The Shaking City

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Friday Poem – ‘The River People’ by Cath Drake

A single white feather floating on the surface of a rippling river bed.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The River People’ by Cath Drake from her collection The Shaking City. Cath recently came second in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry with her poem ‘Wadjemup Rottnest Island’.

The River People One day they just arrived, camped for days on our river island, waiting for swans, but none came. We don’t know who they were, why they weren’t moved on. They were sun-blushed, ethereal, used hand signals we’d never seen before. On our daily commute across the highway from island to city and back, we watched their canvas tents and sometimes a figure or two of a man, woman or child walking in the hot dust like a mirage. The bridge’s heavy traffic drowned any sound of the birds, tides, their daily doings. We couldn’t tell them when the swans disappeared. Would you have noticed if a highway, a skyscraper, or if the river vanished and there was just gravel under your feet? Will you still call this place Swan River? We felt their heavy ochre eyes. They made a swan shrine from a mass of grass, bark and reeds: its beak pointing skyward, long pampas grass feathers flying in the breeze. Every time we crossed the bridge we felt the loss, imagined their reflections in the water swimming with glossy black swans. One day, the River People just went. We didn’t get to ask them anything. The shrine eventually let go into the wind, blowing into the river, into our Swan River.

Cath also runs regular online workshops and mindfulness sessions as part of her ongoing event series The Verandah. The next season of events are due to begin in September including The Climate of Change Poetry Challenge and Dive into Poetry. Take a look at all of the courses she offers on her website cathdrake.com.

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Friday Poem – ‘How I Hold the World in This Climate Emergency’ by Cath Drake

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘How I Hold the World in This Climate Emergency’ by Cath Drake from her debut collection The Shaking City, which is longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2021.

This cover shows a colouful purple and orange painting of a shaky cityscape.

The shaking city of Australian poet Cath Drake’s debut poetry collection is a metaphor for the swiftly changing precarity of modern life within the looming climate and ecological emergency, and the unease of the narrator who is far from home. Tall tales combine with a conversational style, playful humour and a lyrical assurance.​ The poet works a wide set of diverse spells upon the reader through her adept use of tone, technique, plot and form. She is a welcome new voice for contemporary poetry.

How I Hold the World in This Climate Emergency Sometimes I hold world in one hand, my life in the other and I get cricks in my neck as the balance keeps swinging. I walk uneasily. Sometimes I am bent over with the sheer weight of world, eyes downcast, picking up useful things from the ground. Sometimes one shoulder is pulling toward an ear as if it’s trying to block the ear from hearing but can’t reach. Sometimes my body is a crash mat for world. I want to say ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry!’ but don’t say it aloud. I am privileged so I should be able to do something. Sometimes I lie on my side and grasp world like a cushion. I’m soft and young, and don’t feel I can change anything. I nudge world with affection, whispering: I know, I know. Sometimes I build a cubby from blankets thrown across furniture. There is only inside, no outside. When I was a child, world was a small dome and change came summer by summer. Sometimes I make a simple frame with my arms to look at world. I’m not involved directly. It carries on without me. This way I can still love the sky, its patterns of clouds and contrails. Sometimes I’m chasing world through the woods, bursting with hope and adrenalin. Oh God, am I running! I want to keep moving. My mouth is full of fire. Some days are like bread and milk. I just get on with pouring and buttering. I want the little things to be what matters most again. Sometimes I hold little: I’m limp and ill. Days barely exist. It’s enough to make soup.

The Shaking City is available on the Seren website: £9.99

This poem also features in the anthology 100 Poems to Save the Earth, available for £12.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Cath recently appeared on the Mouthful of Air podcast to talk in detail about this poem. Listen on their website.

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Friday Poem – ‘If I Could Wake’ by Cath Drake

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘If I Could Wake’ by Cath Drake from her debut collection The Shaking City.

The shaking city of Australian poet Cath Drake’s debut poetry collection is a metaphor for the swiftly changing precarity of modern life within the looming climate and ecological emergency, and the unease of the narrator who is far from home. Tall tales combine with a conversational style, playful humour and a lyrical assurance.​ The poet works a wide set of diverse spells upon the reader through her adept use of tone, technique, plot and form. She is a welcome new voice for contemporary poetry.

