Amanda Anastasi launched Rural Ecologies by Michael Leach, ICOE Press 2024, on 5 October 2024 at the Bendigo Library on Dja Dja Wurrung Country.

It was a pleasure to be asked to launch this collection of haiku and senryu by Michael Leach. It is a gentle, subtly joyful collection, even in moments where loss and vulnerability are depicted. This slim collection is a testament to the poet’s ability to express a great deal in few words.

From the first page of the book, we are made aware of the presence of a mother who has passed on. When a graveyard, hospital or other human structure is observed, it is always described in relation to the natural environment surrounding it. The spirit of the poet’s mother and the memory of this life are ever-present in this book, marked by gumtrees, wattle and the plants she nurtured. We feel that, although the mother is no longer physically present, something that began with her still grows – are we talking of her plants or her child?  

gumtree’s shadow –
Mum’s grave
beside her parents’

Leach is likely referring to the “shadow” of life, being its transience; knowing that everything in the natural world is ever-changing and will eventually die, as the next generation rises.

There are many haiku that point to the urban and human built up world encroaching upon nature. There is a frequent overlapping of these two worlds. Leach depicts animals by the motorway and poignantly conveys their vulnerability and displacement.

we stretch our legs
on the bush tracks –
an echidna forms a ball

country roadside –
the motorist holds a blanket
round a joey

As a climate poet, I was quick to recognise when a haiku was touching on the subject of climate change. There is the observation of late seasonal shifts and the effects of bushfires.

red maple
in midwinter –
two leaves left

The burnt gumtree’s
bifurcated branches –
koala

There are also haiku that depict companionship and new love.

we walk hand in hand –
wildflowers grow
over old train tracks

Here, there is a sense of what human connection of the natural kind looks like, and how new bonds provide healing and arrive as other loved ones are inevitably lost. As the mother is remembered through plants and vegetation, so too nature marks the burgeoning friendship as it flourishes in “gymea lilies”, “wildflowers” and “lush fields”.

There is also a touch of humour in this collection with poems such as these:

I tell a joke
to the walking group –
only kookaburras laugh

Rural Ecologies ends with a rooster strutting and crowing in the morning, and we are left with the sense of a poet who finds solace in nature – through grief for loved ones lost, through the changing ecosystem, and through the finding of new love and purpose. In this collection, Leach consistently finds ways of narrowing the divide between the human and the ecological. He finds ways of newly appreciating the natural world which so many, who forget to slow down and take in the beauty around them, fail to do.

I have enjoyed reading and reflecting upon this beautiful collection of short form poetry, and I announce Rural Ecologies by Michael Leach launched.

 – Amanda Anastasi

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Amanda Anastasi is a poet from Melbourne’s west and the author of Taking Apart the Bird Trap (Recent Work Press, 2024) and The Inheritors (Black Pepper, 2021). Her work has appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, Griffith Review, Cordite, The Massachusetts Review and Best Australian Science Writing 2021 and 2022. She was Poet in Residence at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub (2019-2022) and has been the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship and a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Grant to write at the Great Barrier Reef.

Rural Ecologies by Michael Leach is available from https://checkout.square.site/buy/4GEVDDCKUFHNN6HOOAXN7EP2