AustLit
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Moon Wrasse is a voyage through transformation and disenfranchised grief: parenthood ambivalence, queer infertility, female-to-male gender transition from the perspective of a life partner; a navigation of identity in a time of climate crisis. It is also a love song to reading in the dialogic tradition of the lyric mode. Alert to questions of intersubjectivity and 'what shapes us' these poems arise from encounters with Australian and international poets ― chief among them, Denise Levertov and Rainer Maria Rilke ― as well as with contemporary philosophy and science, popular music and ecological non-fiction.
'These are poems that speak back, speak to, read with and whisper alongside; that seek to sing the emergent self into being. They are deeply engaged with the notion that we are shaped by the voices around us as well as those we carry within.' (Publication summary)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
This Self Is Not One : Willo Drummond's Moon Wrasse
2024
single work
review
— Appears in: JASAL , 4 November vol. 23 no. 2 2024;
— Review of Moon Wrasse 2023 selected work poetry 'Midway through her debut poetry collection Moon Wrasse, in the poem “A promontory / A memory,” Willo Drummond uses form to mimic the shape of meandering thought, contained in a moment of encounter with the natural world as personified in “pink and purple pig-face / tailors of the coast / salt-resistant sentries” (61). The poem curls down the page like a path, and enacts in doing so the encounter of subjects. The flowers are active companions, overtly present: “Their gesture fills a space / that walks with me, / walks beside me, / treads here too” (61). The poem offers respect to their agency in making response. (Introduction) -
Lyric Permeability, Copresence and the Remaking of Identity in Willo Drummond’s Moon Wrasse
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , October vol. 27 no. 2 2023;
— Review of Moon Wrasse 2023 selected work poetry 'Moon Wrasse offers a poetic space in which human identity entangles inextricably with the species, assemblages and ecosystems of the natural world. The poems of this collection are vulnerable, personal and dialogic, formed intertextually with poets such as Louise Gluck, Denise Levertov and Rainer Maria Rilke, deepening their rich and complicated entanglements. Moon Wrasse presents a sophisticated, emotive and organic lyric incorporating elegy, ecopoetry and permeability.' (Introduction) -
Diversity and Invention : Two New Poetry Collections
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 459 2023; (p. 43-44)
— Review of Icaros 2020 selected work poetry ; Moon Wrasse 2023 selected work poetry 'Tamryn Bennett’s Icaros and Willo Drummond’s Moon Wrasse both use the natural as their central motif. Nature has of course always been a font of inspiration for poets. These two poets draw from that font in vastly different ways. Bennett’s title refers to a form of South American song that is chanted during rituals of cleansing and healing that involve plants. Drummond’s refers to a hermaphroditic fish, the moon wrasse, which acts as a symbol of transformation.'(Introduction)
-
Willo Drummond : Moon Wrasse
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 18 2023;
— Review of Moon Wrasse 2023 selected work poetry 'This is a complex, intriguing and quite exciting first book. The central two (of its four sections) are a kind of poetic search, not for the various certainties or states that poets yearn for, but for a single poet, Denise Levertov. As a long time admirer of Levertov – surely the most likable (and one of the most rewarding) of the post-war school of American “New Poets” – I’m immediately well-disposed and it’s a disposition carried through the other poems of Moon Wrasse. Of course, it raises the question of what one wants from “pursuing” another poet. A poet wants poems, perhaps, as an intellectual wants a better and fuller understanding. But another poet always remains, ultimately, out of reach: the quest valuable but the grail unobtainable. You can feel this in poems like “On Finding and Not Finding Levertov” and “Cedar Tree” in which Drummond visits Valentines Park in Ilford, a place looming large in Levertov’s childhood. In the first of these the issue is one of maturity: the difficulty is to try to see the world through the eyes of a child, even if the child is a nascent poet experiencing the “double vision” of places both in their ordinariness and in the more vibrant life within them, a vision which is the basis of Levertov’s first book, published in England before her emigration to America. “Cedar Tree” is a poem of frustration: touching the tree doesn’t produce the frisson of connection with the poet. ' (Introduction)
-
Willo Drummond : Moon Wrasse
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 18 2023;
— Review of Moon Wrasse 2023 selected work poetry 'This is a complex, intriguing and quite exciting first book. The central two (of its four sections) are a kind of poetic search, not for the various certainties or states that poets yearn for, but for a single poet, Denise Levertov. As a long time admirer of Levertov – surely the most likable (and one of the most rewarding) of the post-war school of American “New Poets” – I’m immediately well-disposed and it’s a disposition carried through the other poems of Moon Wrasse. Of course, it raises the question of what one wants from “pursuing” another poet. A poet wants poems, perhaps, as an intellectual wants a better and fuller understanding. But another poet always remains, ultimately, out of reach: the quest valuable but the grail unobtainable. You can feel this in poems like “On Finding and Not Finding Levertov” and “Cedar Tree” in which Drummond visits Valentines Park in Ilford, a place looming large in Levertov’s childhood. In the first of these the issue is one of maturity: the difficulty is to try to see the world through the eyes of a child, even if the child is a nascent poet experiencing the “double vision” of places both in their ordinariness and in the more vibrant life within them, a vision which is the basis of Levertov’s first book, published in England before her emigration to America. “Cedar Tree” is a poem of frustration: touching the tree doesn’t produce the frisson of connection with the poet. ' (Introduction) -
Diversity and Invention : Two New Poetry Collections
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 459 2023; (p. 43-44)
— Review of Icaros 2020 selected work poetry ; Moon Wrasse 2023 selected work poetry 'Tamryn Bennett’s Icaros and Willo Drummond’s Moon Wrasse both use the natural as their central motif. Nature has of course always been a font of inspiration for poets. These two poets draw from that font in vastly different ways. Bennett’s title refers to a form of South American song that is chanted during rituals of cleansing and healing that involve plants. Drummond’s refers to a hermaphroditic fish, the moon wrasse, which acts as a symbol of transformation.'(Introduction)
-
Lyric Permeability, Copresence and the Remaking of Identity in Willo Drummond’s Moon Wrasse
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , October vol. 27 no. 2 2023;
— Review of Moon Wrasse 2023 selected work poetry 'Moon Wrasse offers a poetic space in which human identity entangles inextricably with the species, assemblages and ecosystems of the natural world. The poems of this collection are vulnerable, personal and dialogic, formed intertextually with poets such as Louise Gluck, Denise Levertov and Rainer Maria Rilke, deepening their rich and complicated entanglements. Moon Wrasse presents a sophisticated, emotive and organic lyric incorporating elegy, ecopoetry and permeability.' (Introduction) -
This Self Is Not One : Willo Drummond's Moon Wrasse
2024
single work
review
— Appears in: JASAL , 4 November vol. 23 no. 2 2024;
— Review of Moon Wrasse 2023 selected work poetry 'Midway through her debut poetry collection Moon Wrasse, in the poem “A promontory / A memory,” Willo Drummond uses form to mimic the shape of meandering thought, contained in a moment of encounter with the natural world as personified in “pink and purple pig-face / tailors of the coast / salt-resistant sentries” (61). The poem curls down the page like a path, and enacts in doing so the encounter of subjects. The flowers are active companions, overtly present: “Their gesture fills a space / that walks with me, / walks beside me, / treads here too” (61). The poem offers respect to their agency in making response. (Introduction)
Awards
- 2022-2023 shortlisted Five Islands Press Prize
Last amended 31 Oct 2023 11:53:21
