'If I say ...': Poetry ‘after God’ in Times of Eco-social and Ecclesial Trauma

This essay focuses on ways poetry is a corporeal making that answers the undoing of worlds – economic, political, social, ecclesial – occurring as a consequence of and concurrent with global crises of climate change and pandemic, and their eco-social, intergenerational, racialized and gendered traumas. Two interrelated tropes – first, breath and its relations to air, atmosphere and spirit, and second, the material sacred – form interpretative keys for considering poems by five contemporary Australian poets: Rose Lucas, Andy Jackson, MTC Cronin, Claire Gaskin and Anne M Carson, as uncertain answers to this crucial time of un-worlding and re-worlding. The focus is on settler poetry in a context of First Nations’ sovereignty. The essay centres on MTC Cronin’s God is Waiting in the World’s Yard and that collection’s enactment of poetry as theology and prayer in a counter-religious society. In reading the poets’ engagements with breath, bodies, trauma, grief and theodicy, the essays highlights tensions between a sense of a material sacred and failures of institutional religion at a moment when the late capitalist consumerist imaginary of human sovereignty over things has shown itself to be a dangerous falsehood.