Earth's Breath

Cyclonic storms inform the still eye of Earths Breath. Its an eye that radiates out from the personal to the communal, tracking its subject matter through the lenses of history and myth. Susan Hawthorne's poetry shifts with seismic intensity, from tranquillity to roar, bureaucratic inertia to survival, and the slow recovery from destruction to regeneration. In 2006, the poet, her partner and their dog sat through the extreme winds of Cyclone Larry, a Category-5 cyclone that hit the coast of Far North Queensland, Australia. Located at the southern edge of the cyclone -- the eyewall -- with winds at their most ferocious, these poems explore the period before the cyclone, the event itself and the aftermath. In "Earth's Breath", Hawthorne evokes the terror and devastation of the cyclonic event and the emotional impact upon those caught in its path. Drawing from Indian, Greek and Biblical mythology as well as Indigenous understanding, these poems range from descriptive to reflective, mythic to emotional, and aim to raise questions of the reader.