Fish Work follows on from Maling’s Fish Song (2019); as signalled by the consonance between the two titles, it retains some of the previous collection’s thematic preoccupations: estrangement, environmental depredation, isolation. Arranged without section breaks, Fish Work takes place entirely on the Reef, where teams of researchers study, among other things, fish, coral, and how the climate crisis affects complex interspecies relationships. Surrounded by scientists, the poet is lonely, frustrated, and uncomprehending: a person out of her depth in an unfamiliar field. In ‘From What We Have Come to Sea’, she writes: 

Living reefs are indecent,
over-abundant, you are always
swimming through spawn,
pulling up things clinging to the anchor-line.

Maling’s confiding voice is compelling, sometimes delivering a brutal truth flippantly, as in these lines: ‘Beheaded I cannot tell what fish this is. / Only that it is dead and there are 96 more to go.’ At other times she is baffled or chastened by the scientific experiments she witnesses. Many of the research projects described in Fish Work are responding to the devastation occurring on the Reef, but Maling does not attempt to fully explain their methods or significance. In ‘Results’, the speaker watches as researchers cull hundreds of fish: ‘Soon these too will be under the knife, / parcelled off, frozen, dispatched north. // I do not know why the outcome of the experiment matters.’ This refusal to emphasise the importance of the research gestures towards the poet’s – and the researchers’ – partial knowledge. Like them, the reader’s understanding is always fragmentary and incomplete.

Poems like ‘An Oversaturation of Clove Oil’, ‘Lit Review’, and ‘Methods’ are prosaic; the poet’s voice loses its sharpness, relaxing into unmediated narration or description, as in the lines ‘I think of them as the mice of the fish world / because they’re always in the labs / having things done to them in shoebox aquaria’. Maling is at her best when she eschews this conversational register, mixing the banal with the brutal in such poems as ‘Gnathids’ and ‘Everything Deeper, Darker’. She is a poet who has always dealt with interpersonal and environmental brutality, and this book handles both well – sometimes blunt, sometimes theatrical, as in ‘Recruitment’, where the speaker observes a researcher ‘working on calcified coralline algae’ and ‘making it mate / with the ruthlessness of a cult leader in a movie’. 

Other comparisons are less successful, presenting the reciprocal relationships and seasonal patterns governing sea life as analogies for human relationships. The poet acknowledges the inadequacy of such comparisons in attempting to understand the non-human world, but they often appear, undermining poems such as ‘Sunset: Ontogeny of Cooperation’:

I do not know why he is telling me these things
except perhaps I’ve made myself too good a mimic,
a fangbelly that pretends to clean
just to get at the flesh.

At such moments, when otherwise intriguing marine relationships are framed in human terms, the poems seem less than original. Fish Work is at its most engaging when Maling sets this familiar approach aside, foregrounding instead the Reef’s complex, damaged ecosystem and the speaker’s grounded, surprising voice. 

Kristen Lang’s Earth Dwellers is about holding: how the landscape holds us; the problems of our hold on the planet’s future. Lang’s poems traverse caves and mountain ranges, the ‘wrinkle of hills’ and ‘stone vowels’ in Tasmania, Nepal, and the Blue Mountains, among others. The first poem, ‘Arrival’, exemplifies Lang’s capacity for rich imagery and lines dense with consonant and assonant phrases. In the middle of the poem, the poet’s attention is captured by the movement of two wrens: 

I can hold, with my lungs, their sheer hearts, their blue-
splashed heads. Where they flit, my fingers slide
into the yellow grass, and the white rims of the dew’s
strung spheres cling to me, their clean, clear weight
lifting as I move

One of the collection’s more musical poems, it generates a sonic patterning that comes close to sprung rhythm. 

Throughout Earth Dwellers, the poet retains her focus on the landscape’s hold on her: it grips her attention, binding her to place through the long work of building a connection. Many poems use similar imagery and phrasing to convey this connection, which is at times immersive, at others repetitive. The poems set in caves, for example, feel compressed and claustrophobic, sealing the reader into ‘the stone’s night’ with heightened sensory details like ‘the cold / spinning its web / into your bones’. Shorter poems, such as ‘Blue light’, ‘Meteor, Himalayas’, and ‘platypus’, are concise and fresh, as is ‘Pressing an ear to Earth’ with its delicate images of ‘the weather inching its grip / into the mountain’ and ‘soldier crabs / sifting the shore’. Longer poems like ‘The roar of it’ and ‘The woman and the blue sky’ cover terrain already explored in previous poems. In them, the poet reaches for phrases that sound powerful – such as ‘stone / opens around her through the jags of its rising’ or ‘she draws / her heed into a mote of years’  – but that form less successful images. ‘The mountains – 18 views’ brings renewed levity and energy towards the end of the collection, but what’s often missing is the lyric poem’s capacity to convey individual experience and personality.

The intensity of the poet’s connection to place is clear, but Earth Dwellers privileges affect over a personalised response to immersion in the landscape. A first-person speaker appears in most poems, often a vague presence, making it difficult to share in the collection’s transformative moments of insight. Some poems contain glimpses of the speaker and another person, like the two figures observing an eagle in ‘Raptor’ or in ‘Alpine Sky’, a companion’s touch registered as ‘the astounding warmth / on my back’, gesturing towards the speaker’s expanded connections to both companion and place. Earth Dwellers is concerned with fragile human and non-human bonds; some poems might have benefited from allowing the speaker to emerge as a clearer figure, not to dominate landscape but to offer a more singular perspective on it.

Fish Work and Earth Dwellers contain similar warnings about the urgency of the climate crisis, and the most effective moments in both collections occur when the poet’s capacity for producing a distinctive personality is deployed: the individuality of voice, imagery, and experience brings variety and vibrancy to the books. Where this dissipates, urgency diminishes along with it, and both can at times feel repetitive or familiar. This raises broader questions about how lyric ecopoetry can continue to evolve as it grapples with environmental depredation, and what poets can do, as Jorie Graham puts it, to ‘help it be felt, help it be imagined’.