The Shaking City is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

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Friday Poem – ‘What I’m Making With the World’ by Cath Drake

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘What I’m Making With the World’ by Cath Drake from her new collection The Shaking City.

The shaking city of Australian poet Cath Drake’s debut poetry collection is a metaphor for the swiftly changing precarity of modern life within the looming climate and ecological emergency, and the unease of the narrator who is far from home. Tall tales combine with a conversational style, playful humour and a lyrical assurance.​ The poet works a wide set of diverse spells upon the reader through her adept use of tone, technique, plot and form. She is a welcome new voice for contemporary poetry.

The Shaking City is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

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Guest Post: Cath Drake – Inside the shaking city

Cath Drake’s debut poetry collection The Shaking City is due to be published on the 14th April. In today’s guest post, she reflects on its unexpected comfort given the situation we find ourselves in.

Inside the shaking city

“… a guide to staying clear-eyed, combative and caring in unsettled times.”
– Philip Gross

My debut poetry collection The Shaking City is due for publication in a fortnight’s time. I could never have dreamed how this endorsement from Philip Gross on the cover, and indeed the book itself, would suddenly take on such relevance in the time of Coronavirus.

While I was finishing writing it, the environmental crisis became increasingly urgent. And just as it is being printed, the global pandemic has also descended on our lives. Now everything is interpreted by the utter transformation and precarity of life in lockdown.

We are all in the ‘shaking city’ together. We all were before but now it’s more obvious. We’ve had to radically change in the face of the pandemic.  We still need to radically change in order to address the environmental crisis, and indeed to survive as a species.

My book explores endurance to change, personal and global – the ‘shaking’ is an energy that holds both the extremes of discomfort and opportunity.

Each poem in the ‘Shaky School Album’ sequence contain ‘shaking’ at a point of change – a release, a realisation, a time when you face the unknown and come out the other side. It can be unnerving and exhilarating.

Some poems explore shaking in the unearthing of trauma, personal and societal. It can take courage and forbearance to face this kind of shaking, essential for positive change, and not to become enveloped by it.

The stories and characters in the book find solace in ways that are helpful or less helpful, often in unusual places or unexpected ways. Both are worth voicing, in the very least to be able to have compassion for all the ways we find comfort.

There are poems about misfits who turn out to be more in touch with their own sense of ‘shaking’ or aliveness in the cracks and corners of society than those following the norm. I wanted to explore mundane and imaginative worlds in order to get closer to what no longer makes sense to me – how our way of life increasingly undervalues community and the natural world.

 ‘This joyful, exuberant, wildly imaginative collection exhorts us all to unmoor our minds, to ‘live’ among the strange and shining.’
– Kate Potts

There is joy in seeing the world anew, in seeing each incredible infinite detail. I believe an environmental lens is vital to wellbeing and survival. I’ve been flying that flag since I was a teenager and when working as an environmental writer, journalist and broadcaster for many years in Australia. It has been very dispiriting seeing this care slip so easily down our list of priorities in my lifetime (although these last couple of years it’s moved back up the agenda, at least before the pandemic.)

The absurdity of not putting our natural world first has always distressed and astonished me and in the book I turn to an Australian folkloric Bunyip to help express this for me.

Another theme in the collection is the difficulty of being so far from home living over the other side of the world. Right now, in lockdown, we feel physically distanced wherever we are. Most of us feel this yearning on a daily basis. I hope it is at least partly, yearning with gratitude – the moments I’ve been able to spend with friends from home are deeply precious memories.

Our city is shaking. Even if it takes all our ability, even if we are particularly vulnerable, can we stay alive to it and come out the other side making better sense of our fragile world? I hope my book can help in some small way to find new ways of seeing in this difficult time.

 

The shaking city of Australian poet Cath Drake’s debut poetry collection is a metaphor for the swiftly changing precarity of modern life within the looming climate and ecological emergency, and the unease of the narrator who is far from home. Tall tales combine with a conversational style, playful humour and a lyrical assurance.​ The poet works a wide set of diverse spells upon the reader through her adept use of tone, technique, plot and form. She is a welcome new voice for contemporary poetry.

 

The Shaking City is available to pre-order on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.