is a richly varied collection: among moving lyrics of loss are dystopian visions, such as the last living bird with its wings and vocal chords sludged by the oily depredations of Exxon Valdez, hummingbird drones indiscriminately raiding and killing, and hybrid bird-humans blurring the boundaries between nature and culture to survive.
‘No-one, in the long history of the Australian “bird poem”, has written about birds like this. Johnson’s poetry is metaphorically rich, sharp as a pin, funny, and emotionally devastating. It demands attention.’ – David McCooey

Rendition for Harp & Kalashnikov
Puncher and Wattmann, 2018; ISBN 9781922186966
This new collection extends themes taken up in The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street. Environmental degradation and theme park notions of the natural endure. Accordingly, these poems reflect with tenderness, anger and irony on the ways humans chronicle, construct and war upon their natural environments. ‘Rendition’ puns on the idea of a song lyric, translation, surrender and also torture. In the anti-pastoral, anti-war poems offered here, groups of human beings and individuals are also shown as either tragically marginalized, lost or held too close. Cautionary ecocritical threnodies splice with personal elegies and historical cultural reflections to suggest a world awash with maladies of different kinds, as if to say that human beings must recalibrate love, death, survival and history as matters of urgency.