Anthropocene Poetry: Place, Environment, and Planet 3031393899, 9783031393891

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LITERATURES, CULTURES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Anthropocene Poetry Place, Environment, and Planet

Yvonne Reddick

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment Series Editors

Ursula K. Heise Department of English University of California Los Angeles, CA, USA Gisela Heffes Rice University Houston, TX, USA

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment focuses on new research in the Environmental Humanities, particularly work with a rhetorical or literary dimension. Books in this series explore how ideas of nature and environmental concerns are expressed in different cultural contexts and at different historical moments. They investigate how cultural assumptions and practices, as well as social structures and institutions, shape conceptions of nature, the natural, species boundaries, uses of plants, animals and natural resources, the human body in its environmental dimensions, environmental health and illness, and relations between nature and technology. In turn, the series makes visible how concepts of nature and forms of environmentalist thought and representation arise from the confluence of a community’s ecological and social conditions with its cultural assumptions, perceptions, and institutions.

Yvonne Reddick

Anthropocene Poetry Place, Environment, and Planet

Yvonne Reddick University of Central Lancashire Preston, UK

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment ISBN 978-3-031-39388-4    ISBN 978-3-031-39389-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39389-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Series Editors’ Preface

Medicine, health care, and the wider social meanings and management of health are continually in the process of change. While the ‘birth of the clinic’ heralded the process through which health and illness became increasingly subject to the surveillance of medicine, for example, surveillance has become more complex, sophisticated, and targeted - as seen in the search for ‘precision medicine’ and now ‘precision public health’. Both surveillance and health themselves emerge as more provisional, uncertain, and risk-laden as a consequence, and we might also ask what now constitutes ‘the clinic’, how meaningful the concept of a clinic ultimately is, and where else might we now find (or not find) healthcare spaces and interventions. Ongoing developments in science and technology are helping to enable and propel new forms of diagnosis, treatment, and the delivery of health care. In many contexts, these innovations both reflect and further contribute to changes in the locus of care and burden of responsibility for health. Genetics, informatics, imaging - to name but a few - are redefining collective and individual understandings of the body, health, and disease. At the same time, long-established and even ostensibly mundane technologies and techniques can generate ripples in  local discourse and practices as ideas about the nature and focus of health care shift in response to global debates about, for instance, One Health and Planetary Health. The very technologies that (re)define health are also the means through which the individualisation of health care can occur – through, for instance, digital health, diagnostic tests, and the commodification of restorative tissue. This individualisation of health is both culturally derived and state sponsored as exemplified by the promotion of ‘self-care’. These shifts are v

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simultaneously welcomed and contested by professionals, patients, and the wider public. Hence they at once signal and instantiate wider societal ambivalences and divisions. This Series explores these processes within and beyond the conventional domain of ‘the clinic’ and asks whether they amount to a qualitative shift in the social ordering and value of medicine and health. Locating technical use and developments in wider socio-economic and political processes, each book discusses and critiques the dynamics between health, technology, and society through a variety of specific cases, drawing on a range of analyses provided by the social sciences. The Series has already published more than thirty books that have explored many of these issues, drawing on novel, critical, and deeply informed research undertaken by their authors. In doing so, the books have shown how the boundaries between the three core dimensions that underpin the whole Series – health, technology, and society – are changing in fundamental ways. In ‘Health Without Bodies’, Kim Hendrikx focuses on a field of praxis that has attracted much controversy and generated key anxieties both historically and in recent years: the regulation of health claims associated with food. Taking an anthropological approach that engages carefully and deeply with qualitative data and propels the literature in exciting new directions, this innovative monograph considers compelling questions around the co-construction and mediation of law and science as they play out within European food markets. Hendrikx explores how health claims around food have become truth-claims and an object of governance, following the formation of this ‘object’, associated evidence-bases and their use as political instruments, and the tensions and solutions that implicate, or as Hendrikx suggests, ‘index’ the body. This exciting ethnography provides a bold analysis of the articulation between ontologies of food, bodies, legislation, markets, politics, and science itself. Through ‘Health Without Bodies’, Hendrikx illustrates the complexities inherent to shifting understandings and deployments of regulatory and evidentiary techniques and the problem of the unruly, metabolising body. He presents a novel interpellation of science and technology studies with wider social and political theory that will be vital to future critical analyses of health and technoscience. London, UK Edinburgh, UK 

Rebecca Lynch Martyn Pickersgill

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the Leadership Fellowship ‘Anthropocene Poetry’ (grant number AH/ T005920/1). This book is one of the main outputs from the grant. I am thankful to the British Academy for a Small Research Grant (SRG1920/101251), which enabled me to conduct further research on the archive of Seamus Heaney at the National Library of Ireland, Dublin. Thanks to Peter Hulme, Terry Gifford, Alan Rice, and Will Kaufman for collegial advice and wise recommendations regarding the manuscript. I am grateful to Jonathan Skinner, Samuel Solnick, Olga Tabachnikova, and Erik Knudsen for their support with the wider ‘Anthropocene Poetry’ project. Thank you to Magma poetry journal, and especially to Cheryl Moskowitz and Maya Chowdhry, for working with me to edit an Anthropocene Issue. This book developed in parallel to the issue, and I am grateful for many productive discussions with fellow editors and authors. Thanks are also due to Green Letters and The Yearbook of English Studies, in which short sections from some of these chapters appeared previously. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Pascale Petit for granting me access to her private archive, and for permission to publish images of her poetry drafts. Her notebooks and typescripts are poetry in the making. I am thankful to Petit and to Bloodaxe Books for permission to reproduce her poem ‘The Anthropocene’ in full. I am thankful to the Estates of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, who approved quotations from drafts at the public British Library and National Library of Ireland archives. I am

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

particularly grateful to Marie and Catherine Heaney, for their very helpful advice about Heaney’s support for environmental projects, and to Carol Hughes for information. United Agents gave permission to reproduce quotations from the work of Alice Oswald. I am thankful to Kei Miller and Karen McCarthy Woolf for the interviews they have contributed to this book and for permission to quote from drafts. ‘Nocturne’ is from Like a Tree, Walking (2021) by Anthony Vahni Capildeo from Carcanet Press. ‘Analog Jaguar Digitization Forest Canopy’ is from The Rendering (2023) by Anthony Cody. The poem appears with the permission of Omnidawn Publishing. All rights reserved. Archivists at the Carcanet Archive, the National Library of Ireland, the British Library, and the Emory University Rose Library have offered invaluable advice and support. My colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire provided valuable feedback, and advice on quotations. Finally, thank you to the poets, geologists, and environmental scientists who have shared their wisdom and interdisciplinary flair as part of the ‘Anthropocene Poetry’ project. This book would not have been possible without them.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Works Cited  20 2 Anthropocene Poetry 23 Scientific Debates: Where Does the Anthropocene Begin?  25 The Anthropocene: Humanities Debates  28 Meshes, Networks, Webs, Systems  37 Ecocriticism, Place, and Planet  39 Environment and Planet  43 Place and Scale  45 Timescales  46 Hybrid Cultural Forms  49 Ecopoetics  52 Poems from the Anthropocene  57 Works Cited  67 3 ‘The  World in a Glance’: Ted Hughes, Anthropocene Scales, and Environmental Cosmopolitanism 73 Hughes and the Anthropocene  78 America, the ‘Great Acceleration’ and the Capitalocene  82 Hughes and Climate Change  84 Hughes and Nuclear Technology  86 Hughes’s Viewpoints: Local, Aerial, Inter-Planetary  95 Extinction, Invasives, Exploitation 103 Works Cited 105 ix

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4 Seamus  Heaney’s Environmental Poetry: Conservation Causes, Deep Time, Shifting Scales, and Climate Change109 Nature, Place, Environment, and Earlier Critical Reception 114 Heaney’s Bog-Poems: Environmental History, Extinction, Extraction, and Conservation 119 Deep Time and the ‘Bog People’ 131 Field Work in the Oilfield? Petroculture, Fossil Fuels, Deep Time, and the ‘Capitalocene’ 146 Climate Change, Place, and Planet 150 Orb, Ovum, Earth, and ‘Earth’s Immunity System’ 162 Works Cited 171 5 Alice  Oswald: Voyaging in Anthropocene Waters175 Oswald, Criticism, and Ecocriticism: Shifting the Landscape 177 A ‘Liquid Anthropocene’ 180 Alice Oswald’s Anthropocene Rivers 181 Bodies of Water: Gender and Fluidity 185 Bodies of Water: The Trans-corporeal 189 From Dart to Dunt: Drought and Climate Change 190 ‘Vertigo’: Climate Change 195 Nobody: Sailing the Anthropocene Ocean 196 Works Cited 207 6 Pascale  Petit: Entanglement, Animals, and the ‘Anthropocene Extinction’211 Petit’s Ecopoetry 212 Ecopoetry and Animal Voices 215 Place, Planet, Anthropocene, and ‘Chthulucene’: Mama Amazonica 218 Anthropocene Animals: Tiger Girl  242 For a Coming Extinction 243 ‘Her Globe’: The Anthropocene on Local and Planetary Levels 248 Entanglements in the Chthulucene 254 Burning Bright: Tiger Girl, Fire, and Climate Change 260 Works Cited 265 7 Kei  Miller: Ecopoetics of Relation, Resistance, and Grief269 Trying to Map a Way Beyond the Imperial Anthropocene 271 Ecopoetics of Relation and Resistance 276

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Cartography, Environment, Place, and Planet: The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion  281 Understories of Entanglement and Violence: In Nearby Bushes  303 Works Cited 326 8 Seasonal Disturbances: Environment, Migration, Science, and an Anthropocene Poetics of Relation in Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Work331 ‘Submarine Roots,’ Sea-Routes, and Tree-Roots: Relation and Entanglement 335 ‘Pushing at the Lyric’: Rhizomes and Inter-Species Relation 341 The Science of Life and the Life of Anthropocene Science 352 A ‘Holistic Ecology of Water’ 357 ‘Ten Minutes After/the Tide’: Collaboration and ‘Activism of the Heart’ 363 Works Cited 369 9 Coda371 Everyday Poems from the Anthropocene and the Anthropocene Issue 371 Poetry, Literary Production, and ‘Activism of the Heart’ in the Anthropocene 377 Works Cited 381 Index383

Abbreviations

Works by Ted Hughes CPH LTH WP

Collected Poems Letters, ed. Christopher Reid Winter Pollen, ed. William Scammell

Works by Seamus Heaney DC DN FK FW HC HL N P WO

District and Circle Death of a Naturalist Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971–2001 Field Work Human Chain The Haw Lantern North Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968–1978 Wintering Out

Works by Pascale Petit MA TG

Mama Amazonica Tiger Girl

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Anthropocene A bride wears a train    of three thousand        peacock plumes She walks down the aisle    like a planet        trailing her seas every wave an eye     shivering with the memory        of the display how the trees turned     to watch as the bird        raised the fan of his tail— emerald forests    bronze atolls        lapis islands every eye    a storm        held in abeyance Pascale Petit, Tiger Girl. (55) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Y. Reddick, Anthropocene Poetry, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39389-1_1

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Climate change, extinction, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, nuclear weapons, and waste: life on  our planet is facing unprecedented threats. Geologists have proposed that humans are causing environmental damage on a global—even geological—scale. Such environmental destruction has been met with spirited resistance movements, from the Latin American social philosophy of Buen Vivir, to climate change strikes led by schoolchildren. Cultural thinkers, scientists, and activists alike are coming to a renewed awareness that Earth’s systems form part of a complex, interlinked whole, and that human beings cannot be considered apart from them. How are poets changing the way they write about nature, now that humans—some much more than others—have altered the climate, the oceans, and the Earth’s very bedrock? This book analyses how these developments in environmental thinking alter the way poets write. It considers the way poets interpret ideas from the ‘hard’ sciences and develop creative, and sometimes also activist, responses. It also shows that the concept of the Anthropocene offers new ways of reading poems.The Anthropocene is defined as ‘The epoch of geological time during which human activity is considered to be the dominant influence on the environment, climate, and ecology of the earth’ (OED). In her poem ‘The Anthropocene,’ Franco-­ Welsh poet Pascale Petit creates powerful visual images for this controversial concept. The poem illustrates the interplay between individual human actions and environments both local and planetary; between animals and the wider systems they inhabit. The imagery in Petit’s poem creates dramatic shifts in perspective: bride to planet, planet to sea, sea to peacock, peacock to trees, trees to forests, atolls, and islands. The poem finally focuses on the ‘eye’ of each peacock feather, which symbolises the ‘eye’ of storms. As part of her book Tiger Girl (2020), Petit’s poem is one facet of Petit’s literary project to explore her grandmother’s Indian heritage. However, environmental concerns are a greater thematic preoccupation: in this poem, the wild peacock from the forest is killed to produce a consumer product, and the aesthetic beauty of the bridal gown is undercut by an awareness of the animal life destroyed to manufacture it. The storm is a metaphor for the widespread storms of climate change. Extinction, environmental exploitation, climate change, consumer culture, the contested spaces of conservation: Petit’s poem raises burning issues that are central to scholarship examining the Anthropocene. Published in current affairs magazine The New Statesman in June 2020, the poem’s first appearance in print echoes its relevance to contemporary cultural and political thinking about the environment. Petit’s poem ‘The Anthropocene’ grapples with

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the vast scales of climate change, yet its affective impact comes from the connection the reader feels first with a human character, then with an individual animal, and through them, to wider vistas of atolls and forests. The poem resonates with the metaphorical ‘storms’ of pandemic and protest. This book argues that the Anthropocene—the (contested) idea that human beings ‘have become a geological force’ (Steffen et  al., 843)— causes us to rethink the scale, scope, and form of environmental poetry. Climate change, acid rain, and ocean acidification defy the boundaries of nations and continents, leading environmentally conscious poets to reconsider traditional notions of geography. When considering the idea of the Anthropocene, ways of thinking that can encompass ‘planetary social thought’ are becoming increasingly important to many thinkers (e.g. Clark and Szerszynski 2020). Yet at the same time, the Anthropocene writes itself into human and animal bodies at cellular and even molecular levels. An influential proposal for the beginning of the Anthropocene is the layer of radioactive material from nuclear bomb tests from the 1940s to the 1960s, which will be detectable in future rocks. Yet, following these nuclear detonations, all human beings now have artificial strontium in the uncannily intimate space of their bones.1 People and animals breathe exhaust gases and toxic fumes; fish ingest microparticles of plastic. This book contends that for poetry to create images adequate to the scale of current ecological damage, it cannot focus exclusively on the individual’s experiences of an unchanging locality. The supposed fixity of place is altered by the shifting, volatile systems of climate, oceans, and volcanic activity; the economic and cultural forces of globalisation; the mobility of creatures, people, currents, weather, and plate tectonics; and a renewed consciousness of human connections to a complex network of living things, from bacteria to blue whales. Places can certainly retain their cultural distinctiveness, but the concept of the Anthropocene encourages a keener awareness of their changeability, their interconnection, and the sheer scale of human modifications to them. Culture of the Anthropocene expands our sense of place and time, encouraging us to consider links between local, regional, national, and planetary scales; between the distant 1  Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene.’ ‘Results of a binding vote by AWG.’ 21 May 2019. Web. 4 Sept 2019. http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene/. Spalding, Kirsty, Bruce Buchholtz, Lars-Eric Bergman, Henrik Druid and Jonas Frisén. ‘Age written in teeth by nuclear tests.’ Nature 437 (15 Sept 2005): 333–34. Elizabeth DeLoughrey. ‘The myth of isolates: ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear pacific.’ Cultural Geographies 20.2 (2012): 167–184 (179).

