Apples & Oranges

The essays of Apples & Oranges are selected from a decade of sustained enquiry into the possibilities for human and more-than-human poetics in the Anthropocene. Drawing on Cooke's experiences as a poet, critic, traveller, and translator, the landscapes are predominantly Antarctic, Australasian, and North & South American. New continental, intellectual, and affective formations emerge here as hybrids of memoir, travelogue, and literary criticism. Or a plethora of songs and signs are rescued from the wastelands of colonial imaginaries. Often, the search for meaning leads to poems; sometimes it leads to the contours of Cooke's own life. Indeed, the logics are poetic rather than sequential: allusion, collage, fragment, and metaphor compose recurrent, occasionally symphonic structures.

In line with the book's title, the essays interrogate and often transgress boundaries between poetry and prose, art and science, and human and non-human. The general tenor is both exploratory and precautionary: as the planet cooks into catastrophe, leaf-cutter ants make symbiotic sculptures, lyrebirds make forest operas, steel becomes sentient, the Brazilian Amazon blends with the Australian Outback, and Roman ruins foreshadow giant bergs breaking from the Antarctic ice sheet.

...Cooke is one of our more exciting writers on poetry... Caitlin Maling, Plumwood Mountain Journal