Rendition for Harp & Kalashnikov

This new collection extends themes taken up in The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street (2012). Environmental degradation and theme parknotions of the natural endure. Accordingly, these poems reflect withtenderness, anger and irony on the ways humans chronicle, construct and warupon their natural environments. 'Rendition' puns on the idea of a song lyric,translation, surrender and torture. In the anti-pastoral, anti-war poemsoffered here, groups of human beings and individuals are also shown as eithertragically marginalized, lost or held too close. Cautionary ecocriticalthrenodies splice with personal elegies and historical cultural reflections tosuggest a world awash with maladies of different kinds, as if to say that humanbeings must recalibrate love, death, survival and history as matters ofurgency.