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past and the far future. The writing examined in this book shifts between scales: from a barge on the River Thames to the Pacific garbage patch; from a riverbank in Scotland to worldwide nuclear fallout; from a swamp engulfing a housing estate to the vast systems of climate change. Humanities research on the Anthropocene analyses a broad and eclectic array of cultural forms, ranging from literary works to architecture (e.g. Emmelhainz 2015), simulation films (Woods 2014), and digital games (Chang 2021). Scholarship on poetry and the Anthropocene is burgeoning. Some poetry scholars have begun to refer to ‘Anthropocene ecopoetics’ and even to an ‘Anthropocene literary canon’ (Auge and O’Brien, 1, 2). This book contributes to these scholarly discussions via research on canonical authors and their archives and also by paying attention to the practice of important up-and-coming poets. Anthropocene Poetry illuminates their processes of composition through archival research, details their awareness of environmental science, and pinpoints their publications in poetry journals. It analyses the way poetry prizes, poetry journal issues, writer-activists, and collectives of writers, artists, and scientists have encouraged a resurgence of interest in ecopoetry and Anthropocene poetry, in the UK and internationally. Scholarship on poetry and the Anthropocene by Bristow (2015), Solnick (2017), Keller (2017), Hume and Osborne (2018), McCarthy Woolf (2019), Farrier (2019), Clark (2019), Vermeulen (2020), Parham (2021) and many others lays the foundations on which this book builds. The creative-critical work of Harriet Tarlo (2011), Jonathan Skinner’s ecopoetics journal, Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo’s ecopoetics issue of Stand (2019), Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams’s anthology The weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (2020), Karen McCarthy Woolf and Mona Arshi’s Nature Matters (2023) project, and the ongoing work of journals including Pratyusha’s Amberflora and Charlie Baylis’s Anthropocene constitute just a few practice-based branches of the diverse and ramifying fields of ecopoetry, ecopoetics, and the Anthropocene. Such enquiries into the way environmental poems are created have helped to shape the wider creative-­ critical project that gave rise to this book.2 Bringing interdisciplinary insights from ecocriticism and ecopoetics together with the study of Anthropocene science and literary production, 2  Further outputs from the ‘Anthropocene Poetry’ project include Maya Chowdhry, Cheryl Moskowitz and Yvonne Reddick, eds. Magma 81: The Anthropocene Issue (2021) and Yvonne Reddick. Burning Season. Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2023.

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this book intervenes in the boldly interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities by considering how poetry and science interact. I begin by analysing major, canonical figures of the twentieth century: British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. This book then moves to the next generation of environmental poets who draw out the intricacies of their place on a damaged planet: Alice Oswald, the 2019–2023 Oxford Professor of Poetry; Pascale Petit, winner of the inaugural Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry; and British-based Jamaican poet and novelist Kei Miller, winner of the 2014 Forward Prize. My final chapter analyses the work of poet, ecocritic, and editor Karen McCarthy Woolf, a finalist for the 2020 Laurel Prize and a prominent collaborator with ocean scientists and climate change arts organisations. The book’s coda examines some examples of work by international poets, from Anthropocene anthologies and journal issues, and pays attention to innovative collective, epistolary, and collective poetic works. The poets examined here have Irish, Jamaican, French, and British citizenship, with family links to Spain and the Indian Diaspora. Living and working in Britain, Ireland, Amazonia, India, and beyond, they offer a unique perspective on environmental issues that range from local to worldwide. While many previous books on British poetry of the Anthropocene have focused on poets whose work is not always connected (Bristow 2015; Farrier 2019; Solnick 2016), this book creates a timeline of authors linked by their shared environmental concerns and by intricate, intertextual references. Their poetry ranges from traditional and lyric in form (Ted Hughes) to hybrid and experimental (Karen McCarthy Woolf, Anthony Cody). Archival research from five archives in the UK, the USA, and Ireland yields valuable information about how poets’ awareness of issues associated with the Anthropocene develops. Archival documents show how their environmental poems are crafted, how their research into issues of the Anthropocene informs their poetry, and how they develop their interpretations of what the concept means to them. In some cases, the archives reveal poets’ activism to oppose pressing issues associated with the Anthropocene, from nuclear technology to mass extinction. This book was developed via the analysis of thousands of pages of manuscripts, typescripts, research notes, diaries, limited editions, and scientific and conservation documents. Anthropocene Poetry’s examination of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney’s drafts, travel diaries, limited edition publications, correspondence, research notes, and conservation writing spans international archival holdings. I analyse documents kept at the British Library, the

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National Library of Ireland, and Emory University’s Rose Library to pinpoint crucial moments in their environmental awareness. This book identifies the beginning of Ted Hughes’s highly prescient research on climate change, in documents filed with his diaries from the 1960s. It reveals Seamus Heaney’s important, but hitherto undiscussed, use of his writing to support major conservation causes, from the Irish Peatland Conservation Council to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds; Heaney’s manuscript drafts, limited editions, and correspondence illuminate this. The first ever scholarly access to Pascale Petit’s private archive reveals that her research on a threatened Amazonian plant in the 1990s provided the title poem for her prize-winning collection Mama Amazonica in 2017. Archival research on Kei Miller’s poetry proofs at the Carcanet archive shows how he writes about climate change and shapes a sense of environmental relation in diaspora, in Jamaica and beyond. McCarthy Woolf’s drafts, supplied by the author, provide informative insights into the process of crafting Seasonal Disturbances, while analysis of her commissioned poem for Magma Poetry’s Anthropocene Issue reveals her interpretation of interdisciplinary environmental themes. Interviews with Petit, Miller, and McCarthy Woolf, conducted for this monograph, further illuminate the way they interpret the concept of the Anthropocene and what it means for their poetry. This book analyses the commissioning, composition, and production of these authors’ ecopoetry and how many of them use their poetry for conservationist and activist aims. It discusses how the archives reveal drafting decisions that shaped the published work; how Ted Hughes donated a poem to Greenpeace, how Heaney used bog-poems for bogland conservation, and Pascale Petit gave her writing to Extinction Rebellion; how poets collaborated with geologists on the theme of the Anthropocene for Magma Poetry’s Anthropocene Issue; and how the material production of the Anthropocene Issue itself (recycled paper, vegetable ink) aimed to draw attention to debates about post-consumer waste. This stands in contrast to many existing books on Anthropocene literature, which examine finished literary works (e.g. Clark 2015; Farrier 2019; Trexler 2015; Vermeulen 2020) but pay less attention to the prolonged, surprising, and often serendipitous processes of composition, collaboration, and commissioning. Anthropocene Poetry joins a rich array of ecopoetics scholarship that emphasises authors’ creative processes (e.g. Keller 2017; Milne 2018) and important creative-critical ecopoetic works such as Jonathan Skinner’s editing of ecopoetics journal (2001–2009), Harriet Tarlo’s The Ground Aslant: Radical Landscape Poetry (2011), and the work of Sledmere and

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Williams (2020). Commissions analysed here include Seamus Heaney’s writing for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Alice Oswald’s contribution to Carol Ann Duffy’s high-profile newspaper commission on climate change, and Karen McCarthy Woolf’s poetic process for commissioned work in Magma Poetry’s Anthropocene Issue; these examples illuminate the environmental and poetic context in which ecopoetic creation takes place. For literary texts to be ethically and intellectually adequate to the issues raised by the Anthropocene, they cannot depict places as fixed, unchanging, or completely ‘natural.’ They must grapple with issues beyond the local, such as climate systems, ocean currents, and networks of human and creaturely migration. The capitalist world-system links consumers living in Australia to oil producers in Saudi Arabia and petroleum refineries in Singapore. All these producers and consumers are linked to the ‘deep time’ of fossilisation and geological transformation by their dependence on fossil fuels. Yet the environmental impact of consumerism in wealthy nations is felt far beyond the local—and human—scale. As Timothy Clark puts it, ‘To live the hourly trivia of an affluent lifestyle in France is already to lurk as a destructive interloper in the living space of a farmer on the massive floodplains of Bangladesh’ (2015, 155). Novelist Amitav Ghosh summarises it pithily: ‘Global warming is unique, after all, in that it is simultaneously a domestic and global crisis’ (141). Yet rich and poor, Global North and Global South, are not equally affected by the changes wrought in the Anthropocene. The idea of the Anthropocene has generated important cultural responses, across multiple disciplines. The Rachel Carson Center’s Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands (2014–2016) exhibition ranged through visual art and recordings. Edward Burtynsky’s photo-­ essay Anthropocene (2018) evokes the terraforming (and sometimes terrifying) potential of human actions. Robert Macfarlane’s travelogue Underland (2019) delves into salt mining, oil drilling, and the eerily long afterlife of nuclear waste. In poetry, collections such as Alice Major’s Welcome to the Anthropocene (2018) and John Elder’s Anthropocene Blues (2017) flag up their dialogue with the concept in their titles. At once more avant-garde and more bitingly humorous, Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover’s ‘#Misanthropocene: 24 Theses’ (2015) rains down curses on everything from ocean dredging to ant poison, capturing the hubris that comes with declaring human beings to be geological agents. In 2020, Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams published The weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene, which anthologises poetry ranging from the

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lyric to the experimental. October 2021 saw the publication of Magma poetry journal’s Anthropocene Issue, which developed some of its methods from Magma’s Climate Change Issue of 2018. In the same year, the arts and sciences journal Consilience launched a virtual Anthropocene exhibition of poetry and art, and Sudeep Sen published his superb Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation, which ranges across literary and visual artforms. Many earlier scholars saw poetry as intimately linked to place. From Jonathan Bate (2000) to Lawrence Buell (2005), from David Cooper and Neil Alexander (2013) to Thomas Bristow (2015), there is a tradition of examining how poetry articulates deep-rooted links to locality. In spite of a turn towards postcolonial and world literature perspectives in ecocriticism as a whole (Garrard 2012; Heise 2008, Buell, Heise and Thornber  2011), some writing about poetry has retained a focus on place that does not consider how poets engage with volatile earth-systems or globalised world-systems. Some poets—for example, John Burnside (1998) and Owen Sheers (2008)—have written about their practice as informed by dwelling in local landscapes, and while locality is no doubt important to them, there is a plethora of poets whose work evidences a far more wide-ranging environmental awareness. This book enters scholarly debates about the way poetry now tackles far larger geographical scales: a mode of thinking and writing that shifts between local, regional, and worldwide environmental changes. The concept of a geological epoch shaped by human actions has been discussed for decades, if not centuries.3 The Anthropocene crystallises the notion that the distant past, the present, and the far future are impacted by human actions. As David Farrier puts it, ‘Fundamentally, the Anthropocene describes how humanity has radically intruded in deep time, the vast time scales that shape the Earth system and all the life-forms that it supports’ (2019, 6). Even if the term is never formalised by geologists, they may continue to use it informally.4 Geologists need a stratigraphic marker that is both worldwide and synchronous to declare a new epoch. However, the Anthropocene is an interdisciplinary idea, published in English by an atmospheric chemist and a 3  Andrew Revkin raised the idea of the ‘Anthrocene’ in his 1992 book about climate change, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast. Prior to that, Lewis and Maslin find antecedents for the idea dating back to 1854 (2019, 29, 31, 37). These include the term ‘Anthropozoic,’ coined in 1854 by Welsh geologist Thomas Jenkyns (Walls, 42). 4  ‘Precambrian’ and ‘Tertiary’ are unofficial terms for stratigraphic time, but they are used widely and consistently in the scientific community (Zalasiewicz et  al. 2014, 197). As Szerszynski and Clark point out, no-one has yet contested the term ‘Hadean’ for the most distant era of ‘deep time,’ coined by Preston Cloud in 1972 (Szerszynski and Clark, loc 946).

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lake biologist, vigorously debated by the geological community, and established as a significant concept for the humanities. Whether or not it ends up being formalised by geologists, the idea of human beings as geological agents encompasses the scale of their alterations to the planet. It is also important to cultural practitioners, who have their own interpretations of what the term means to them. Scientists’ proposed starting dates for the Anthropocene are contested and various. They include exterminatory hunting of large land-animals at the end of the last Ice Age5; forest clearance and agriculture 8–5000 years ago6; environmental consequences of the conquest of the Americas7; climate change after the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s8; the advent of nuclear testing in 19459; and the 1950s’ increase in population and the consumption of natural resources (the ‘Great Acceleration’).10 The majority of the Anthropocene Working Group currently favour mid-twentieth-century radioactivity from nuclear tests as an optimal boundary in future rock strata, also pointing to the Great Acceleration as a contemporaneous development.11 Nevertheless, the Anthropocene has significant political and cultural dimensions. It is no longer a matter of where geologists will place the 5  For information on vast human-caused changes since the Holocene, see Bruce D. Smith and Melinda Zedar. ‘The Onset of the Anthropocene.’ Anthropocene 4 (December 2013): 8–13 and Jackson Landers, ‘Since the Late Pleistocene Humans Were Already Radically Transforming the Earth.’ Smithsonian.com. 7 June 2016. Web. 6 Nov 2018. https://www. smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/new-research-shows-late-pleistocenehumans-transforming-habitats-180959324/. 6  William Ruddiman. ‘The Anthropogenic greenhouse era began thousands of years ago.’ Climatic Change 61 (2003): 261–93. 7   Simon L.  Lewis and Mark A.  Maslin. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. London: Penguin, 2018. 8  Paul J.  Crutzen and Eugene F.  Stoermer. ‘The “Anthropocene.”’ Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. 9  Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N.  Waters, Mark Williams, Anthony D.  Barnosky, Alejandro Cearreta, Paul Crutzen, Erle Ellis, Michael A. Ellis, Ian J. Fairchild, Jacques Grinevald, Peter K. Haff, Irka Hajdas, Reinhold Leinfelder, John McNeill, Eric O. Odada, Clément Poirier, Daniel Richter, Will Steffen, Colin Summerhayes, James P.M. Syvitski, Davor Vidas, Michael Wagerich, Scott L. Wing, Alexander P. Wolfe, An Zhisheng, Naomi Oreskes. ‘When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal.’ Quaternary International 383 (2015): 196–203. 10  Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams and Colin N. Waters. ‘Can an Anthropocene series be defined and recognized?’ Geological Society, London, Special Publications 395 (11 Mar 2014). Web. Accessed 7 Nov 2018. http://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/early/2014/03/11/ SP395.16 11  Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene.’ ‘Results of a binding vote by AWG.’ 21 May 2019. Web. 4 Sept 2019. http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/ anthropocene/

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‘golden spike’ of a geological boundary. This book interprets the Anthropocene as a debate that is now happening across culture and science—a contentious concept, rather than an idea to be accepted uncritically. Humanities scholars are also putting forward their own possible thresholds. For cultural critic Timothy Morton, three thresholds stand out: agriculture and house-building around 10,000 B.C., colonialism in the early seventeenth century, and the ‘Great Acceleration’ of 1945 (2020, 27). The debates surrounding the concept and the Anthropocene’s inception are analysed in Chap. 1. Responses from the humanities are important here, because they reveal the social and cultural ideas that underpin scientific concepts in the first place. Humanities scholars can pinpoint ethical, political, and cultural issues embedded in scientific discourse, which scientists might not otherwise consider. Humanities scholarship highlights not only how science is influencing culture, but also how cultural practitioners intervene in debates about concepts that originate in the sciences. Scholars should ‘embrace [the Anthropocene’s] contradictions and inconsistencies’ (Kelly, xx). There are several key ethical and cultural issues with the Anthropocene that humanities scholars are well placed to discuss. The first is in the very name ‘Anthropocene,’ which some find excessively human-focused; others caution against its possible glorification of human technological ‘mastery.’ Another issue is the danger that the Anthropocene presents a totalising view of humans as an undifferentiated ‘species’ and that the concept betrays masculinist biases. The Anthropocene has been criticised for its inadequate consideration of racist systems of environmental exploitation, from plantation slavery and New World mining to the ravages of climate change on the Global South. Some scholars find that the Anthropocene obscures the ravages of capitalism; others find its stony focus on geology problematic, as this turns our focus away from Earth’s living systems and the human-caused extinctions we are currently witnessing. These issues are analysed in Chap. 1. This book discusses how contemporary literary production is informed by, and may critique and re-interpret, scientific theories such as the concept of the Anthropocene. Work on collaborations between poets and scientists reveals that poets may be highly cognisant of scientific knowledge, but that their poetry is not thereby a deferential form of ‘science communication.’ Indeed, literary art picks up on ethical and political issues that the Anthropocene Working Group sometimes downplays (see Chap. 1): the unequal impacts of the Anthropocene on different groups of human

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beings; the affective and cultural impacts of human-caused extinctions; and the white, patriarchal history of environmental science. Moreover, experimental ecopoetics may actually be created in the laboratory, as in the case of the radically inventive work of Canadian poets Christian Bök and Adam Dickinson (mentioned in Chap. 1, and analysed at length in Farrier 2019, 108–23). This monograph focuses mainly on poetry that is less radical in form, but which nevertheless finds ways of engaging with Anthropocene science that range from the collaborative to the critical. It matters who initiates, funds, and participates in debates, exchanges of knowledge, and collaborations between the arts and the sciences. The ‘hard’ sciences are so hegemonic in some academic quarters that the European Research Council uses ‘science’ as a synonym for ‘research.’ While this monograph was being finished, Magma poetry journal’s Anthropocene Issue was in production. The issue showcased the results of a collaboration initiated by the editors and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, bringing eight poets together with three former petroleum geologists, two environmental engineers, a geomicrobiologist, and an environmental humanities scholar. This is a more collaborative cross-fertilisation between disciplines than the transmission of ideas from science to art that some critics have argued for. In his monograph about poetry of the Anthropocene, Samuel Solnick considers ‘how scientific ideas are communicated across different discourses’ (Solnick, 7), which might run the risk of presenting a hierarchical view of the way the Anthropocene is conceptualised. Later in his book, however, Solnick suggests that cultural narratives are embedded in scientific discourse, arguing that ‘the popular dissemination of scientific ideas is bound up with the constitutive mythologies of societies, with concepts and metaphors drawn from other discourses’ (8). Yet scientific ideas may be narrative-based and even literary: with Marco Caracciolo, I have argued that concepts such as ‘tragedy’ and ‘fable’ are not only used by scientists to describe the Anthropocene to the public, but to structure their thinking about this proposed new epoch (2022). This book analyses how writers such as Alice Oswald, Kei Miller, and Karen McCarthy Woolf reinvent and subvert scientific discourse (and how Karen McCarthy Woolf actually participated in an all-women research voyage to monitor ocean plastics). It ends with a brief analysis of more collaborative models of transdisciplinary work between writers and scientists. When Magma journal partnered with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative in 2018 to produce its Climate Change Issue, John Fanshawe, an ornithologist by training, wrote of ‘the way arts practice can challenge and reshape approaches to contemporary

