The poems in this collection respond to the failed institutional responses to child sexual abuse as detailed in the Australian Royal Commission report handed down in 2017. The poems reflect the writer’s own background in the Roman Catholic tradition and her situation as a settler on stolen First Nations’ lands and the related institutional failures in both cases. Poet and researcher Anne Elvey was part of a group of four whistleblowers who approached the Vicar-General of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne more than three decades ago about the behaviour of a parish priest, now deceased, whom the diocese has since accepted was serially abusing children. In these poems, a sense of the sacredness of matter stands alongside lament for the loss of church as a community because significant church leaders did not honour the sacred in the community’s own most vulnerable members. (C)loud begins with lament, then explores the poet’s experience of being part of the problem and her increasingly fraught relationship to an inherited tradition of Roman Catholicism. The collection moves toward a poetic reinterpretation both of and beyond a Roman Catholic sacramental tradition after the Royal Commission but does not pardon it. Towards the end of the collection the poem ‘Loud’ honours the voices of all those who cried out and the eloquent remembrance given material expression through the Loud Fence movement. The title of the collection holds the word ‘loud’ as part of an ongoing story that has been clouded for too long.
