“Time Has Caught on Fire:” Eco-Anxiety and Anger in Selected Australian Poetry

Abstract

This essay discusses fire as a significant factor shaping Australian social and cultural life. It focuses first on the climate-change induced emotions such as eco-anxiety and anger that can be tied with the Australian landscape, and then moves on to a discussion of the presence and function of fire in selected contemporary Australian poetry. The reflection on the poetics of trauma in the second part of the essay is accompanied by a discussion of solastalgia connected with land dispossession as an experience of the First Nations expressed in the Aboriginal literature in English.

Keywords

• emotions in australian literature
• solastalgia
• metaphors of anger
• anthropocene
• australian wildfires
• trauma