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conservation’ (34). The opportunities that the arts have to make such impacts on conservation are somewhat rare; their reach and impacts may remain limited; and deferential attitudes towards the sciences persist in many universities. Yet when the sciences, the arts, and activist movements join forces, they can suggest new, collaborative ways of attempting to rethink and resist the colossally daunting impacts of the Anthropocene on Earth’s systems. Poetry offers innovative ways to conceptualise time, place, and planet in the Anthropocene. Certain authors and literary critics once found traditional, narrative prose to be inadequate for conveying the vastness of the planet’s environmental problems (e.g. Ghosh 2016); yet poetry provides alternative literary possibilities. Poetry can offer the flexibility to attempt to grapple with the dizzyingly long timescales of environmental change, or with (often unspeakable) topics, such as climate change (see Chap. 1). Seamus Heaney might choose to create a chronological narrative in Station Island, but ‘Bog Queen’ moves between the timeframes of modern archaeology and ancient ice ages. Francis Presley’s Lines of Sight (2009) has a 3–4000 year timescale (Griffiths, 6). If their work is often able to move fluidly between geographical places, the poets analysed in this book also remain acutely aware of temporality. They harness the innovative timeframes of poetry to explore distant pasts and imagine remote futures. Heaney and McCarthy Woolf in particular display ‘the condition of temporal hyperawareness characteristic of the Anthropocene’ (Merola, 122). Such temporal hyperawareness informs the way poetry conceptualises climate change: thinking about climatic issues leads one to consider both the climates of the past and portents of future climatic cataclysms. For Ghosh, poetry ‘has had a long and intimate relationship with climatic events’ (2016, 26). Ghosh’s vision of the Anthropocene is restricted to climate change, but the ecopoets analysed here look at ‘temporal hyperawareness’ in the broader Anthropocene contexts of geology, archaeology, nuclear technology, and species extinction. A close examination of the ‘deep time’ of fossilisation, extinction, glaciation, the rock cycle, and tectonic events is present in Hughes, Oswald, Petit, and Miller. I argue that one of the most significant poetic explorations of ‘deep time’ in English-language poetry is the bog-poetry of Seamus Heaney. Intertextual allusions, and sometimes mentoring and literary friendships, create intricate connections between Hughes, Heaney, Oswald, Petit, Miller, and McCarthy Woolf. It is important for this book that Heaney, Oswald, Petit, and McCarthy Woolf all claim to draw inspiration

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from Hughes or are linked to his poetry by critics (McCarthy Woolf 2015a, 1; Mellor, 311; O’Driscoll, 79; Petit 2013).12 Heaney’s mentor Philip Hobsbaum recommended that he should read Hughes, who became a lifelong friend and correspondent; their friendship was ‘foundational’ (O’Driscoll 79). Chapter 3 shows how Heaney and Hughes discussed environmental issues. Oswald has been compared to Hughes and Heaney by critics (Mellor, 311), with one reviewer even claiming her as ‘an heir to Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill’ (Spacecraft Voyager 1, article quoted on back cover). She has contributed to Hughes’s posthumous literary reception through articles and anthologies. Petit cites Hughes’s essay ‘Capturing Animals’ as a touchstone for her animal-poems (2013). Petit mentored McCarthy Woolf during a course at the Tate Modern art gallery (McCarthy Woolf 2015b), which has helped to shape both authors’ shared preoccupation with the environment, diaspora, and elegy. Miller and McCarthy Woolf, both published by Carcanet Press, share an interest in place and the history of environments, and McCarthy Woolf examines Miller’s work in her literary criticism. McCarthy Woolf commented that ‘Of recent collections, Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion appealed to me greatly—not least for its insistence that there is a need for a new kind of political and poetic rhetoric’ (2015, 4). The final two chapters of this book engage with McCarthy Woolf’s scholarship on Miller’s ecopoetics. Gender, race, sexuality, economic inequality, and other intersectional issues remain complex problems in the Anthropocene. Looking at human beings as a ‘species,’ as some geologists do, risks some absurd conflations: it groups hunter-gatherers together with oil executives. In literary criticism, the issue of whose work is examined, and whose is left out, needs to be scrutinised with care. Regarding scholarly books about poetry in the Anthropocene from Britain, monographs by white male critics such as Thomas Bristow, Samuel Solnick, and David Farrier were the first to appear. Debates about gender and race in literature of the Anthropocene were somewhat muted until important critical work by Kathryn Yusoff, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Alexandra Campbell, and others. The imbalances 12  Of course, they are also responsive to a far broader range of intertextual influences. To name but a few, Heaney responds to Virgil, Petit draws inspiration from Frida Kahlo, and Karen McCarthy Woolf’s work is in dialogue with the Japanese zuihitsu and the Afghan landay; she names poet and publisher Kwame Dawes as an important influence in a 2015 interview (McCarthy Woolf, Forward Arts Foundation 2015b).

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in poetry criticism are partly symptomatic of the wider landscape of UK poetry publishing, which has had problems with discrimination on the grounds of gender, race, sexuality, and disability,13 among many other issues. Samuel Solnick’s monograph (2017) offers perceptive readings of poetry in relation to science, but white male poets are the main focus of the book. Harriet Tarlo, Alice Oswald, and Lisa Robertson make brief appearances (28, 35), but there are entire chapters on Ted Hughes, Derek Mahon, and J. H. Prynne. Thomas Bristow’s concise monograph (2015) devotes one chapter to Alice Oswald. However, she is outnumbered by John Kinsella and John Burnside—and all poets analysed in Bristow’s book are white. Longer standing biases are visible in ecocritical work from the early twentieth century that takes poetry as its main focus. In Jonathan Bate’s important monograph The Song of the Earth (2000), Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore are among the twentieth-century poets analysed; Sylvia Plath is also mentioned. However, Bate’s primary focus is a male-dominated canon: Basil Bunting, Paul Celan, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Kamau Brathwaite, Les Murray, and Wallace Stevens. Bate’s line of argument is drawn from his examination of the British Romantic tradition and its legacy; women’s recent engagements with environmental issues are given less space. The second edition of Terry Gifford’s Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (2011) features a chapter on ‘Many green voices,’ in which poetry by women poets and authors from diverse backgrounds is analysed (157–80). There has been much work that redresses critical limitations, from an international array of critics. Keller’s 2017 monograph on North American Anthropocene ecopoetry treats poetry by men and women as equally worthy of examination, while Heather Milne’s book on feminism and the new materialism 13  The struggles faced by poets of colour, female-identifying and LBGTQIA+ poets are well documented. The T. S. Eliot Prize, the UK’s most prestigious book prize for poets, was founded in 1993. The prize has helped to focus scholarly attention on the work of previous winners, such as Don Paterson, John Burnside, Philip Gross, and Alice Oswald. Women’s struggles for literary recognition are frequently lamented by authors. Between 1993 and 2017, women received 30% of the T. S. Eliot Prizes. Kamila Shamsie detailed the difficulties faced by women authors here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/05/ kamila-shamsie-2018-year-publishing-women-no-new-books-men. For regular statistics on the number of prizes, publications, and reviews of poetry by women and people of colour, see Dave Coates’ ‘The State of Poetry and Poetry Criticism’ site (https://davepoems.wordpress.com/). For more information about the challenges facing authors of colour, see Sandeep Parmar’s ‘Not a British Subject: Race and Poetry in the UK’ (LA Review of Books, 6 Dec 2015) and also The Complete Works literary talent development scheme.

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only analyses the work of women poets (2018). In the USA, anthologies such as Camille T. Dungy’s Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009) challenged the tired, outmoded association of nature poetry with white male privilege, while tackling crucial Anthropocene issues such as climate change, colonialism, and the environmental impacts of capitalism. Dungy judged the Gingko Prize for Ecopoetry in 2021, reflecting the international outlook of a prize that has its roots in the UK.  In Britain, The Willowherb Review was founded in 2018 to publish nature-writing across genres, by writers of colour. Sledmere and Williams’s The weird folds contains work by Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo, Katy Lewis Hood, and Lila Matsumoto, to name but a few—a diverse array of poets of colour and LBGTQIA+ writers. Karen McCarthy Woolf and Mona Arshi’s anthology Nature Matters (2024), dedicated to Black and Asian writers, further decolonises environmental poetry and illustrates how a diverse array of authors tackle issues such as the Anthropocene and climate change. Anthropocene Poetry shows that a multiplicity of poetry responds to the idea of the Anthropocene; publications are collating important environmental poetry from a diverse range of authors, while creating new opportunities for working with scientists. This book begins by examining scientific and cultural interpretations of the Anthropocene and interrogating their ethical and political dimensions. Chapter 1 analyses debates about gender and race, inequality, and inter-­ species ethics. It situates the concept of the Anthropocene within theoretical discussions about cultural geography and science studies, and discusses how the idea of the Anthropocene challenges long-held assumptions about poetry and place. Literary critics’ burgeoning interest in ecopoetics—from the lyric to the experimental—is examined with reference to debates about the Anthropocene. The opening chapter continues with a look at how the Anthropocene as a concept is shaping the production of poetry and considers the Anthropocene issues that writers contributing to anthologies of poetry and literary journals have highlighted. If many poets considered in this monograph look to scientific knowledge to inform their creative work and sometimes their environmental activism, some subvert its white, patriarchal biases. The chapter argues that a transdisciplinary understanding of the idea of the Anthropocene has come to inform literary projects—witness Sledmere and Williams’s ‘everyday poems from the anthropocene’ (my emphasis). Their title implies that the poetry they anthologise has developed out of everyday life, in the context of large-­ scale human changes to Earth’s systems. Poets, arts practitioners,

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scientists, and environmental activists are entering into dialogue, to try to put into words its simultaneously vast and insidiously intimate impacts. In 2019, the majority of the Anthropocene Working Group proposed to formalise the Anthropocene as a geological epoch beginning with radionuclides from nuclear bomb testing.14 In 2023, the Working Group proposed Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, as the location selected to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene; its sediment bears witness to the spike in radioactive plutonium-239 from early 1950s nuclear weapons testing (Ly, 9). The first chapter cautions that while it would be excessively totalising to propose that Anthropocene poetry is a genre, or to read all contemporary poetry through the lens of the Anthropocene, the poetry presented in recent anthologies and journals suggests that interdisciplinary and collaborative ways of understanding the Anthropocene are arising. Ted Hughes’s work, a popular focus for ecocritics and long considered to be intimately linked to place, is interpreted afresh in Chap. 2. This chapter draws on extensive archival research into Hughes’s unpublished travel diaries, fishing diaries, correspondence, research notes, and draft poems, revealing that Hughes’s environmental awareness developed international dimensions earlier than most previous scholars have recognised. The chapter identifies his earliest writing about climate change—archived with documents dating from 1960—and his poetry is reinterpreted with reference to Anthropocene scientists’ work on nuclear technology and the ‘Great Acceleration.’ Debates about environmental cosmopolitanism and extinction in the Anthropocene are deployed to analyse his writing from a global array of locations, including the USA and Kenya; his exchange of ideas with his son, the freshwater biologist Nicholas Hughes, is linked to more recent debates about extinction; shifts in scale between local and global are perceived in his environmental writing as his career progresses. While Hughes has been analysed extensively by ecocritics including Terry Gifford and Jonathan Bate, this chapter expands the field from a focus on Hughes’s localism, towards a fuller scholarly appraisal of his environmental cosmopolitanism. The chapter argues that he did not need to know the term ‘Anthropocene’ for his work to respond to most of the major proposed thresholds for this proposed epoch. The ‘deep time’ of the distant past and the far future haunts Anthropocene culture, and this may give rise to an ethic of care that aims 14  Meera Subaraimanian. ‘Anthropocene now: influential panel votes to recognize Earth’s new epoch.’ Nature news, 21 May 2019. Web. 05.07.21. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01641-5

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to protect fragile, ancient environments for the future. Chap. 3 delves into Seamus Heaney’s archives, unearthing manuscripts, limited edition publications, and conservation documents that reveal Heaney’s support for conservation causes. Although Heaney is often interpreted as an ecopoet, and there has been promising, recent work on his climate change poetry, no previous scholars have mentioned his support for environmental projects. This research thus aims to expand readings of Heaney as a poet of place, nature, and environment, towards an understanding of his work as a public intellectual engaged with environmental issues. I analyse Seamus Heaney’s celebrated bog-poems through the lens of the Anthropocene’s preoccupation with ‘deep time.’ The bogland is a highly significant focus for Heaney, and his poems examine vast systems of climate, the water cycle, glaciation, and geology. Archival drafts reveal new insights into Heaney’s awareness of water pollution, peat as a fossil fuel, extinction, and the petroleum industry. I build on the work of David Farrier and others, who read Heaney’s published work in the context of Anthropocene studies. The chapter also develops a line of enquiry that scholars such as Maureen O’Connor and Benjamin Gearey have raised; this complicates Heaney’s early celebration of peat cutting, by showing that Heaney came to understand that peat extraction could damage the bogland and used his celebrated bog-poems to raise funds for bog conservation. With reference to theories of environmental cosmopolitanism, earth systems, and planetary ways of seeing in the Anthropocene, I then analyse his images of the planet in conservation documents and later environmental poems. Critics have often interpreted Alice Oswald’s poetry as place-based. Yet Chap. 4 reveals that Oswald’s recent work develops highly cosmopolitan environmental dimensions. From plastic in the sea to polluting aviation, Oswald’s work is shown to be cognisant of local and worldwide environmental issues. Building on theorists who have analysed how the Anthropocene affects river-systems and oceans and have placed Oswald’s work in the context of ‘deep time,’ this chapter examines how Oswald creates shifts in scale from the microscopic to the planetary, and how such shifts are conveyed in poetic forms that are often hybrid and experimental. Deploying the work of Donna Haraway, Stacy Alaimo, Catriona Sandilands, and others, the chapter analyses Oswald’s work with reference to theories of ecological entanglement, river-systems, gender, the trans-corporeal, and the focus on oceans that some have termed the ‘blue humanities.’ The chapter also highlights how the poetry community has called on Oswald to write climate change poetry, poetry about extinctions, and judge a prominent award for ecopoetry.

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Ecologists have begun to refer to ‘the Anthropocene’s biological extinction crisis.’15 If scholars such as Stacy Alaimo have criticised Anthropocene culture for focusing on inert rock strata rather than living organisms (Alaimo 2017), Pascale Petit’s work throws the sixth mass extinction event into relief. Chapter 5 builds on scholarship that analyses cultural representations of extinction, showing how Petit develops a feminist poetic response to the biodiversity crisis and its causes. Global locations, from the Amazon rainforest to Indian tiger reserves, are the focus of politically charged poetry that grapples with extinction. Petit’s work links extinction to both climate change and the capitalist commodification of rainforests and wildlife. Research on Petit’s private archive shows how her poems were crafted, linking published work to her scientific research notes. Petit’s quiet engagement with Extinction Rebellion is brought to scholarly attention, and a new interview with the author illuminates her decades-long concerns about declining biodiversity. ‘We have been living in the Anthropocene for hundreds of years,’16 Kei Miller said in a discussion about the Anthropocene and race, with scholars and poets. Miller’s poetry has often been interpreted with reference to race and identity, with less consideration of important ecological strains in his work: the plantation system, invasive species, the naming and classification of Jamaican flora, climate change, land rights, and gay men’s relationships with nature. Chapter 6 argues that environmental issues are a key focus of his recent poetry. Building on Edouard Glissant’s important research on the poetics of relation, Kathryn Yusoff’s work on ‘Black Anthropocenes,’ and Karen McCarthy Woolf’s ecocritical scholarship on Miller, while mindful of the argument that Caribbean culture reflects the depredations of a ‘capitalist world-ecology’ (Niblett and Campbell 2016, 3), this chapter analyses Miller’s poetry of environmental relation, resistance, violence, and grief. I argue that Miller’s poetry illustrates ethical issues that are often unexplored by Lewis and Maslin’s scientific research on the Anthropocene as an epoch marked by colonial transportation of human beings and other species. In Miller’s work, issues of climate 15  Cebaddos, Gerardo, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo. ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114.30 (Jul 25 2017): E6089–96. 16  Kei Miller, interviewee, and Yvonne Reddick and other interviewers. ‘We have been living in the Anthropocene for hundreds of years: a conversation with Kei Miller.’ Magma 81: The Anthropocene Issue (October 2021): 111–14 (111–2).

