Bonny Cassidy

Following the threads and detours signalled by research, objects and testimony, Bonny Cassidy’s Monument considers how non-Indigenous Australians might absorb First Nations truth-telling; and what this means for acts of speech, and writing. Should our memories serve the living or the dead, the past or the present? Why do we need new monuments in Australia, and where should we expect to find them?

Chatelaine is a collection of poems whose personae, like a family portrait, resemble one another in foxed, latent ways. Its voices stalk across time and space, inhabiting genres of riddle, fragment, confession, lyric and ekphrasis, and returning to images of metamorphosis and possession.

‘Final theory’ is a phrase which describes the attempt to find an absolute formula for the working of the universe. This book arrives somewhere less certain. Final Theory is a long poem told in episodes, combining two interwoven story lines. One follows a man and a woman as they travel through landscapes both pristine and ravaged. The other story portrays the sensations of a child, real or imagined, thrown into a distantly familiar world. Researched and composed in countries that were once part of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana – New Zealand, Australia and Antarctica – the poem places its figures within vast scales of time and space. The focus on two generations, the near future and the far-off, raises questions about what place humans – and poetry – have in the unfinished process of chance and change.