Eleanor Malbon recorded her gorgeous poetry for Feminartsy, so you can experience it as it’s meant to be heard.

Somehow Fragile is definitely a blurring of memories. I was quite young when I watched my Dad on my uncle’s catamaran, maybe 6 years old, and I didn’t have the nuance or perspective to think of the shifting role he has in my life. In this poem I ended up using the idea of a ‘father’ to illustrate the shifting power between human civilisation and the ‘wild’ places, which are really the places that human civilisation has found it too hard to colonise – the oceans, the difficult mountains, the barren lands. What happens when we confront those parts of the world? Sometimes we die, and sometimes we pass through; ending up perhaps wiser or perhaps more destructive.

Image: Nikki Mikhailovich