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injustice, racism, and homophobia are deeply bound up with the colonial treatment of Jamaica’s land and people. Storms and earthquakes symbolise earth’s volatile systems, while illustrating how natural disasters exacerbate human conflict. The chapter illuminates how Miller shows that environmental issues are linked to societal questions of displacement, environmental racism, gender violence, and homophobia in Jamaica and beyond. Typescripts of Miller’s poetry in the Carcanet archive offer new insights into the way he develops setting, location, language, shifts in locality, and hybrid poetic forms. Chapter 7 examines Karen McCarthy Woolf ’s climate change poetry in Seasonal Disturbances (2017). This chapter builds on Haraway’s work on gender and multi-species kinship in the Anthropocene, Kathryn Yusoff ’s work on ‘Black Anthropocenes,’ and scholars of Edouard Glissant who have further ecologised his concept of the poetics of relation. The chapter draws on McCarthy Woolf ’s scholarly engagement with decolonial ecopoetics, on drafts of her poems, and an interview conducted for this monograph, to consider how her work offers fresh ways of subverting white-dominated and male-dominated arguments about the origins of the Anthropocene. I argue that McCarthy Woolf ’s poetic responses to white male biologists subvert and parody patriarchal, Eurocentric science, and analyse how McCarthy Woolf ’s formal innovations convey London’s cosmopolitan environments, its links to global systems of capitalist and racist oppression, and its vulnerability to climate change. McCarthy Woolf ’s focus on river-systems and oceanic systems is analysed as an ecologically aware response to paradigms of the Black Diaspora. The chapter ends by drawing attention to her collaboration with scientists monitoring ocean plastics, her work with the climate change arts organisation Cape Farewell, and a recent commission for Magma poetry’s Anthropocene Issue. The book concludes with a brief Coda that examines recent work from anthologies and journal issues relating to the Anthropocene. Considering both the lyric and the highly experimental, the Coda explores whether there is thematic common ground between these two supposedly distinct ecopoetic methods. The Coda highlights further links between environmental activism and the production of poetry and shows how ecopoetry, climate change poetry, and issues associated with the Anthropocene are present at the heart of the Anglophone poetic establishment, thanks to projects by Poets Laureate from the USA and Britain.

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Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. ‘Your Shell On Acid: Material Immersion, Anthropocene Dissolves.’ In Richard Grusin, ed. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2017. Pp. 89–120. Alexander, Neal and David Cooper. Poetry and Geography: Space and Place in Post-­ War Poetry. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Auge, Andrew, and Eugene O’Brien, eds. ‘Introduction’. Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 1–15. Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. London: Picador, 2000. Bristow, Thomas. The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism. London: Wiley, 2005. Buell, Lawrence, Ursula Heise and Karen Thornber. ‘Literature and environment.’ Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36 (2011): 417-40. Burnside, John. ‘Poetry and a Sense of Place.’ Nordlit 1.1 (1998): 201-22. Campbell, Chris, and Michael Niblett. ‘Introduction.’ In Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett, eds. The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2016, pp. 1–16. Capildeo, Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel). ‘Editorial  – Stand: The Ecopoetics Issue.’ Stand 17.3 (2019): 3–4. Chang, Alenda. ‘Digital Games.’ In John Parham, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. Pp. 163–78. Clark, Nigel, and Bronislaw Szerszynski. Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. London: Wiley, 2020. Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshhold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. ———. The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. Emmelhainz, Irmgard. ‘Conditions of Visuality Under the Anthropocene and Images of the Anthropocene to Come.’ E-flux 63 (March 2015). Web. Accessed 13 Dec 2019. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/63/60882/conditions-ofvisuality-under-the-anthropocene-and-images-of-the-anthropocene-­­to-come/ Farrier, David. Anthropcoene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2019. Garrard, Greg. ‘Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy.’ SubStance 127, 41.1 (2012): 40-60. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Griffiths, Matthew. The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

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Guardian. ‘Carbon emissions per person, by country.’ 2nd Sept 2009. Web. 15 Jan 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/ sep/02/carbon-­emissions-­per-­person-­capita. Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Local Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hume, Angela and Gillian Osborne, eds. Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. Iowa City: Iowa UP 2018. Keller, Lynn. Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2017. Kelly, Jason L. ‘Preface’. In Jason M. kelly, Philip V. Scarpino, Helen Berry, James Syvitski, and Michael Meybeck, eds. Rivers of the Anthropocene. Oakland: California UP, 2016. Pp. xv–xxvi. Lewis, Simon L. and Mark A.  Maslin. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. London: Penguin, 2018. ———. ‘Defining the Anthropocene.’ Nature 519 (12 March 2015): 171–180. Ly, Chen. ‘Canadian lake chosen to mark the start of the Anthropocene.’ New Scientist 3447 (15 Jul 2023): 9. Merola, Nicole. ‘Materializing a Geotraumatic and Melancholy Anthropocene: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods.’ minnesota review [capitals sic] 83 (2014): 122–32. Miller, Kei. In Nearby Bushes. Manchester: Carcanet, 2019. Milne, Heather. Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics. Iowa: Iowa UP, 2018. O’Driscoll, Dennis, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. London: Faber & Faber, 2008. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: 2010. ———. Dark Ecology: The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2016. Oswald, Alice. Spacecraft Voyager 1: New and Selected Poems. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2007. Parham, John. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. Petit, Pascale. ‘Pascale Petit.’ Poetry Archive 2013. Web. 5 Nov 2018. https:// www.poetryarchive.org/poet/pascale-­petit. ———. Tiger Girl. Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2020. McCarthy Woolf, Karen. ‘How I Did It: Mort-Dieu’. Poetry School, 2015a. Web. Accessed 5.11.18. https://poetryschool.com/poems/how-­i-­did-­it-­mort-­dieu/. ———, interviewee. ‘Forward Arts Foundation in Conversation with Karen McCarthy Woolf.’ Forward Arts Foundation, 2015b. ———. ‘Hybrid hierophanies: where Rastafari meets religious ecology in Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Journal of Foreign Literatures and Cultures 3.1 (June 2019): 91–102.

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Reddick, Yvonne and Marco Caracciolo. ‘Reading Anthropocene science: literary templates and the Anthropocene Working Group.’ Interconnections 1.2 (2022): 39–56. Sheers, Owen. ‘Poetry and place: some personal reflections’Geography 93.3 (Autumn 2008): 172-5. Skinner, Jonathan. ecopoetics. Issues 1–7, 2001–2009. https://ecopoetics.wordpress.com/. Sledmere, Maria and Rhian Williams. The weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene. Glasgow: Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020. Smith, Jos. The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Solnick, Samuel. Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Print. Solnick, Samuel. Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, biology and technology in contemporary British and Irish poetry. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. Steffen, Will, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill. ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’ Ambio 36.8 (Dec 2007): 614–21. Tarlo, Harriet. ‘Women and ecopoetics: an introduction in context.’ How 2 3.2 (Summer 2008) 1–24. Print. Tarlo, Harriet, ed. The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry. Exeter: Shearsman, 2011. Print. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virgina Press, 2015. Vermeulen, Pieter. Literature and the Anthropocene. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. Woods, Derek. ‘Scale critique for the Anthropocene.’ minnesota review 83 (2014): 133–42. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Mark Williams and Colin N.  Waters. ‘Can an Anthropocene series be defined and recognized?’ Geological Society, London, Special Publications 395 (11 Mar 2014). Web. Accessed 7 Nov 2018. http://sp.lyellcollection. org/content/early/2014/03/11/SP395.16

CHAPTER 2

Anthropocene Poetry

The Anthropocene. This unwieldy term has inspired travelogues and Twitter handles, photography projects and TED talks, leaders in The Economist and National Geographic, exhibitions, films, and music albums.1 There is even an online poetry magazine entitled Anthropocene. How did this idea, published in English by a chemist and a biologist, gain such widespread recognition? Why has it spread from climate science and geology to the realm of culture and politics? How do literature and the humanities interpret and develop the concept—and point out how the idea might indeed have cultural aspects? The idea that humans could alter the environment on a global scale was hardly new. Even the term

1  Examples of travelogues and ‘new nature-writing’ include Robert Mafarlane’s Underland (2019) and Gaia Vince’s Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made (2014). Twitter handles include @anthropocene and #anthropocene, which are attached to photographer Edward Burtynsky’s latest photography project on the subject. Chemist and Anthropocene Working Group member Will Steffen has delivered a TED talk on the subject. The Rachel Carson Centre’s Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands exhibition ran from 2014 to 2016. Films engaging with the idea include Steve Bradshaw’s 2015 film Anthropocene, and Edward Burtynsky’s 2018 collaboration with Nicholas de Pencier and Jennifer Baichwal. Other cultural forms are participating: in 2015, the American death metal band Cattle Decapitation released a studio album called The Anthropocene Extinction.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Y. Reddick, Anthropocene Poetry, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39389-1_2

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‘Anthropocene’ had been used before the twenty-first century.2 Yet it was atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and lake sediment expert Eugene Stoermer who published the term ‘Anthropocene’ in English in 2000, and are frequently associated with it. For the beginning of the Anthropocene, Crutzen and Stoermer put forward ‘the latter part of the eighteenth century,’ with the increase in carbon dioxide emissions that coincides with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine (17). In 2016, the majority of the Anthropocene Working Group voted for the Anthropocene to be a geological time period.3 A further vote in 2019 led to a similar outcome: a majority of Anthropocene Working Group members were keen to see the term formalised (Subramanian). Geologist Jill Schneiderman views this as an indication that the term is likely to be accepted formally (190). In 2023, stratigraphers proposed that Canada's Crawford Lake, whose sediments are layered with radioactive plutonium from nuclear bomb tests in the early 1950s, should be the site marking the beginning of the Anthropocene (Ly 9). It is unsurprising that the idea of a human-dominated geological age has generated widespread cultural interest. The term is now ‘permeating the public sphere’; for literary critic Rob Nixon, even geologists sceptical about its formalisation admit that the term Anthropocene is important for the cultural understanding of ‘human-induced environmental change.’4 Geologists such as Schneiderman argue that the Anthropocene needs ‘cultural as well as geological engagement’ because it affects ‘ethics, policy, cognition, and economic systems’ (186). The term is productive for environmental debates because it captures ‘the impact of humanity on planetary systems’ (Solnick 2017, 6). Nevertheless, the idea raises significant ethical questions about unequal levels of environmental culpability and risk and the limitations of anthropocentrism.

2  As far back as 1778, Georges-Louis Leclerc proposed that ‘the entire face of the Earth today bears the imprint of human power’ (ctd in Lewis and Maslin 2018, 29). Thomas Jenkyn used the ‘anthropos’ prefix for a human geological epoch in 1854 (31). The Great Russian Encyclopedia proposed an ‘Anthropogenic system (period) or Anthropocene’ in 1922 (37). 3  Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin Waters, Mark Williams and Matt Edgeworth. ‘Media Note: Anthropocene Working Group.’ Aug 2016. https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/pressreleases/2016/august/media-note-anthropocene-working-group-awg 4  Rob Nixon. ‘The Anthropocene: The Promises and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea.’ Edge Effects. 6 Nov 2014. http://edgeeffects.net/anthropocene-promise-and-pitfalls/

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Scientific Debates: Where Does the Anthropocene Begin? The point where the Anthropocene begins is an issue that has provoked extensive scientific discussion. Should it begin with the domestication of fire or with nuclear firepower? What about global capitalism or the Industrial Revolution? What might the implications of these thresholds be? For some thinkers, the domestication of fire is a threshold in human development that leads to human beings’ ability to effect major transformations to their environment. Humans are unique for being the only living things known to use fire, according to fire historian Pyne (2019, 1, 2). Arguments for the beginning of fire use range from 1.9 million years ago to 1 million years ago (Lewis and Maslin 2018, 92). Pyne has put forward the alternative term ‘Pyrocene’ (New Age of Fire): the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change, which makes wildfires more frequent (Pyne 2019, 3). This idea could place the ‘Pyrocene’ at a very early point indeed—dating back to early hominins. A case has been made for the Anthropocene beginning with human beings wiping out most of the large-bodied land animals, as humanity expanded through different continents. This occurred between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. The Pleistocene megafauna extinction raises important ethical questions about how we exploit other creatures. The slaughter of megafauna could be used to focus attention on current extinctions or the exterminatory, climate-changing consequences of industrial meat production. However, the megafauna extinction occurred at different times on different continents, so geologists are unlikely to accept it as a stratigraphic marker (Lewis and Maslin 2018, 173–4; Zalasiewicz et al. 2015, 3). In a worst-case scenario, the idea that humans have killed off entire species of large animals for thousands of years could even be used to justify further extermination. Yet Braje and Anderson argue that the sixth mass extinction has been ongoing from 50,000 years ago until the present and that extinction should be a factor in defining the Anthropocene. They view this as providing further impetus for conservation and wildlife restoration programmes.5 Other ‘early Anthropocene’ hypotheses include Bill Ruddiman’s arguments for the spread of agriculture in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. This witnessed the clearing of forests and an increase in  Todd Braje and Jon Anderson. ‘Human acceleration of plant and animal extinctions: A Late Pleistocene, Holocene, and Anthropocene Continuum.’ Anthropocene 4 (December 2013): 14–23. 5

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atmospheric CO2 and methane and a resulting increase in temperatures, beginning 7000 years ago.6 The invasion of the Americas and the birth of global capitalism are the thresholds that other thinkers see as the most important for defining the Anthropocene. Earth-system scientists Lewis and Maslin argue that ‘the collision of Europe and the Americas was a watershed event resulting to a new global economy and a new global ecology’ (2018, 11). The European colonisation of South America caused a catastrophic death toll among local people due to disease, famine, and war (155). Lewis and Maslin’s argument is that fewer people were farming, leading to the regrowth of forests and a decrease in global levels of carbon dioxide (2018, 13). They focus on South America in particular, because they see the continent as the locality where this colonial-era change to the atmosphere occurred. (It is important to note that their argument has been contested by stratigraphers.)7 Building on the work of Karl Marx, Alfred Crosby, and others, their view is that the conquest of the Americas created mercantile capitalism on a global scale: ‘Following the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, the world’s first global circuits of trade began. China, Western Europe and South America became commercially linked’ (161). Further changes that could be visible in future geological strata include introduced species: horses now live in the Americas, while llamas and alpacas can be found on farms in Europe. Another proposal for the beginning of the Anthropocene draws attention to fossil fuel use. Crutzen and Stoermer’s aforementioned proposal, that the Anthropocene begins with the Industrial Revolution and climate change, has proved influential for both science and culture. Coal powered western capitalism during the Industrial Revolution. Oil has since taken over as the world’s most important source of energy, although the demand for renewable energy is surging.8 This origin point for the Anthropocene

6  William Ruddiman. ‘The Anthropocene.’ Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 41 (2013): 45–68. 7  Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin. Defining the Anthropocene. Nature 519 (2015): 171–180. This hypothesis is contested in Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin Waters et  al. ‘Colonization of the Americas, ‘Little Ice Age’ climate, and bomb-produced carbon: Their role in defining the Anthropocene.’ The Anthropocene Review 2.2 (29 May 2015): 117–27. 8  For information on growth in demand for renewables, see Timothy Goodson et al. at International Energy Review. ‘Global Energy Review 2021: Assessing the effects of economic recoveries on global energy demand and CO2 emissions in 2021.’ April 2021.

