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.
Anne Elvey is a poet, editor and researcher, living on unceded Bunurong Country. Her recent poetry collections are Leaf (Liquid Amber Press, 2022), shortlisted in the 2023 ASLE-UKI Book Prize for the best work of creative writing with an ecological theme, and Obligations of voice (Recent Work Press, 2021). Intents is forthcoming from Liquid Amber Press in April 2025. Kin (Five Islands Press, 2014) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2015. She was international winner of the Overleaf Chapbook Manuscript Award 2015. Anne is co-author of Intatto/Intact (La Vita Felice, 2017), an Italian-English collection of ecopoetry with Massimo D’Arcangelo and Helen Moore, and translators Francesca Cosi, Alessandra Repossi and Todd Protnowitz. She was inaugural managing editor of Plumwood Mountain journal until 2020. Her scholarly book Reading with Earth: Contributions of the New Materialism to an Ecological Feminist Hermeneutics (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2022) was winner of the inaugural ANZATS Book Prize for an Established Scholar. Behind an unkempt garden, home to wattlebirds, brushtail and ringtail possums, occasionally tawny frogmouths and bats, with visiting bees, dragonflies, little ravens and rainbow lorikeets, among others, she lives near Port Phillip Bay in Seaford, Victoria, with her partner Greg Price.
* An important perspective on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
* Honours the Loud Fence movement of survivors of child sexual abuse
* An original new collection by recognised Australian poet, Anne Elvey
* A testament to the importance and wide-ranging power of poetry.
