Poet Judith Nangala Crispin talks to HELEN MUSA about her just-published first illustrated verse novel, The Dingo’s Noctuary, about a lady motorcyclist and her little white mongrel dingo Moon’s journey of discovery into the Tanami Desert.

If all the books in the world were destroyed in a sudden cataclysm, one form would survive – poetry.

The most compressed and subtle of all literary forms, it is held in mouths and memories everywhere, so that when someone dies it is invariably to verse that people turn.

It is all the more surprising, then, that poetry has been hidden in the shadows of the Canberra Writers’ Festival, with its perennial focus on Power, Politics and Passion.

But under new director Andra Putnis, Canberra’s poets will get a look-in at this year’s event, which runs from October 22-25.

First, through the popular Monday event That Poetry Thing At Smith’s, local poets Judith Nangala Crispin, Barrina South, Andrew Cox and Melinda Smith will take the stage alongside Evelyn Araluen, Anne-Marie Te Whiu, Dominic Hoey and Dakota Feirer in two 45-minute poetry sets moderated by Canberra poet Martin Dolan.

Then, in Poems of Love and Rage on the NLA’s Patrick White Lawns, Canberra poets Jacqui Malins and Omar Musa will join Evelyn Araluen and Maxine Beneba Clarke.

When I catch up with polymath poet, photographic artist and former CityNews music reviewer Judith Nangala Crispin at her property between Bungendore and Braidwood, she’s on fire as she tells me of plans she and poet John Foulcher have to revive the Two Fires Festival in Braidwood, inspired by the late Judith Wright.

A passionate advocate for poetry as “the longest-standing art form in Canberra”, she points to a closely knit poetry community in the ACT where “poets support poets”.

“Poetry is the language of the soul, it will never die,” she says, remembering how her grandma liked Robbie Burns and how poems were dropped to Yazidi women under threat from Isis.

Nangala Crispin, originally a composer with a PhD under Larry Sitsky at the ANU, took to poetry while on a post-doctoral Humboldt Scholarship to Berlin.

She came under the influence of Polish poet Adam Agajewski and Marvin Bell from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. More recently, her poetry has won the Blake Prize and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Her visual art, which began when her mum gave her some cameras, has won her residencies, awards, an overseas exhibition in Cornwall and now another in Lithuania.

She’s waiting to see and feel the final printed edition of her first illustrated verse novel, The Dingo’s Noctuary, which she swears will be only half as heavy as the original copy she puts in my hands.

It’s a night-time tale (a noctuary) about the flight of a lady motorcyclist and her little white mongrel dingo Moon into the Tanami Desert to find a caravan of miraculous, dog-headed beings glimpsed in dreams and in the dementia tales of an old desert lady, all opening up questions of authenticity and family truth.

Finding myself in conversation with a small white dog called Moon, it’s clear that this is a deeply personal tale, relating to her ongoing discovery of her own First Nations ancestry – covered up for decades – and her adoption of the Tanami as her second home.

Indeed, I find that the book was written over 37 desert crossings, sometimes with dingo-dog Moon on the back of the bike, and that the entire second half was drafted on a 1966 Olympia Splendid 33 travel typewriter after a motorcycle accident left her unable to use a computer for a time.

Nangala Crispin mixes poetry and prose, equally weighted, set alongside maps of land and stars, hand-drawn maps of the Australian central deserts which she shows me, plant pressings, and 47 lumachrome glass prints – not paintings but “afterlife” portraits of road-killed bodies – baby dingoes, birds and other native animals placed on emulsion and developed in natural light.

She largely invented this process, which involves arranging blood, clay, sticks, leaves, seeds, resin, ochres, and more with road-killed animals or birds on light-sensitised paper.

First Nations curator Djon Mundine describes it as “a form of spiritual rescue and easing”, adding: “Crispin creates a spiritual death-mask print of twilight’s last gleaming – the last gasp of their spirit leaving”.

As for Crispin, she says there’s more material deleted than remains in the book.

It may have been a wild ride – making a new family, dancing to Leonard Cohen on a salt lake, encountering a giant python and owls, and learning to listen to what country says – but it was better than watching people throwing bombs at each other.

“We’re losing our sense of magic,” she says.

Canberra Writers Festival, October 22–26, program at canberrawritersfestival.com.au

The Dingo’s Noctuary, Puncher & Wattmann, out October 28.