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points to an escalation in climate-changing practices—although it remains focused on activities that originated in Britain and the west. The Anthropocene Working Group currently favours the mid-­twentieth century as the point of the Anthropocene’s inception. This marks a period of ‘enhanced population growth, global economic growth and associated environmental change starting in the mid-twentieth century, following the end of WWII. This has been termed the ‘Great Acceleration’ ’ (Steffen et al. 2007). The ‘Great Acceleration’ is characterised by the rise in carbon dioxide levels since pre-industrial times, an increase in private car ownership, the intensification of agriculture, and ‘the phenomenon we term ‘globalization’  ’ (Zalasiewicz et  al. 2015, 197). Its impacts included increasing climate change, accelerating species extinction, and ozone depletion (Szerszynski and Clark 2020, loc 1470). The Anthropocene Working Group’s stratigraphers need a simultaneous, global signal to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene. At the time of writing, most of them favour artificial radionuclides from nuclear bomb testing. This is synchronous with the Great Acceleration, and some link the two events (Zalasiewicz et al., 199). Hence, they write, ‘we suggest that the Anthropocene (formal or informal) be defined to begin historically at the moment of detonation of the Trinity A-bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico,’ in 1945—a geological boundary that their proposal frames to be as global and as cataclysmic as the meteorite impact that killed the dinosaurs (200). Zalasiewicz and his colleagues mention that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic blasts are geologically synchronous with these American bomb tests and are keen to stress this marker’s ‘functional stratigraphic, rather than societal, implications.’ They avoid commenting on the historical and political significance of their choice of boundary marker.  Before proposing Crawford Lake as an optimal site for the boundary marker, the Anthropocene Working Group had examined multiple localities that geographer Simon Turner called ‘natural environmental archives.’ These include an Australian coral reef, a Polish peat bog, Sihailongwan Lake in China, and Beppu Bay in Japan. According to Colin Waters, the chair of the Working Group, ‘approval from the Indigenous community in the area and the protected status of the region clinched it for Crawford Lake’ (Ly). Laced with plutonium-239 from nuclear bomb tests, and layered with carbon dioxide ash from fossil fuel burning (Amos), the lake’s sediments bear witness to environmental impacts associated with the Great Acceleration. Nevertheless, there were dissenting voices among other geologists, who argued that the Anthropocene would be better viewed as a broad term for human

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alterations to the environment that have been ongoing for thousands of years (Ly). It is noteworthy that approval from Indigenous people and the lake’s status as a protected environmental area were significant factors in this proposal. Wendat and Anshinaabe ceremonies were performed before, during, and after the collection of core samples from the lake, by an Anshinaabe member of the stratigraphy team (McCarthy et al.). But could selecting contamination from nuclear bomb tests risk overlooking other stories held in the muddy archive below the lake? Corn pollen, altered lake chemistry, and the remains of intricate longhouses (Mitchell) bear witness to the way Indigenous people altered the area’s environment. When colonists arrived, they logged the forests and cleared the land (McCarthy et al.). These considerations point to the important discussions generated by the idea of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene: Humanities Debates Defining the Anthropocene is a decision loaded with cultural, political, ideological, and ethical implications. This means that scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences are well placed to enter the debate. As Bonneuil and Fressoz put it, ‘Besides being a geological event, the Anthropocene is at the same time a political event’ (24). Scientists certainly expected humanities scholars to enter discussions about the Anthropocene, but they may not have received the response they hoped for. Zalasiewicz and his colleagues write that ‘[a nuclear] boundary selection may open possibilities for historical fields other than Earth history (geology) to more easily engage in the emerging interdisciplinary science base of the Anthropocene’ (201). Thinkers such as Szerszynski and Clark have wondered whether this invitation to the Anthropocene’s ‘interdisciplinary science base’ was a gesture intended to welcome and include scholars from the social sciences and humanities (loc 933). While interdisciplinary dialogue surrounding the Anthropocene is important, this book and many others are subjecting certain narratives of the Anthropocene to critical scrutiny. The scale of (some) humans’ alterations to the planet is both vast and highly dangerous: witness the life-annihilating capabilities of nuclear

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weapons or the climate-changing coal industry. But not everyone has access to such powerful technologies, and not everyone is equally responsible or equally affected. Thinkers from the humanities and social sciences point out that human beings cannot be grouped together as an undifferentiated ‘species.’ (In his defence, Paul Crutzen does point out that impacts on the planet ‘have largely been caused by 25% of the world’s population’ (2002), but not all scientific accounts that I have mentioned do this.) Thus, Dipesh Chakrabarty highlights the need to nuance the discourse of undifferentiated ‘mankind’ that Crutzen and Stoermer initially put forward (17): ‘This is why the need arises to view the human simultaneously on contradictory registers: as a geophysical force and as a political agent […] and bearer of rights’ (Chakrabarty 2012, 14). Moreover, humans are hardly the only living things to alter their environments, which leads some to consider the concept of the Anthropocene to be excessively human centred. Here, the environmental humanities play an important part in interdisciplinary debates surrounding the Anthropocene because they are able to deconstruct the notion of the ‘human’ and the concept of ‘our species’ or ‘mankind.’ If the Anthropocene is declared to begin with the use of fire or the rise of agriculture, there is the risk that particularly damaging practices of environmental exploitation are viewed as ‘human nature.’ Extinction could be seen as an equally provocative proposed boundary. The flourishing of posthumanism and animal studies in humanities circles9 is leading some humanities thinkers to examine how scientists are framing extinction and changes to biodiversity as a potential Anthropocene threshold (see Heise 2016). ‘Biodiversity loss’ features as one of the nine Planetary Boundaries proposed by scientists Rockström and Steffen. A rhetoric of benevolent planetary ‘stewardship’ appears in a paper by Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill (618), and yet it is paradoxical to read this straight after they have acknowledged that ‘the Earth is in its sixth great extinction event’ (617). The deep ethical problems that stem from humans’ treatment of other species are not 9  For further information on posthumanism, see Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2010. For animal studies, see Cary Wolfe’s edited volume Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2003 and for information on extinction, see Ursula Heise’s Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago UP, 2016.

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adequately explored in most geological accounts of the Anthropocene, according to Eileen Crist (137). In her view, it is problematic to name an epoch after humans10 and downplay the destruction of other species: ‘[T]he Anthropocene discourse veers away from environmentalism’s dark idiom of destruction, depredation, rape, loss, devastation, deterioration, and so forth of the natural world into the tame vocabulary that humans are changing, shaping, transforming, or altering the biosphere’ (133). Geologist Jill Schneiderman proposes the mournful alternative name ‘Elachistocene’: the time of the fewest species. This is in keeping with earlier names for geological epochs, and it recognises that our age is witnessing a major extinction (194). Indeed, as I have mentioned, ecologists are linking the concept of the Anthropocene to extinction.11 This is an indication that associating the Anthropocene with human-caused impacts on other species requires further examination, from the humanities, arts, and sciences alike. From ecocidal extinctions to colonial practices that some have termed genocidal: the next origin point for the Anthropocene, considered chronologically, is the invasion of the Americas by Europeans. Thinkers from Marx to Sylvia Wynter have this event to be a major threshold in human history: the birth of global capitalism, the inception of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the decimation and oppression of the Indigenous people in the Americas. Lewis and Maslin’s narrative, which we could term an ‘imperial Anthropocene,’ would thus strike humanities thinkers as familiar but ethically troubling for what it risks downplaying. Power, racism, inequality, colonialism, and how humans treat other species, are not adequately explored. Lewis and Maslin’s model shows how contemporary globalisation has its roots in an invasion that changed the flora and fauna 10  Sections of the geological timescale have previously been named after the locations where they were first studied or the type of rocks they contain. The Cambrian was named after the Classical name for Wales, and the Ordovician, after an ancient Welsh tribe. These units of time were named for stratigraphic sequences found in Wales. The Permian is named after Perm in Russia; the Cretaceous after the Latin for chalk, due to the extensive chalk deposits in Paris (Schneiderman 174); and the Ediacaran after rocks in South Australia (Ellis, 118). More imaginative nomenclature exists: the primordial Hadean era is named after the Greek god of the underworld. These labels could be taken to task for being human centred; indeed, the act of scientific classification could even be called human centred. Yet naming an epoch after one species is clearly unique (Ellis, 82), and the Anthropocene is a departure from naming conventions in that regard. 11  Cebaddos, Gerardo, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo. ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114.30 (Jul 25 2017): E6089–96.

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of continents, but by deploying Alfred Crosby’s euphemistic concept of the ‘Columbian Exchange,’ they downplay the way Europeans ravaged other civilisations—and the systems of inequality that persist as a result. For Suzan Shown Harjo, this is a matter of ‘genocide and ecocide’ (Harjo, 32). For Sylvia Wynter, this is a ‘sociosystematically produced series of savage inequalities’ (40) and the origin of racist discrimination, ecological destruction (41), and a ‘globally hegemonic culture’ (47). Kathryn Yusoff analyses the racial dimensions of declaring the Anthropocene—the stance of geological objectivity performs a ‘deadly erasure’ (8) that overlooks black bodies worked to death in New World silver mines (14). There remains a need to ‘provincialize’ the Anthropocene (Morrison, 75–6) and to raise questions about the systems of exploitation that this proposed threshold has created.  The extraction of sediment  cores from  Crawford Lake was done with Indigenous stakeholders, in a way that was sensitive to their cultural practices  (McCarthy et  al). But for many scholars, there are forms of inequality and depredation associated with the Anthropocene that evoke a long history of western oppression. An invasion that marks the global establishment of a hegemonic economic system: for thinkers who link Marxist criticism to ecological issues, scientists’ narratives of the Anthropocene risk ignoring the capitalist world-system. The ethical problem with this is that grouping together different human beings glosses over stark inequalities between rich and poor, their unequal patterns of consumption, and their vastly different carbon footprints. Jason W. Moore has proposed that the Anthropocene is in fact a ‘Capitalocene’: ‘Are we really living in the Anthropocene—the ‘age of man’—with its Eurocentric and techno-determinist vistas? Or are we living in the Capitalocene—the ‘age of capital’—the historical era shaped by the endless accumulation of capital?’ (Moore, 596). The ‘Capitalocene’ would draw attention to the ‘schism between uber-rich and the ultra-­ poor’ (Nixon 2014) and the unequal ecological damage that this inflicts (Tsing 2015, 17, 25). Tsing, Latour, and others find that global capitalist land appropriation leads to a ‘Plantationocene’—a concept that encapsulates the way that crops from sugar to palm oil have been intensively produced, first for slavers and their European customers, and later for wealthy customers of multinational corporations.12 In literary criticism, such views 12  Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing and Nils Bubandt. ‘Anthropologists Are Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse.’ Ethnos 83.3 (April 2018): 587–606. See also Haraway 2015, 162.

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of capitalism, ecology, and literary production have given rise to the work of Michael Niblett and Christopher Campbell, which interprets world literature as the literature of the ‘capitalist world-ecology’ (8); and to Niblett’s later work on world literature, ecology, and commodity frontiers (2020). Some humanities thinkers equate the Anthropocene with climate change, and they echo Crutzen and Stoermer’s arguments in doing so. In the earlier stages of the humanities’ intervention in such debates, the Anthropocene was synonymous with climate change; this notion has persisted in some circles. Poetry critics Andrew Auge and Eugene O’Brien, for example, are very confident in their placement of the ‘golden spike’: ‘The term ‘Anthropocene’ was coined two decades ago by the atmospheric scientists P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stroemer [sic] […] Its ultimate manifestation is the anthropogenic warming of the climate’ (1). They draw this equivalence of the Anthropocene with climate change from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s early work (2009, 209) and from novelist Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (8). Humanities thinkers such as Ghosh make a crucial argument about an Anthropocene that begins with climate change: the world’s poorest will bear the brunt of climate-related damage, which risks reinforcing the balance of world power along former imperial lines (Ghosh, 136–43). Climate change is indeed a problem coupled with western nations’ industrialisation and the actions of the world’s most affluent. Placing the ‘golden spike’ at the inception of rising carbon dioxide emissions links the Anthropocene to the biggest historical carbon dioxide polluters: the UK and USA (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 116). And such an argument needs to recognise not only the unequal impacts of climate change but its roots in colonial systems of exploitation (see Yusoff, 15–16, 101). Others have argued that the Anthropocene is a larger and thornier issue than capitalism alone: Chakrabarty nuances his later work by arguing that climate change takes place on larger spatio-temporal scales than capitalism or globalisation (2017, 31). Timothy Morton puts forward such a multifaceted view of the Anthropocene, arguing that what he terms ‘agrilogistics’ can be linked to a host of major environmental issues. These range from extinctions to the origins of capitalism and climate change, plus the perceived distinction between ‘nature’ and (cultivated) culture (2016, 43–6, 52). Morton’s argument elegantly links several proposed thresholds for the Anthropocene, and considers how they are bound together by culturally determined ways of thinking.

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From the fires of climate change to the white heat of nuclear explosions: for many, the ‘new age of humans’ arrives with the atomic age. If the nuclear boundary is formalised, geologists must acknowledge what this means for society. In the article quoted above, Zalasiewicz leaves scholars in the humanities to point out that their new geological epoch arrives with human beings’ ability to destroy each other and to threaten life on earth at the touch of a button. The Trinity bomb test in New Mexico, led by Robert Oppenheimer and his laboratory of European and American scientists, paved the way for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. Later atomic weapons testing by the USA in the South Pacific subjected local people to radiation burns, cancers, birth defects, and non-consensual medical experimentation (DeLoughrey 2019). British bomb testing on Australian Aboriginal islands and French bomb testing in Algeria (Yusoff, 47) inflicted environmental damage along colonial lines. The impacts were far from stratigraphic alone: they were cataclysmic for human beings and ecology alike. What is missing from DeLoughrey and Yusoff’s accounts is an expanded focus on what nuclear weapons do to creatures other than humans. The 1954 ‘Bravo’ bomb blast at Bikini Atoll vaporised three islands and raised the water temperature to 55,000  °C; sea life became radioactive; and long-term effects included the local extinction of twenty-­ four coral species.13 This is human geological agency indeed, but at a terrible cost. Although research suggests that some species at the test sites are returning, one scientist called the bomb craters ‘scars on the planet that will never heal.’14 Technocratic, militaristic, western dominated, and masculinist, a nuclear Anthropocene credits the most dangerous weapons ever invented with ushering in a ‘human age.’ The new epoch begins with a bang that establishes the ‘man of science’ as a shatterer of worlds.15 After reading about atom bombs and their victims, Sylvia Plath wondered, ‘What obsession do men have for destruction and murder?’ (SPJ, 40). In the ‘industrial Anthropocene’ and ‘nuclear Anthropocene’ accounts, Man is indeed the protagonist. Gender remains a crucial question in debates about the Anthropocene. Consider the following sentence from Crutzen 13  Z. T. Richards et al. ‘Bikini Atoll coral biodiversity resilience five decades after nuclear testing.’ Marine Pollution Bulletin 56.3 (March 2008): 503–15. 14  Sam Scott. ‘What Bikini Atoll looks like today.’ Stanford Magazine Dec 2017. Web. 8 Nov 2019. https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-bikini-atoll-looks-like-today 15  This sentence adapts Robert Oppenheimer’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which he said sprang to mind at the time of the Trinity atom bomb detonation. The quotation was reported in Time 52.19 (8th Nov 1948): 72–80.

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and Stoermer’s landmark article: ‘Mankind has now inhabited or visited almost all places on Earth; he has even set foot on the moon’ (2000, 17). The label ‘mankind’ attempts to look at human beings as a totality, but it risks overlooking 51% of the world’s population. Several discussions of gender in the Anthropocene misinterpret the meaning of the word ‘Anthropocene’—its etymology is ‘new age of humans’ and not invariably ‘new age of man.’16 Yet there is no question that discussions about the Anthropocene were dominated by male scientists for several years after Crutzen and Stoermer’s publication of the term. With an initially all-male Anthropocene Working Group making the important decisions, science writer Kate Raworth coined the satirical label ‘Manthropocene’ (2014) to draw attention to questions of gender. At the time of writing, the Working Group contains a minority of women scientists and cultural critics. The problem with this runs far deeper than the underrepresentation of women in the sciences and on academic committees. The very narrative of Anthropocene ascendancy could be seen as gendered. For Donna Haraway, ‘The story of Species Man as the agent of the Anthropocene is an almost laughable rerun of the great phallic humanizing and modernizing Adventure, where man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end in tragic detumescence’ (2016, 47). Such partial perspectives inflect not only science, but cultural criticism. A bias towards white male authors is certainly evident in some of the first Anthropocene poetry monographs from Britain (Bristow 2015; Farrier 2019; Solnick 2017), as mentioned in the introduction. Is the ‘New Age of Humans’ too fixated on human beings at the expense of other organisms? And is the Anthropocene necessarily anthropocentric? This is a fundamental question that ecocritics must consider, given the flourishing of posthumanism and animal studies in

16  ‘Anthropos’ in Greek can mean ‘human,’ person or ‘man’ (OED). The word can function as a bi-gender noun and can take a feminine or masculine definite article. I am indebted to Richard Correll at the Yearbook of English Studies for pointing this out. An unequivocally gendered geological ‘epoch of men’ would be the Androcene (since an anthropologist studies other human beings, whereas an andrologist specialises in men’s health). Colebrook writes of an invariably gendered ‘man of the Anthropos,’ but this is as disputable as it is tautological. See ‘  ‘We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene’: The Anthropocene Counterfactual.’ In Richard Grusin, ed. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2017. 1–20 (p. 10).

