AustLit

'There is something about the complexity, the uncomfortability, of climate change, that makes the aesthetic recuperation of classical elements both necessary, consoling, and in some ways or instances at least, inadequate. It is an especially reductive anthropomorphic synthesis of largely non-synthesisable phenomena. And while many artists deploy and reinvent the concept of classical elements in creative, intricate, and compelling ways that serve to challenge its potential reductiveness, this essay will concentrate on a collection of poetry whose performativity short-circuits all of the tropological hard-wiring that underpins our collective imaginaries, not least the earth-fire-wind-water quadruplet. This is the radical eco-poetry of Kate Fagan, whose artistic experimentation, commensurate with some of the avant-garde science of our day, thwarts the kind of axiomatic comprehension that most readers are programmed to desire, and capers instead in vortices of problematics. ' (Author's introduction)