Poets traverse barefoot through immaterial places like the past, the future, and dreams. The container that houses the immaterial is the body. It is Country. Wergaia and Wemba Wemba poet Susie Anderson’s debut collection, the body country (2023), is a timeless capsule in which the material and immaterial are swirling in figure eights and where the self metamorphoses over and over in a delicate surrender to the infinite rhythms of Country.

While reading the body country, the image orbiting my mind is Cuban artist Ana Mendieta’s Imagen de Yagul (1973), a chromogenic print of the artist lying naked in the ruins of a Zapotec tomb. Growing out of the artist’s body are wild green shoots with white flowers, resonant with the tapestry of life, decay, and a return to organic matter, where there is reciprocity between life and death. The boundaries between the body and the earth dissolve, as do the past and future self. In the body country, these concepts are reborn. Anderson takes us into the temporality of the body, ancestral imagination, and the interrogation of colonial representations of Country and her childhood in Western Victoria. The body country is a luminous, resilient body of work – an eminent presence in contemporary Australian poetry.

I first spoke to Anderson about the body country at a café in Footscray one winter morning. It felt like I was taken for a walk-through Western Victoria, across many timelines, paying attention to birds and ghosts. Sometime later, we continued the conversation publicly at the Williamstown Literary Festival on a cold Sunday afternoon. There, Anderson’s poetry awakened the childhood memories of audience members. Now, this once immaterial dialogue becomes tangible for you to read.

Manisha Anjali: In your poetry collection, the body country, you explore the duality between the temporality of the physical body and the eternity of Country. In an untitled lyrical sequence throughout the collection, you echo Haruki Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun and his lines: ‘The body was just a temporary, lonely container that I happened / to be borrowing.’ The reader is invited into storied containers, primordial vessels, and delicate ruptures to linear time. Can you reflect on the concept of the body and its presence in your collection?

Susie Anderson: Fragments of this lyrical essay weave through many of the poems in my collection, especially when thinking about the body and all its facets. This is my attempt to reckon with the notion that our bodies will eventually grow old and die – specifically mine.

I’ve been preoccupied with temporality since my father’s death at age five. Adults don’t know how to grieve, and kids don’t either, so I think to grapple with this loss, I’ve spent almost my entire life pretending that I won’t personally be part of the death process. The existential reckoning and panic are something I wanted to address through a First Nations lens, through my felt understanding of the timelessness of Country. I suppose an attempt to find peace with the ultimate truth of death.

Other lines of Murakami’s titular essay are fragmented through my approach toward body acceptance, which is a concept that, for me, hovers at the door of fat acceptance. Though I exist in a straight-sized body, we all exist in diet culture. The lines about getting a ‘new tattoo’ explore how we mark our bodies to feel and create sensations that we can control in a world that seeks to judge our bodies (big, blak, non-white, dis/abled, queer, not visibly ‘enough’ of these things to ‘be’ them).

The autonomy over sensations within our bodies, the containers for our experiences, is one approach to personal sovereignty. And in a spiritual sense that maybe only Aboriginal or other First Peoples will understand, those qualities connect us to our Country and ancestors. It’s strange to try to link something ephemeral to something tangible, but that’s why it’s poetry, I guess.