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environmental humanities circles.17 Of course, all species alter their environments, to some extent. Human beings share their ability to change their surroundings with tower-building termites; the first living climate changers were bacteria. But the bacteria that created oxygen in our atmosphere evidently did not know that they were climate-changing agents (Revkin 2011). For cultural critic Derek Woods, the agents of the Anthropocene are not human at all: ‘the subject of the Anthropocene is nonhuman’ (134), consisting of terraforming assemblages of ‘non-humans such as cows, genes, starlings, corn, nitrogen molecules, oil, computers, methanogenic archaea, and refineries’ (139). The deep ethical problems that stem from humans’ treatment of other species are not adequately explored in most geological accounts of the Anthropocene, according to Eileen Crist (137). In her view, naming an epoch after humans18 reinforces human-centred ideas by proposing a limitless ‘ascent’ of affluence and technology, ignoring those who are marginalised by this—nonhuman and human alike (130–5). Feminism and posthumanism offer a ‘zoe-centred’ way of thinking that stresses biodiverse vitality, for Rosi Braidotti (25, 32). Donna Haraway finds the Anthropocene to be excessively focused on humans and their technology at a time when people need more than ever to consider the mesh of interconnections between themselves and other living organisms. Her alternative term ‘Chthulucene’ is named for the chthonic powers of the earth and its ‘more-than-human’ assemblages of different forms of life—plus human technology (2016, 101). Haraway’s interconnected ‘Chthulucene’ and Rosi Braidotti’s ‘cross-species alliances’ 17  For further information on posthumanism, see Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2010. For animal studies, see Cary Wolfe’s edited volume Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2003, and for information on extinction, see Ursula Heise’s Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago UP, 2016. 18  Sections of the geological timescale have previously been named after the locations where they were first studied or the type of rocks they contain. The Cambrian was named after the Classical name for Wales, and the Ordovician, after an ancient Welsh tribe. These units of time were named for stratigraphic sequences found in Wales. The Permian is named after Perm in Russia and the Cretaceous after the Latin for chalk, due to the extensive chalk deposits in Paris (Schneiderman, 174); the Ediacaran, for rocks in South Australia (Ellis, 118). More imaginative nomenclature exists: the primordial Hadean era is named after the Greek god of the underworld. These labels could be taken to task for being human centred; indeed, the act of scientific classification could even be called human centred. Yet naming an epoch after one species is clearly unique (Ellis, 82), and the Anthropocene is a departure from naming conventions in that regard.

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(Braidotti, 32) offer productive ways of turning the idea of the Anthropocene from a human-dominated age to one where human beings are seen as enmeshed with a host of other earth-altering forms of life. And must ‘the human’ be such an essential and bounded category? Just as the concepts of race, gender, and biological sex have been labelled as essentialist by cultural theorists and scientists alike,19 the idea of ‘species’ and ‘the human’ is deconstructed by posthuman thinking. Every one of us has DNA that we have inherited from bacteria, and as many microbial cells in our bodies as human ones. A tiny bone in our middle ear has been passed down to us from our fish ancestors, and 99% of our DNA is shared with chimpanzees.20 So what, if anything, distinguishes human beings from other forms of life? Not much, other than their above-mentioned domestication of fire. Yet discussions surrounding the idea of ‘the human’ is likely to remain central to debates surrounding the Anthropocene. For Timothy Morton, the concept of the human necessarily remains central to the Anthropocene because the alterations associated with the Anthropocene were created by humans—‘Not bacteria, not lemons’ (2016, 23). However, he does argue that the Anthropocene is not necessarily fixated on the human: ‘The Anthropocene is an antianthropocentric concept because it enables us to think the human species not as an ontically given thing I can point to, but as a hyperobject [a vastly extended assemblage]21 that is real yet inaccessible’ (2016, 25). Indeed, for some thinkers, the subject of the Anthropocene is posthuman or more-than-human. Concepts such as 19  For a classic discussion of gender as societally determined and performative, see Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People (2004) deconstructs the heteronormative notion that male and female are the only possible genders. 20  For information about the ratio of microbial cells to human cells, see Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs, and Ron Milo. ‘Revised estimates for the number of human and bacteria cells in the body.’ PLOS Biology 10.1371 (19 Aug 2016): 1–21. Regarding gene transfer from bacteria to humans, see S. L. Salzberg, O. White, J. Peterson, and J. A. Eisen. ‘Microbial genes in the human genome: Lateral transfer or gene loss?’ Science 292. 5523 (8 June 2001): 1903–06. For the origin of the stapes bone in fish gill arches, see Neil Shubin. Your Inner Fish: the amazing discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor. London: Penguin, 2007. 206. For statistics on shared DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos, see Ann Gibbons. ‘Bonobos Join Chimps as Closest Human Relatives.’ Science, 13 June 2012. Web. 28 May 2020. https:// www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/bonobos-join-chimps-closest-human-relatives 21  For Morton’s definition of ‘hyperobjects,’ see Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

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Donna Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene’ and Tsing’s idea of entanglement consider our deep imbrication in more-than-human systems. Paradoxically, our current predicament could be viewed not as the ‘age of humans’ at all, but the age when we realise how dependent we are on nonhumans—and the extent of our ability to damage them. In poetic work that engages with the concept of the Anthropocene, Rhian Williams and Maria Sledmere write: ‘Culture has bored into nature; nature has become culture. Where are our categories now?’ (13). Thus, the Anthropocene might be viewed as a threshold in human awareness, as much as a line in Earth’s strata. This leads Timothy Clark to argue that the Anthropocene represents a threshold in cultural thinking (2016, 9). But one could develop this further: the Anthropocene has cultural and even literary dimensions, and these are present even in scientific accounts. Scholars have long pointed out that scientific concepts reflect the perspectives of those who are doing the measuring and the observing, the gene-editing and the patent registrations, the writing up, and the publishing (Haraway 1991, 2016; Merchant 1990; Shiva 1999). Scientific ideas are also conceptualised and communicated through narrative (Caracciolo 2021; Hales, Beer, and Heise 2016). Eileen Crist sees the concept of the Anthropocene as a ‘discourse,’ a human-centred ‘world-­ picture’ with technological ‘themes’ (129–30). Vermeulen’s view is that theories of the Anthropocene present ‘different historical narratives with their own protagonists and plots’ (20). If Haraway calls a masculinist narrative of the Anthropocene a ‘story’ (2016, 47) and Ursula Heise thinks that the Anthropocene draws on narratives ranging from epic to science fiction (2016, 51), we could view the Anthropocene Working Group’s proposal as both a stratigraphic boundary and a cultural trope. And there is another story—one of interconnection—that may offer hope when considering how to survive in such a fraught time.

Meshes, Networks, Webs, Systems ‘Everything is connected’: the Anthropocene offers a new take on this old ecological truism. In western thinking, a holistic view of our planet’s interconnected living and non-living systems can be traced at least as far back as Georges-Louis Leclerc’s 1778 publication The Epochs of Nature (Walls, 39). Yet, springing up much more recently in ecology and systems theory,22  For systems theory perspectives of Earth science, see Ellis loc 2578.

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and inherently interdisciplinary from the outset, rooty and knotty meshes have long been woven into the fabric of the environmental humanities. They are now seen as extending to digital networks and to intricate Earth-­ system processes, from the Internet to climate systems. The connecting tendrils of such intricate structures enmesh bacteria and blue whales, oil refineries and computer keyboards. French historian of science Bruno Latour has been putting forward such arguments since the 1990s and critiquing the perceived difference between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in the process (1996, 2017). From a postcolonial perspective, poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant suggests a rhizomatic way of connecting to place and planet (1989, 1997). The ‘mesh’ of interconnection is the central argument of several books by cultural critic Timothy Morton (2007, 2010), and this concept is refined in later books that detail his interpretation of the Anthropocene (2013, 2016). This means that everything that exists, from humans to viruses to the Internet, is connected by a ‘mesh,’ linking all life forms, all living creatures and dead creatures, and their habitats (Morton 2010, 29). Looking at the Anthropocene with an eye to the ‘mesh’ means that human beings are hardly the ‘masters’ of the planet at all. Donna Haraway has some provocative ways of rethinking the Anthropocene. Looking at ‘tentacular’ creatures from spiders to octopi and humans (‘tentacular’ because we have fingers), Haraway proposes an awareness of interconnection that challenges narratives of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene, where humans are the primary agents (55). Her ‘Chthulucene’ is inspired by creatures and connections that have tentacles, from ‘humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities’ plus ‘nets and networks, IT critters’ (32). Interconnection is the essence of her theory, and it aims to foster ‘multispecies well-being’ (51). The Anthropocene—Chthulucene?—has the advantage of enmeshing us in a non-hierarchical, non-gendered spider’s web of other earth-bound entities, from elephants to fungi. The Anthropocene can thus be employed as a profound challenge to human exceptionalism. It suggests a new lens for thinking of human activities as a part of Earth’s systems—a sense of imbrication that we ignore at our peril. Donna Haraway writes that human exceptionalism is ‘unthinkable’ in contemporary natural and social sciences (30). The ethical imperative that she derives from this is that we should ‘make kin’ with other species and embrace ‘sympoiesis’—an enmeshed ‘making-with’ other living things (2016, 58).

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Ecocriticism, Place, and Planet In the words of Donna Haraway, ‘Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.’ Haraway is arguing for interconnections, local and global; for ‘roots and routes’ (2016, 31). This focus on interconnection puts received notions of place—fixity, boundedness—under pressure. Questions of ‘place’ and ‘space’ have preoccupied philosophers and authors, psychoanalysists and geographers—and indeed psychogeographers. The influential work of geographer Yi-Fu Tuan proposes that place is bounded, while space is more open ended, and that the two are largely distinct (Tuan, 1974).23 Some ecocritics follow this line of enquiry, also drawing on concepts that Heidegger formulated in his lecture Building, Dwelling, Thinking (1951) to develop a sense of dwelling in place, and poetry as uniquely qualified to articulate human beings’ relationship to it. Heideggerian readings of poetry by ecocritics have persisted, ranging from Garrard (1998) to Bate (2000) to Drangsholt (2016) to O’Brien (2021); only the first two of these critics mention the ideological problem that Heidegger’s proto-ecological concept of dwelling was informed by his fascism.24 Yet other thinkers, from cultural geographers to literary scholars, are in favour of definitions of place that encompass openness and interconnection. Such perspectives include David Harvey’s view that globalised communications and transport have created ‘time-space compression’ (147), and Doreen Massey’s ‘progressive sense of place’ as interconnected and mutable (1991, 29). Many poetry critics have assumed that poets have a particular attachment to place, and this inflects certain critical readings that link poetry, place, and the Anthropocene. This way of thinking about ecopoetry runs from Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth (2000) to Neal Cooper and David Alexander’s Poetry and Geography: Space and Place in Post-war Poetry (2013), Thomas Bristow’s monograph on Anthropocene poetry (2015), and essays on Irish climate change poetry collected by Auge and O’Brien (2022). It would be foolish to deny the importance of 23  For arguments that (largely) favour fixity and boundedness, and for ‘topophilia’—a love of place—see Tuan 1974 and 1977. 24  Such ideas have been influential for literary critics including Jonathan Bate (2000) and J. Scott Bryson (2005). Martin Heidegger’s concept of ‘dwelling’ (1951), and the problems with deploying Heidegger’s work, was frequently raised by ecocritics examining poetry, literature, and place (e.g. Bate 2000, 251–68; Garrard 1998, 158). See in particular Garrard’s problematisation of this (2010).

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the Midlands to Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns or of the Niger Delta to Ogaga Ifowodo’s The Oil Lamp. Yet place, region, and nation are no longer the dominant geographical scales in environmental literary criticism. As late as 2011, Terry Gifford’s book Green Voices proposed to ‘respect and celebrate the regionalism of ecopoetry in the British Isles’ (14). This raises the question—whose regionalism, and why? The Anthropocene, with its focus on shifting scales of perception, reveals the forces that shape society and literature to be not merely social, but ecological—even geological and planetary. If ecocritical theory started off with a ‘centripetal’ focus on the locale and bioregion, it has become increasingly ‘centrifugal’: embracing ‘hybrid spaces’ and ‘cosmopolitan identities’ (Garrard 2012, 9). Bate’s The Song of the Earth largely exemplifies a ‘centripetal’ approach to poetry and place— the Wordsworthian ‘spot of time’ (206, 212). Lawrence Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism, which finds a ‘global sense of place’ in Walcott’s Omeros (92), begins to evidence a ‘centrifugal’ focus. From the work of Ursula Heise on a sense of place and planet (2008) to Michael Niblett’s monograph on world literature, ecology, and commodity frontiers (2020), ecocritical work with this ‘centrifugal’ approach draws on scholarly frameworks on globalisation, cosmopolitanism, and concepts that examine planetary systems—including the idea of the Anthropocene. Theories of environmental cosmopolitanism have reshaped the way ecocriticism conceptualises ‘place.’ Environmental cosmopolitanism challenges earlier arguments for the value of place in environmental literature, creating a more nuanced picture of the links between local and global. Sociologist Ulrich Beck’s work on cosmopolitanisation and world risk has provided productive lines of enquiry for ecocritics such as Ursula Heise (2008). Shared risks, for Beck, create a climate of global risk, although different levels of risk affect different groups of people in distinct ways (1999, 53, 37). Beck argues for ‘cosmopolitanization,’ which means ‘internal globalization, globalization from within the national society’ (2002, 28, 17). Moreover, some other species are inherently cosmopolitan: they migrate across oceans and continents. Indeed, ‘the long evolution of patterns of bird migration has been influenced by the drifting of the continents and by the periodic advance and retreat of the succession of ice ages’ (Massey 2005, 138). In addition to this, human beings are transporting more nonhuman species around the globe than at any other time in history. Thus, culture is changing biology—but invasive species show how biological entities have transformative capabilities of their own (Clark

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2002, 103–4). In Kei Miller’s poetry, turtles, blue whales, Caribbean caribou—and even the slow mobility of trees—enable an ecopoetic consideration of nonhuman cosmopolitanism. One of the most significant books to examine ‘a global sense of place’ is Ursula Heise’s 2008 monograph Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Local Imagination of the Global. Heise writes, ‘In search of countermodels to such nation-based concepts of identity, a wide range of theorists instead presented identities shaped by hybridity, creolization, mestizaje, migration, borderlands, diaspora, nomadism, exile, and deterritorialization not only as more politically progressive but also as potential grounds for resistance to national hegemonies’ (5). Globalisation does risk containing ‘imperialist dimensions’ (7), but Heise proposes alternative ways of looking at international connections that are neither totalising nor hegemonic. Her argument favours ecological advocacy based ‘on ties to territories and systems that are understood to encompass the planet as a whole’ (10) through decentralised, non-hierarchical networks (65). In a later monograph, she has updated her idea of ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ with the concept of the Anthropocene in mind. She writes, ‘eco-cosmopolitanism as I conceive it is shaped by an awareness that very little commonality can be taken for granted and that speaking about the human species, humanity, humanness, or the Anthropocene requires a patient and meticulous process of assembly’ (2016, loc 4562). However, to be adequate to the predicament of the Anthropocene, the ideas of the ‘network’ and the ‘assembly’ need to be expanded. This book shows how poets are deploying the idea of the network to create formal ecopoetic strategies—Anthony Cody’s work is a particularly striking example (see Coda). Networks, meshes, and Earth’s systems emphasise global connectivity across levels (e.g. Latour 1996). However, the concept of the Anthropocene takes this a step further: such networks are not merely local and international, but planetary. The Anthropocene interrogates the vast timescales of geology. A long view of Earth’s history reveals the very rocks themselves to be highly mobile. Plate tectonics cause continents to drift, collide, merge, and be destroyed. Volcanic activity creates land masses, hills, and islands; they are eroded, deposited, reburied, and metamorphosed; they may be melted down and erupted afresh. The rock cycle means that ‘places’ are dynamic, in flux, subject to destruction and transformation. Mountains are on the move, and ‘immigration’ could be seen as going back to the deposition of boulders by glaciers (Massey 2005, 113). The earthquakes in Kei Miller’s work suggest that places are reshaped by

