Naming the Beasts

by Elizabeth Morton

Overview

Naming the Beasts is a menagerie of poems about the gnarlier aspects of being a creature of this world. Within these pages wilderness and suburbia collide. The ‘I’ in these poems takes many forms: a wolf, a waterbuck, a bird ‘stuck circling the carnage.’ Whether soaring above or prowling through the neighbourhood, Morton’s beasts bear witness to an unremitting vision of pain and ecological damage. As the flames climb higher, the beasts in this collection are left to wander and live out their lives. There is love and loneliness, passivity and rage. Yet there is always hope. Hoof and hide, fang and gut, these images and insights are those of an artist in a war zone intent on chronicling beauty in a world that’s falling apart. Morton’s poems take a bite out of the world around us, as they explore reality through the vitality and immersiveness of their imaginative powers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781990048388
Publisher:	Otago University Press
Publication date:	11/29/2022
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Morton grew up in suburban Auckland. Her poetry and prose have been published in New Zealand, the UK, the USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and online. She holds an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Morton has accrued many literary acknowledgements for her work, and her previous collection of poetry, This is Your Real Name (OUP, 2020), was longlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The manuscript of Naming the Beasts was shortlisted for the 2021 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.

Table of Contents

Feral 9

Grief 10

Linnaeus eats the ocean 11

Old doggo barks the world 12

Mower 13

Driving north 14

Stalker 15

Kuroko 18

Birdlife in a broken century 19

Rabbits 21

We write what we know when we run out of things that we don't 22

Maps 23

If we are alone 24

Castles 25

Instructions on how to lose a mind 26

Burn night 27

Eternal recurrence 28

Poem in which we sleep at the wheel 29

The lost ones 30

A history of wading backwards 31

Metaphors are for pussies 33

Widdershins 36

Textbook 37

Fire 38

The luck of things 39

Passengers 40

My final gift 41

I hope this is mine 42

Stolen pepeha 43

If Vivaldi were under a CTO 45

The gospel 48

Vertical 49

Visitor 50

Amor fati 51

Nostalgia is a thing of the past 52

Immunohistochemistry 53

Relatives 54

Time 55

Naming the beasts 56

It will blow over 57

God of nations 58

Mapping old stars 59

Hard sell 60

What we wish 62

Road trip with my adolescent self 63

Cowboys are an animal left too long 64

The toll 65

We go down together 66

I forgot why I came 67

When I try to meditate the waterbuck explodes 68

The penultimate garden 69

Breaking news 70

Patmos 71

Fire in the slaughterhouse 73

Dream-deer attends the collapse 74

Gestalt 75

Drift 76

Acknowledgements 78