AustLit

'A coupe is a specific area of forest identified for logging operations under VicForests’ Timber Release Plans. Despite the ecological catastrophe of the 2019-20 Summer bushfires which burnt through 1.25 million hectares of forest in East Gippsland VicForests has not revised its logging plans, in fact two additional Timber Release Plans were approved by the Board of the state-owned company in July and December 2020. More than 550 coupes and 20,000 hectares of forest including key unburnt refuges are scheduled for logging in East Gippsland.

'The Coupe Portraits series was created by Louise Crisp and Lisa Roberts as part of Stony Creek Collective a collaborative multi-artform research project undertaken in the foothill forests of East Gippsland during 2020-21. The project was supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.' (Introduction)

'Glide is the second part of an eco-poetic project that began with the landmark collection Yuiquimbiang, which was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2020

'Louise Crisp’s new collection extends her walking interrogation of environmental destruction in south-eastern Australia; stolen land afflicted by the ongoing colonial practices of logging, mining and land clearing.

'Glide is a series of radical long-form poems which attend to specific East Gippsland ecosystems: endangered gliders of the foothill forests, rare grasslands of the Gippsland Plains, a copper mine on the montane headwaters of the Tambo River, and the historic Brolga country of the Gippsland Lakes’ fringing freshwater wetlands in counterpoint to the Brolga swamps and lagoons of south-western Victoria. Crisp creates an intimate and haunting poetics of inhabitation and dialogue with the more-than-human world.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Read. This is poetry. Both a praise and a lament for Country. Read. There is little like it. Australia struggles with an embrace of the past, but Louise Crisp does not flinch from the intimacy of fact. If there is regret here, there is also hope – hope and a plea to you, reader, to witness the works of those for whom the land is not their mother.' (Introduction)