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Earth’s volatile systems. The dynamic Earth, and its mobile weather, oceans, plants, animals, and humans reveal the concept of ‘place’ to be fundamentally shifting and interconnected. Climate systems are another good example of planetary processes that defy borders—but which do not affect everyone equally. For Ghosh, ‘the ongoing changes in the climate, and the perturbations that they will cause within nations, cannot be held at bay by reinforcing man-made boundaries’ (Ghosh, 143–4). Indeed, climate-related changes ‘mock the discontinuities and boundaries of the nation-state’ and ‘defy the boundedness of “place”’ (62). Places are changing profoundly as the climate changes, and are losing the geographical and cultural distinctiveness that were formerly attached to them. Glaciers in Iceland and the Alps have been declared ‘dead’25; the Netherlands and the Maldives are at risk of being engulfed by the rising sea. Yet the boundlessness of climate change will not necessarily stop richer nations from attempting to reinforce their borders. The UN’s International Organization for Migration predicts that climate change refugees may number 200 million by 2050—with an upper estimate of 1 billion (International Organization for Migration 2018). Ghosh writes that wealthy nations will invest heavily in keeping the tide of climate refugees at bay (143). In Karen McCarthy Woolf’s poetry, displacement due to climate change is a significant concern. Place and space end up uncannily scrambled in the Anthropocene, for Timothy Morton, who argues that space is inherited from western imperialist thinking and is more anthropocentric than place (2016, 10, 11). Instead, his argument for ‘dark ecology’ involves a multifaceted, multi-­ scalar, and inter-species concept of place that is capable of linking levels across the planet: Now that the globalization dust has settled and the global warming data is in, we humans find ourselves on a very specific planet with a specific biosphere. It’s not Mars. It is planet Earth. Our sense of planet is not a cosmopolitan rush but rather the uncanny feeling that there are all kinds of places at all kinds of scale: dinner table, house, street, neighborhood, Earth, bio25  Andri Snaer Magnason. ‘The glaciers of Iceland seemed eternal. Now a country mourns their loss.’ Guardian opinion sec., 14 Aug 2019. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2019/aug/14/glaciers-iceland-country-loss-plaque-climate-crisis. Arnaud Siad and Amy Woodyatt. ‘Hundreds mourn ‘dead’ glacier at funeral in Switzerland.’ CNN World sec., 22 Sept 2019. Web. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/22/europe/swissglacier-funeral-intl-scli/index.html

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sphere, ecosystem, city, bioregion, country, tectonic plate. Moreover and perhaps more significantly: bird’s nest, beaver’s dam, spider web, whale migration pathway, wolf territory, bacterial microbiome. (2016, 10)

Morton’s argument for a diversity of (global) places and connections across scales, and for nonhumans’ understanding of their surroundings, resonates with the poetry examined in this book, which considers individual characters and species—but which can also ‘scale up to Earth magnitude’ (24), as he puts it.

Environment and Planet The image of our planet carries diverse meanings for different thinkers. For some, seeing the fragile ball of forests, deserts, cities, and oceans inspires a holistic ethic of environmental care. For others, the image of the globe encourages a God’s-eye perspective: a detached view from nowhere that dislocates us at the very time when we most acutely need to be aware of our utter dependence the earth. Others still find that the globe (and globalisation) can inspire megalomaniac or neo-colonial visions of world domination. Is it possible to think about the Earth as a whole, without adopting such totalising perspectives? In the 1960s, people were able to see photographs of the planet for the first time. Images taken from the orbital flights of Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn, the Apollo missions and ‘Earthrise’ image of 1968, and the ‘blue marble’ image of 1972 created new ways of seeing the world, although conceptualising the globe had a long history in western culture (Cosgrove). These images were important to the environmental movement, as Heise has noted (2008, 22). Yet the image of the globe from space is certainly associated with military surveillance—witness Cold War developments such as the American CORONA satellite programme. It is ironic that the very technologies that first enabled people to see their entire planet were linked to nuclear weapons technology capable of destroying life. Moreover, one of the dangers of focusing on the totality of the globe is that it might encourage a detached view. Such a view raises echoes of empire-building, and is a concept associated with contemporary, capitalist globalisation (Cosgrove, loc 80). This risks ignoring the vital and vulnerable creatures with whom we share our world. According to Stacy Alaimo, recent cinematic and photographic images that illustrate the Anthropocene present Earth as ‘an eerily lifeless entity’ (2017, 91). Indeed, Latour’s

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ideological problem with images of the Globe is that ‘he who looks at the Earth as a Globe always sees himself as a God’ (136). Latour has built on Lovelock and Margulis’ Gaia theory; ‘Gaia,’ for Latour, is not a sphere but the delicate, living layer of organic material ‘a few kilometres thick’ on our planet’s surface (139).26 Bonneuil and Fressoz equate the idea of the Anthropocene with global thinking, and are highly suspicious of the hegemonic ideologies this suggests (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 48). This presents ethical problems according to art critic T. J. Demos, who comments that satellite images that characterise ‘Anthropocene visualizations’ have ‘moved essentially beyond photography (historically and conventionally gauged to human perception) to remote sensing technology (scaled to global, even interplanetary measurements).’ The result is that ‘environmental emergencies and attritional scenes of slow violence’ are left out (13). In visual culture, views of the totality of the globe, and even views beyond it, risk performing a disembodied ‘god trick’ that conceals masculine, western, and technocratic biases (Haraway 1991, loc 3871). Yet certain environmental risks must be considered on a worldwide scale. Climate change is one particularly intractable example. While some think that it threatens to reinforce hegemonic western power (Ghosh 2016), there are others who consider it a global risk that could topple the world’s economic titans (Wallace-Wells 2019, 118). Unprecedented levels of environmental danger, and viruses that proliferate worldwide, necessitate concerted, international cooperation, although the damage caused by these issues is not distributed evenly. The processes behind this generate gross environmental and economic injustices, and they function at multiple scalar levels. The global spread of introduced species, international trade, and digital communication networks are providing new ways of conceptualising the world as a whole. The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, which collects new words to describe the Anthropocene, has even coined a term to articulate a ‘supercontinent’ created by international trade and the mixing of species: ‘Neopangea.’27 26  Latour’s idea is not without its problems. The issue with his concept of ‘Gaia’ as a layer is that it does not recognise that living organisms travel farther than this and that other theorists have sought to put the living/non-living distinction under pressure. Bacteria can survive 10,000 metres up in the atmosphere and at the searing mouths of undersea hot springs; the boundary between living and non-living, such as the ambiguous cases of viruses and RNA, has been deconstructed by thinkers such as Morton (2010, 67). 27  Bureau of Linguistical Reality. ‘Neopangea.’ 2015. Web. 20 Nov 2019. https:// bureauoflinguisticalreality.com/portfolio/293/

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But what if the concept of ‘the global’ could be replaced with an idea of the ‘planet’? Viewing the Anthropocene as a planetary, rather than global, concept would have the advantage of focusing attention on Earth’s dynamic systems, and avoiding totalising, distanced, or hegemonic views of the globe. In her essay ‘Planetarity,’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls on fellow thinkers in the social sciences to ‘imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities’ (2003, 73). For geographers Szerszynski and Clark, Earth contains both ‘planetary multiplicity’—a series of changeable Earths—and ‘earthly multitudes’—the diverse and different peoples who inhabit our planet (383). As they put it, ‘we live on Terra mobilis. And a planet that is constitutively in motion, as many of the more mobile earthly multitudes well know, is one that obliges its inhabitants to move’ (Szerszynski and Clark, loc 3319.) This paves the way for my focus on poetry, place, and planet. Yet how does culture shift between such planetary perspectives, and more intimate, local, and personal scales?

Place and Scale The Anthropocene necessitates ways of thinking that shift between the microscopic and the massive. Environmental art and culture are shifting between planetary panoramas, the lives of individual people, and the intimate space of animal and human cells. Heaney’s ‘On the Spot,’ which broadens its focus from a clutch of eggs to the great sphere of the Earth, is an example of how such a shift can take place in the space of a single poem (Chap. 3). Place and the local are not obsolete concepts for poets, but contemporary environmental poetry considers them to be increasingly fluid and mutable. Anthropocene poetry shifts fluidly between local, national, international, and planetary scales, between human and nonhuman. The clashing together of discrepant scales has been termed ‘scale variance’ by visual art critic Derek Woods, who analyses Eames and Eames’s 1977 simulation Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe. This simulation creates dramatic cinematic leaps from a couple in a park, out to the Earth in space and in a cluster of galaxies, and right down to the cells in the man’s hand, and the subatomic particles that constitute them (133). Such scale variance ‘names the disempowerment of the human’ (134), an ironic dimension of the Anthropocene that sees human beings as only one terraforming agent among many. I would go further

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than Woods in scrutinising the idea of ‘the human’: the simulation shows human cells being reduced to their constituent subatomic particles, and witnesses the human body becoming an insignificant speck in a vast galaxy cluster. The simulation thus deconstructs, dissects, and decentres human bodies—a profound challenge to anthropocentrism. Shifting scales, from the vast to the microscopic and back again, is a tactic that artists and poets are employing to grapple with the issues the Anthropocene raises. Among literary forms, poetry is particularly well equipped to do this. A poem can create ‘jump cuts’ between different places, times, and viewpoints more easily than all but the most experimental of fiction or scripts. Literary critics have deployed various terms for this: ‘scalar dissonance’ in the work of Lynn Keller on ecopoetics (Keller, 32) and ‘derangements of scale’ in Timothy Clark’s research on fiction (2012, 152, 2016, 9). Earlier environmental humanities concepts, such as Stacy Alaimo’s idea of the ‘trans-corporeal’—‘the material interchanges across human bodies, animal bodies, and the wider material world’ (2012, 476)—and Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’—the actions of vast, (neo)-imperialist multinationals that damage poorer citizens’ environments right down to the intimate space of their cells (2014, 6)—enable further interrogations of how environmental justice issues demand a multi-scalar imagination. Such a multi-scalar imagination can help poets to represent the chemical traces of plastic in living cells, the way communities are shocked to see polluting plastic washing up on their beaches, and the vast infrastructure of oil extraction, refining, and processing that led to the creation of the plastic. From cells to climate and back again: Anthropocene poetry offers suggestive ways of putting these shifts into play. Yet no consideration of poetry and the Anthropocene would be complete without a look at how culture also shifts scales to consider issues of time.

Timescales Under a mountain, a clock ticks once a year. It chimes a melody that will be unrepeated for ten millennia. The ‘10,000 Year Clock,’ made from stone and metal, is being built in the Nevada desert by the Long Now Foundation. This epochal clock is designed to encourage us to think about the geological past and our impact on the far future.28 Here is an example that illustrates Anthropocene culture’s preoccupation with ‘deep time.’ 28  The Long Now Foundation. ‘The 10,000 Year Clock.’ ND. Web. Accessed 2 Jun 2020. http://longnow.org/clock/

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Anthropocene theories are haunted by shifts in our perception of temporality. As Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams put it, ‘If, for some geologists, the anthropocene is too small in its scale—not yet ripe for geological tools of measurement—for most humans, its span is too wide, its significance not bearable. The proposal that human activity is now materially determining the constituent parts of the earth disorients us’ (13). Such timespans also raise crucial ethical questions about how we have treated other species in the past, our exploitation of them in the present, and how the world will look to future humans and nonhumans. ‘Deep time’ is a primary preoccupation for culture associated with the Anthropocene. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘deep time’ as ‘Time in the far distant past or future; spec. time viewed on a geological or cosmological scale rather than the historical scale’ (OED). The idea of ‘deep time’ was pioneered in 1788 by the Scottish geologist James Hutton (Baxter 2004) and popularised by Hutton’s friend John Playfair (Walls, 41). Bonneuil (2015) and others have argued for a ‘geological turn’ in Anthropocene thinking. According to Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, ‘the geologic, both as a material dynamic and as a cultural preoccupation, shapes the ‘now’ in ever more direct and urgent ways’ (2013, 7). This is certainly a resonant idea for interpreting poets who are self-consciously preoccupied with geology, such as Norman Nicholson or Hugh MacDiarmid. More recently, Michael McKimm’s pamphlet Fossil Sunshine (2013) engages specifically with the idea of the Anthropocene, mentioning stratigraphic debates. However, Stacey Alaimo has discussed the ‘geologic turn’ as raising potential ethical problems. The stony focus of Anthropocene stratigraphy may detract attention from human impacts on the living bodies of other species: ‘Even though the concept of the Anthropocene muddles the opposition between nature and culture, the focus on geology, rather than, say, chemistry or biology, may segregate the human from the anthropogenic alterations of the planet by focusing on an externalized and inhuman sense of materiality’ (Alaimo, ‘Your Shell on Acid’, 94). Yet considering humans within a geological timescale can also have ethical advantages—and recent poetry explores this. Matthew Griffiths’s humorous poem ‘Pantones for the Anthropocene,’ which will be discussed shortly, suggests how long timescales can be used to decentre human delusions of geological grandeur. A majority of the Anthropocene Working Group may have decided that we have created a new geological epoch, but it has lasted only a few decades or centuries—absurdly brief when we consider the antiquity of Earth or the solar system. We begin to look laughably small and

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unimportant against the great backdrop of the evolution of life (see also Heise 2016, loc 4576, Kelly, 3, Alaimo ‘The Anthropocene At Sea’, 158). Even if humans are belittled by the planet’s vast systems, some of our impacts on those systems are potentially suicidal. The question of the future hangs heavily on Anthropocene culture. Echoing the words of the Long Now Foundation, Robert Macfarlane asks, ‘Are we being good ancestors?’ (2019, 410).29 When Anthropocene Working Group members write about the distant future, their grandiose rhetoric of the ‘Great Acceleration’ as a time of ‘massive increase’ in human terraforming (Zalasiewicz et al., 5) is replaced by dire predictions about human impacts on future lives. When Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams write about oceans imperilled by climate change, they argue that ‘short-term economic pressures are currently too strong to allow effective international action against the chemical pollution (for such it is) that threatens to transform, irreversibly, and for the worse, the Earth and its oceans.’ They even discuss the need to ‘diminish the scale of the Anthropocene across the entire Earth.’ The reason for their concern about the future of the oceans is inter-generational injustice—‘setting the interests of the current generation against those of very many generations of the future’ (2011, 35). Although the idea of preserving the planet ‘for our grandchildren’ risks being human centred and heteronormative,30 there will inevitably be future lives to consider—human and nonhuman. For Timothy Clark, the Anthropocene is haunted by the unborn. These ‘spectral multitudes of human and innumerable non-human creatures’ are ignored by contemporary politics but are invoked as powerful reasons for environmentally responsible behaviour (46). Such ‘spectral multitudes’ might appear rather distant and disembodied in Timothy Clark’s description. Yet some contemporary writing gives them a visceral, almost tangible presence. Tamsin Hopkins’s poem ‘An Apology of Hair for My Unborn Grandchildren,’ from Magma’s Anthropocene Issue, considers the ethical dilemmas that women face when they consider having children—and what might dissuade them from doing so. ‘Little fingers and toes—stay away, do not be 29  The Long Now Foundation. ‘The 10,000 Year Clock.’ ND. Web. Accessed 2 Jun 2020. http://longnow.org/clock/ 30  See Adeline Johns-Putra, ‘Borrowing the world: climate change fiction and the problem of posterity.’ Metaphora. Journal for Literature Theory and Media 2 (2017): 1–16, Greg Garrard, ‘Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy.’ SubStance 127, 41.1 (2012): 56, and Nicole Seymour, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013.

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born,’ Hopkins writes, because future organic life is threatened: ‘loam and forest/becoming desert’ (Magma, 81 12). And what if, sometime in the future, human beings became extinct? Alan Weisman grapples with this quandary in his book The World Without Us (2007). Anthropocene poetry engages with this possibility, which is even more challenging to the human imagination and emotions than imagining one’s own death. Ted Hughes envisaged nonhuman ‘Mutations’ surviving a nuclear holocaust (CPH, 212). When asked which poets would be read in a century’s time, poet Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo quipped, ‘Who will be alive to read us? I cannot divine the literature of phosphorescent cockroaches.’31 In a more radical tradition, the ‘biopoetry’ of Christian Bök is written into the DNA of a radiation-resistant bacterium, potentially creating a poem that could outlast the human race.32 The very idea of a future presence that considers human impacts on strata suggests a perspective beyond the human, or even beyond the extinction of humans, for Clare Colebrook (24). Literature that takes a long view into the ‘deep time’ of the future is exploring this provocative possibility. Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey looks ‘far forwards into a post-human future’ (2019, 419). Poetry that engages with the Anthropocene considers posthuman futures in ways that may be elegiac or even ironic. Magma’s Anthropocene Issue brings together several examples. Poet A. C. Bevan subverts biblical discourse to create a feminist critique of nuclear technology, its uncannily long half-life, and its ability to destroy and outlast human beings: ‘as mother decay into daughter […] & daughter degrade unto granddaughter’ (Magma, 81 13). Alice Willits’ ironic title for her poem is ‘Jellyfish and cows will be the last animals left’ (Magma, 81 110).

