Cyclonic storms inform the still eye of Earth's Breath. It's 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.
Susan Hawthorne joined the Womens Liberation Movement in 1973. She quickly volunteered at Melbournes Rape Crisis Centre and was active in student politics. She has organised writers festivals, been an aerialist in two womens circuses and written on topics as diverse as war, friendship with animals, and mythic traditions. She writes non-fiction, fiction and poetry and her books have been translated into multiple languages. Her most recent non-fiction is Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy. She has taught English to Arabic-speaking women, worked in Aboriginal education and had teaching roles across a number of subject areas in universities including Philosophy, Womens Studies, Literature, Publishing Studies and Creative Writing. She is Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities at James Cook University, Townsville. She has won awards in writing, publishing, the gay and lesbian community and in 2017 was winner of the Penguin Random House Best Achievement in Writing in the Inspire Awards for her work increasing peoples awareness of disability.
