Red Earth

by Esther Vincent Xueming

Red Earth is an ecofeminist poetry collection offering meditations on place and the making of home amid the ever-increasing racket of society. It embodies a new planetary politics of making kin with plants, animals, the elements, and landscapes to find hope and healing in a time of state-sanctioned violence against the land and by proxy, its peoples. It is an ecofeminist act of solidarity with marginalized others and an artifact of social and environmental activism.

Genres: Poetry

98 pages, Paperback

Published September 16, 2021

Reviews

[faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

really enjoyed this; a focused thematic poetry collection without being limited. natural imagery, movement, nature, free flowing verses were quite prevalant throughout the poems. the concepts of singapore and nature seem to be rather oxymoronic (besides the artificiality of a garden city), but this collection reached beyond that visage. poems that link to the personal (poems dedicated to family, poems playing on the idea of "roots", poems about migration, about people of the land); the national ("sungei buloh sonnets", "pulau semakau", "albatross" on sand mining); and the third part "on pilgrims" on travels overseas that does feel quite like being taken on that journey.

favourite poems:
- nocturne - "again, the night. again, the sleep that does not come."
- family tree - family, movement, migration
- in this photograph - "you are an image both clear / and out of focus // shifting yet still, brimming / with the blur of whiteness spinning."
- spinning - movement, the ferris wheel

[Laetitia · Rating 4 out of 5]

this collection kept growing on me as I read it. I want to write like this, always w an attentiveness to the world & all the beings that inhabit it…

[Edward Ong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esther Vincent’s poetry collection is a timely reflection of the ever-evolving state of the world and the possibly irreversible erosion of Man’s relationship with Nature. The repercussions of urbanisation are observed throughout the collection, notably in the appropriately fragmentary ‘Island City’ (“your city is/drowning how do you reclaim a capsized past”), ‘State Island’ (“The field is claimed by the sign staked/into the ground state island”), ‘Albatross’ (on illegal sand mining in Cambodia), and ‘Throw me in the landfill’ (“A city might forget, but the land,/she finds a way to remember). Collective amnesia is a leitmotif: we egotistical urbanites, desperate to stake our claim, have desecrated Nature to prioritise our “civilised” needs, and consequently, forgotten the once sacred bond between us and the wild. The collection, however, is more than just a straightforward indictment of Man’s recklessness; it also offers a curious and intimate insight into the poet’s private life and ancestry (‘Family Tree,’ ‘Lost Tongue,’ ‘In this Photograph’), and epiphanic travels to faraway places (‘Montenegro in Two Scenes,’ ‘Pilgrims,’ ‘Le Morne Beach’). A pervasive sense of self-awareness and mindfulness imbues these poems inhabited by a speaker who attempts to comprehend life’s mysteries by examining her inner world. In one of the final poems entitled ‘And at once I knew, I was not magnificent,’ we find a voice that ruminates on the phenomenon of memory, questioning its composition and purpose. Ultimately, we realise, as readers of these private words, that memories, though indefinable, give our existence meaning, and it is this “meaning” that allows us to establish a compassionate relationship with ourselves, our partners, and by extension, the greater world.

[carol · Rating 1 out of 5]

this collection of poems didn’t have a very strong thematic focus to ecofeminism and nature. there are seemingly random references to nature, ecology and females but these themes are not presented in a way that evinces emotion and that utilises language as poetry should.