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POETRY To walk a place into the body Nandi Chinna. Swamp: Walking the Wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain. Fremantle Press: Freemantle, 2014. A $24.99. 130 pp. ISBN 978-1-92208-948-9
I fell in love with the idea of this book before I read any of the poems. In Swamp, Nandi Chinna undertakes a complex and challenging project that is in part grounded in history and environmental remembrance, but also in a certain degree of poetic experimentation. Chinna tells us in the introduction that the poems in this collection were inspired by long walks she undertook as a way to rediscover the lost lakes of Perth. Walking is so essential a part of her creative process that she even coins a new term, "poepatetics" to describe what she calls "making from walking" (10).
For Chinna, walking is more than meditation or a way to clear her head; it is also a way to literally connect with a place. She writes, "The stories enter my stride as I walk and are recorded on the map that is being walked into my body" (12). In this way the various speakers in Chinna's poems often act as a sort of conduit for relaying the human and environmental history of the Swan Coastal Plain, the wetlands on which modern day Perth now stands. The seventy-six poems in this book are a mix of historical record, environmental statement, and personal meditation. Historical photos and maps are also interspersed amidst the poems,...