Controlled Burn is an antipastoral collection with a difference. Poems closely and compassionately situate woman at the centre of interconnected legacies of colonial, economic, domestic and military violence. Images of fire, heat and ecological degradation thread free-verse, localist poems such as ‘The Woman Who Ran the Farm’, ‘Aqua Nullius’ and ‘Petroleum’, chronicling devastating impacts. Elsewhere, poems such as ‘Painted weather’ and the ekphrastic villanelle ‘The Hay Wain’s Cry’, foreground disconnects between high culture and climate change activism. Institutional art brings solace, but may be a lame raft, clung to at our peril. The collection is rounded off by poems offering blistering satires of a techno-feudalist world; metapoetic poems such as ‘Password’ and ‘The Sentence’ portray the slow violence of online fora and erosions of the rule of law which differently undermine what it means to be human on a shared planet. In this visionary collection, A. Frances Johnson’s cautionary threnodies muse on environmental depletion, colonial dispossession and personal loss. These poems deftly criticise enduring theme-park notions of the natural in spheres poetic, and beyond.
