Land Art
Stuart Cooke
“Drawing on the deepest resources of antipodean poetics, [Cooke’s work] hymns the created world in all its prodigious diversity. It is funny, reverent, full of curious facts, and crazily ambitious.”
– J.M. Coetzee on Cooke’s previous collection Lyre
Review of ‘Land Art’ by Alison Clifton in Stylus Lit, September 2022
When opening a slim volume of poetry entitled Land Art, a reader might expect a collection of ecopoetics. Instead, Stuart Cooke offers what might be termed “egopoetics.” A critical reader of both his own work and the poetry of numerous writers from around the (not just English-speaking) world, Cooke offers an exegesis for Land Art in the Forward. Less an apology, defence, or justification, the Forward is more an exploration of questions raised by writing and drawing about the relationship between poet-speaker and land. For Cooke, writing and sketching are both linguistic artforms, and he points to the history of writing in the West as ineluctable from the aesthetic and the visual. He points to the time before the printing press rendered prose and poetry prosaic and illuminated manuscripts grew scarce. As Cooke observes in the Forward to his collection, “the printed alphabet is embedded in long histories of aesthetic decisions.”
He opens and closes the Forward with pairs of questions. First, he asks, “When land compels us to language, what’s happening?” From the outset, then, it is clear that Cooke’s collection does not centre on ecology. Yet, this is no vain attempt to escape anthropocentrism or deny the writer’s identity as a human spectator of nature. Cooke is inhabitant, visitor, and – in a way – interlocuter . . .
Click on the tab below to read the full review published in Stylus Lit.
Stuart Cooke
Stuart was born in 1980 and grew up in Sydney and Hobart. Even in the suburbs of Sydney, he was fortunate to grow up in homes that were always adjacent to large tracts of bush. This proximity to more-than-human worlds was the inspiration for his earliest poems, and was fed by his voracious reading of Australian poetry as a young writer—Robert Adamson, Michael Farrell, Robert Gray, Martin Harrison, Peter Minter, Les Murray, Jennifer Rankin and Judith Wright were all early, foundational influences.
Stuart completed his undergraduate studies at UTS, where he was supervised by Martin Harrison. He then obtained a PhD in Indigenous Australian and Chilean poetics at the ANU and Macquarie University, supervised by Deborah Bird Rose and Stephen Muecke. In between and during these studies he travelled widely, and lived in Argentina, Chile, England, Mexico, the Philippines and the United States.
Stuart moved to Queensland in 2012 to assume a position at Griffith University, where he lectures in Creative Writing and Literary Studies. He lived on the Gold Coast until 2019. He now lives in Brisbane, on Turrbal country.
In addition to his own poetry, Stuart has translated a wide variety of Latin American poets from Spanish and Portuguese, and he has also written extensive criticism on poetics, particularly with relation to environmental and Indigenous themes.
Books
Poetry
Lyre, UWAP, 2019.
Opera, Five Islands Press, 2016.
Departure into Cloud, Vagabond Press, 2013. [limited edition chapbook]
Edge Music, Interactive Press, 2011.
Corrosions, Vagabond Press, 2010. [limited edition chapbook]
Criticism
Cooke, S. & Denney, P. (Eds.), Transcultural Ecocriticism: global, romantic and decolonial perspectives, Bloomsbury, 2022.
Speaking the Earth’s Languages: a theory for Australian-Chilean postcolonial poetics, Rodopi, 2013.
Translation
Gianni Siccardi, The Blackbird, Vagabond Press, 2018.
George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line: a West Kimberley song cycle, Puncher & Wattmann, 2014.
Juan Garrido-Salgado, Eleven Poems, September 1973, Picaro Press, 2007.
Prizes
2020: Shortlisted, Judith Wright Calanthe Prize
2017: Shortlisted, Newcastle Poetry Prize
2016: Winner, Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize
Winner, New Shoots Poetry Prize
Shortlisted, Newcastle Poetry Prize
2012: Winner, Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize
2011: Shortlisted, Newcastle Poetry Prize
Residencies & Fellowships
2022: BR Whiting Residency, Italy
2019: Atlantic Center for the Arts, USA
Djerassi Resident Artists Program, USA
Arteles Creative Center, Finland
Bundanon Trust, Australia
2018: International Literary Writing Program of Jilin, China
Varuna Writers’ House, Australia
2017: Omi International Arts Centre, USA
2016: RMIT University, Australia
2015: Centre d'Art i Natura, Farrera, Spain
2014: Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, Scotland
2012: Asialink Fellowship, De La Salle University, Philippines\
2009: Varuna Writers’ House, Australia