Hybrid Cultural Forms It will be clear from the preceding work that the concept of the Anthropocene is not only highly interdisciplinary, but is also generating a profusion of cultural works that are hybrid, innovative, and sometimes downright unclassifiable. If Timothy Clark once argued that ‘Linguistic 31  Times Literary Supplement. ‘Twenty questions with Vahni Capildeo.’ N.D. Web. 6 Jun 2020. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/twenty-questions-vahni-capildeo/ 32  Christian Bök. The Xenotext: Book 1. Toronto: Coach House, 2015. For an analysis of this work, see Farrier 2019, 108–21.

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narrative in particular seems at issue solely as that mode which, by implication, fits least well the demands of the Anthropocene,’ apparently on the evidence that Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects (2013) and other important critical texts paid closer attention to visual art than to literature (Clark 2016, 187), issues associated with the Anthropocene have in fact given rise to an eclectic and imaginative array of hybrid literary forms.33 For Pieter Vermeulen, ‘formal innovation aligns contemporary literature with the aims of the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities’ (36)—although such innovative literature also contributes to the alignment and aims of the field. John Parham argues for the ‘adaptive, hybrid forms of literature that the Anthropocene will necessitate’ in order to cope with the vast scalar challenges that the concept entails (Parham 2021, 7). His view is that ‘three core components of literature—form, genre and narrative—are adapting and innovating to meet the Anthropocene head on’ (Parham 2021, 14) and that this process involves not only adapting existing forms but ‘the evolution of new genres or sub-genres’ (2021, 16). If Lauren Berlant argues for a capacious interpretation of the term ‘genre’ that includes both cultural and political contexts and proposes ‘genre flailing’ as a response to crisis (2018), Stephanie LeMenager argues that the Anthropocene may lead to a ‘struggle for genre.’ She argues that artefacts as diverse as a cli-fi novel and a weather report may be seen as ‘genres’ associated with climate change (2017, 222). Yet the idea of the Anthropocene does not always lead creative practitioners to struggle; it is inspiring the recycling, reconfiguration, and outright reinvention of genres. If Ghosh’s dismissal of the realist novel as inadequate to the task of representing the vastness of climate change is well known to scholars (2016), speculative fiction, science fiction, and ‘cli-fi,’ with their transgressive recombination of genres, are widely explored by ecocritics (e.g. Caracciolo 2021; Heise 2008; Trexler 2015; Vermeulen 2020). For Mandy Bloomfield, discussing the experimental poetry of Evelyn Reilly and others, poetic innovation is key, as ‘this era demands new kinds of language, thinking and perception’ (85). Analysing literature, film, and science communication, Marco Caracciolo and I have argued elsewhere 33  For complex debates regarding the term ‘form,’ see Vermeulen 41, and his argument that literary form provides patterns and connections: ‘Literary form can enrich interdisciplinary discussions by providing patterns, connections, structures, and descriptions that other kinds of knowledge production are less free to generate, if only because their protocol’ don’t allow the blend of imaginative, speculative and descriptive elements that make up literary form’ (47).

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that hybridity is a characteristic of many of the most innovative and successful narrative works that engage with the Anthropocene (2022). Indeed, science and culture are cross-fertilising in important ways: Anthropocene Working Group members in Steve Bradshaw’s 2015 film Anthropocene use words such as ‘tragedy’ and ‘fable’ to describe the Anthropocene, and indeed literary templates such as the apocalypse structure scientists’ ways of conceptualising it. Notable hybrid cultural works by important thinkers include Kosmokolos (2011), a tragicomic radio play with elements of science fiction, by Bruno Latour, Chloé Latour, and Frédérique Ait-Touatti; and Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood’s unclassifiable Ness (2018), which combines elements of the mystery play and the medieval long poem with visual art and nuclear discourse (Reddick and Caracciolo 2022). Innovation is burgeoning across cultural fields. In contemporary ecopoetry, Vermeulen finds that Evelyn Reilly’s Styrofoam (2009) is ‘a successful effort to devise new forms’ (40), deploying collage while recycling older concepts such as the Romantic sublime (41). Hybrid literary works are proliferating: Keri Hulme’s collection Stonefish (2004), part magical realism, part play, part poetry (see DeLoughrey 2019, Chap. 4); Sudeep Sen’s fascinating volume Anthropocene (2021), part poetry, part essay, part photo-essay. Christian Bök’s ongoing ‘biopoetry’ project The Xenotext even aspires to be co-created with a bacterium, a poetic equivalent of (often controversial) ‘bioart’ projects that involve nonhuman organisms;34 more on lab-grown ecopoetics shortly. Digital, hybrid interventions may be co-authored by a multiplicity of creators. Examples include ‘The Living Archive,’ created by Thom Van Dooren and dedicated to documenting accounts of extinction in Oceania; and the Climate Stories Project, in which people around the globe video record and share their accounts of floods, dwindling fish stocks, ocean warming, and climate activism. Such projects ‘unite data’s accumulation of knowledge with anecdote’s power to imagine and co-experience ecological impacts, while also sharing messages of resistance and hope’ (Parham 2021, 17). And there are many, many more such collective creations, which combine elements of the epistolary, the poetic and the digital; the Letters to the Earth 34  For debates surrounding ‘bioart,’ including the transgenic glow in the dark bunny by Eduardo Kac, see Cary Wolfe. ‘From Dead Meat to Glow in the Dark Bunnies: Seeing “the Animal Question” in Contemporary Art.’ Parallax 12.1 (2006): 95–109. For details of bioart projects, including ‘urban reefs’ designed to be colonised by plants and fungi, and artworks spun by silkworms, see Bioart Laboratories Foundation. Talents. 2021. Accessed 23.05.23. https://bioartlab.com/portfolio_page/urban-reef/

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project, pioneered by Culture Declares Emergency, enables the public to submit their letters to the planet itself.35 Letters to the Earth: Writing to a Planet in Crisis (HarperCollins 2019) brings together responses ranging from songs and poems, to schoolchildren’s handwritten epistles, and celebrities’ prose.36 Other endeavours, rooted in poetry, but branching out through collective authorship and cross-pollination with other art-­ forms, include ‘Dawn Chorus: a collective sound poem’ and ‘Murmuration: a collective film poem.’ New Writing North’s Climate Writer in Residence, Linda France, curated these poems, putting out open calls for the public to contribute audio recordings and individual lines of poetry.37 Working across poetry and visual art, Alec Finlay paints his poems onto bee skeps and bird boxes.38 The Anthropocene is too vast, baffling, and unsettling an issue to be tackled by one genre alone; yet, hybrid, innovative, and collaborative artworks are helping cultural practitioners  to conceptualise strangeness and survival.

Ecopoetics Issues that would later be called ‘environmental’ could be traced back to the world’s earliest written work, which is a poem: The Epic of Gilgamesh (Pogue Harrison, 3–18). If poetry criticism began to turn its lens on environmental matters in early publications such as Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991), ecopoetry and ecopoetics have since burgeoned, diversified, and ramified. Developing in aforementioned publications such as Terry Gifford’s Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (1995), Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth (2000), and Jonathan Skinner’s ecopoetics (2001 onwards), the field has flourished within the wider context of ecocriticism. 35  Letters to the Earth homepage. ‘What world are you dreaming of?’ 2023. Accessed 15.05.23. https://www.letterstotheearth.com/ 36  While celebrity contributors certainly generate public interest in such projects, and improve sales, it could be argued that young people and emerging activists might be in greater need of the platform they provide. 37  New Writing North. ‘Murmuration: a collective film poem.’ Oct 2020. Accessed 15.05. 2023. https://newwritingnorth.com/journal/murmuration-by-linda-france-and-katesweeney/. New Writing North. ‘Dawn Chorus: a collective sound poem.’ April 2021. Accessed 15. 05. 23. https://newwritingnorth.com/journal/dawn-chorus-by-linda-franceand-christo-wallers 38  Alec Finlay. ‘Living things.’ 2023. Accessed on 23.05.23. https://www.alecfinlay.com/ living-things

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I have analysed the development of ecocriticism in detail elsewhere (Reddick 2017, Chap. 2), and it is most important here to draw attention to recent debates about ecopoetics, and how they relate to the formal techniques and thematic strategies of Anthropocene poetry. ‘Ecopoetics’ and ‘ecopoetry’ continue to generate a proliferation of definitions and theoretical ideas. They raise debates about form and content, and about the artistic merits of poetry versus its role in environmental activism. Ecocritics will be familiar with Jonathan Bate’s rejection of Gary Snyder’s ‘Mother Earth, Her Whales’ because of its ‘didacticism’, and Bate’s endorsement of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Moose,’ which he terms ‘a poem that knows why we need wild animals’ (2000, 201). Bate is right to point out the problems with environmental poetry that preaches, yet considering why people need wild animals remains a human-centred way of reading Bishop. When Bishop ends her poem with the ‘smell of moose, an acrid/smell of gasoline’ (201), she hints at threats to its existence: roads breaking up its habitat, collisions with vehicles, oil extraction in Canada. Since Bishop’s time, readers are likely to interpret that whiff of gasoline as a harbinger of climate change. If Terry Gifford thought that ‘ “[e]copoetry” is now broadly used for what used to be called “nature poetry” ’ (2011, 8) and that ‘green poetry’ has come to be viewed as ‘narrowly propagandist’ (2011, 8), there are many scholars who argue that ecopoetry is in fact an important development of, or departure from, nature poetry. As American poet Juliana Spahr has observed, nature poetry has ‘tended to show the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird’s habitat’ (69). The lines between the ecopoetry of personal epiphany and the politicised poetry of environmental activism are also becoming increasingly blurred. In contemporary poetry, the Poetry School’s Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry has been awarded for single poems since 2015. The year 2019 saw the Ginkgo Prize running a new Environmental Defenders’ prize for eco-activists. Such initiatives have encouraged poets to pay close attention to the literary quality of any poetry that conveys an environmental ‘message,’ and they show that some circles of the literary establishment are encouraging and valuing poetry in an activist vein. Jonathan Skinner’s journal ecopoetics broke new ground in defining what ecopoetics was, and bringing together poetry that exemplified its diverse formal and compositional qualities. He criticised avant-garde poetry of the early 2000s for being ‘finicky’ about nature, although his journal was founded on the basis that ‘a lot of nature is getting into poems

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these days—in ways that, furthermore, subvert the endless debates about “language” vs. lyric, margin vs. mainstream, performed vs. written, innovative vs. academic, or, now, digitised vs. printed approaches to poetry’ (2001, 6). He is right in observing that environmentally focused poetry spans the supposed divide between so-called language poetry, which draws attention to the self-referential nature of language and the instability of the authorial self,39 and lyric poetry—usually the utterance of a single speaker or narrative voice,40 and which Lynn Keller defines as ‘mainstream’ and ‘expressive’ in her later monograph (2017, 11). Skinner’s definition of ecopoetics is open to shifting boundaries and interdisciplinarity poetic work, in ‘this global age.’ Yet here is his mission statement for the journal: ‘ “Eco” here signals—no more, no less—the house we share with several million other species, our planet Earth. “Poetics” is used as poesis or making, not necessarily to emphasize the critical over the creative act (nor vice versa). Thus: ecopoetics, a house making’ (7). The homeliness of the house-making metaphor is problematic for feminist thinkers and women poets, as it risks confining them.41 Moreover, the Eames’s simulation Powers of Ten goes beyond the Earth to consider other galaxies, while poets are quite clearly considering other parts of the solar system and universe. The Anthropocene reinforces the idea that inhabited places are expansive, interconnected, and rapidly changing; the concept inflects the thematic and technical strategies employed by the poets analysed in this book. Skinner’s journal does present genre-defying breadth and interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation, but the issue of ecopoetics from which this mission statement is taken does focus more on the avant-garde than on any other poetic genre or tradition. This might risk reinforcing the dichotomies between ‘mainstream’ and avant-garde that Skinner argued were becoming increasingly fluid. Skinner explains that his choice of poems is a riposte to the ‘formally conservative’ character of American nature writing 39  For a definition of ‘language’ poetry, see Baldick 196–7, and for examples see the archive of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine at http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/LANGUAGEn1/ contents.html 40  For a definition of the lyric, see 206–7. 41  See, for example, the work of feminist geographer Gillian Rose, who argues that not all women would recognise a vision of home that is ‘conflict-free, caring, nurturing and almost mystically venerated by the humanists’ (Rose 1993, 56). Harriet Tarlo is an environmental poet who has objected to ‘[t]his emphasis on the domestic space of “home” ’ (5) in an ecopoetic context.

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since Thoreau. He is in favour of a poetry that is ‘frank about the materiality of language, whether via image or sound or both’ (Skinner 2001b, 105), and which demands a move beyond ‘uncritical mimesis.’ He approves of borrowing concepts from earth sciences and the languages of pre-European America (106). The results are experimental and surprising, but at times, they confound readerly interpretation. Julie Paton’s ‘Slug Art’ is written in the blank spaces that slugs have chewed into leaves; its fragmentation would make it unintelligible to anyone who was not well versed in avant-garde poetry. Such unintelligibility suggests searching and often playful methods of defamiliarising human language, challenging human exceptionalism, and considering whether we can enter into dialogue with other species. Skinner has discussed the nuances between ‘ecopoetry’ and ‘ecopoetics’: ‘ecopoetry’ engages with ecological themes and content, and for him, it may stray towards ideological conservatism. However, ‘ecopoetics’ is more focused on reflecting ecological processes (and human interventions in these) through compositional techniques.42 Other critics have focused their attention on experimental poetry, finding it to be more adequate to today’s environmental predicaments than formally traditional work. Critic Mandy Bloomfield certainly favours contemporary, ecologically aware work that draws on the methods of ‘open field’ poetics, pioneered by poets such as Charles Olson (75),43 analysing the work of North American poets Evelyn Reilly, Ed Roberson, and Stephen Collis. She argues that ‘nature poetry’ is obsolete; it is giving way to ‘poetry, that, rather than figuring nature as a space of renewal, engages with anthropogenically compromised environments. Rather than positing nature as separate from human culture, this work emphasises entanglement and contingency. And instead of engaging with the material world through individual lyric personae, as in much nature poetry, it explores alternative forms of agency and collectivity’ (73). Poet and critic Harriet Tarlo’s anthology The Ground Aslant showcases ‘radical landscape poetry’ from the British Isles (2011). Elsewhere, she has written about her wariness of the lyric: ‘[W]e need to get beyond not just the confessional obsession with identity, but 42  Jonathan Skinner. Round table discussion at the advisory board meeting for AHRC Leadership Fellowship, ‘Anthropocene Poetry.’ 27 May 2021. 43  A publicly available version of Charles Olson’s 1950 manifesto ‘Projective Verse’ is available at Poetry Foundation 2009, accessed 15.05. 2030. https://www.poetryfoundation. org/articles/69406/projective-verse

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also the obsession with the fracturing of identity which has characterized recent theoretical thought.’ She favours a poetry that attempts ‘to reduce human egotism, anthropocentrism and subjectivism’ (141). When writing about climate change, critic Matthew Griffiths notes that ‘Modernist aesthetics is much better equipped to articulate the complexities and nuances with which climate change confronts us than […] traditions of nature poetry’ (9–10). Lynn Keller’s analysis of poetry of the ‘self-­conscious Anthropocene’ takes in poets who are ‘often more or less experimental’ (19), while Heather Milne finds that ‘much innovative and avant-garde poetry is deeply engaged with the pressing social, economic, and geopolitical issues of our times.’ For Milne, it enacts this complex critique formally and compositionally (5). Milne does admit that ‘[m]uch of this poetry is unintelligible when read through traditional strategies of literary analysis’ (Milne, 97). A potential pitfall of such poetic strategies is that they risk ‘straining the boundaries of accessibility, relevance and even readability’—Timothy Clark certainly finds this with Evelyn Reilly’s avant-­ garde poem Styrofoam (2019, 75). The North American ecopoetic avant-­garde is creating some daring and provocative experiments, including Christian Bök’s aforementioned ‘biopoetry’ and Adam Dickinson’s collection that riffs off pollutants in his own body.44 If Bate’s The Song of the Earth had largely examined the supposedly ‘mainstream’ lyric, with exceptions such as the more experimental Kamau Braithwaite and the Modernist Basil Bunting (2000), Scott Knickerbocker focused on the ‘organic formalism’ of Stevens, Bishop, Wilbur, and Plath (2012). Some work in poetry of the Anthropocene and ecopoetics is bringing together the ‘avant-garde’ with the ‘lyric,’ suggesting that the perceived divide between these two modes needs to be examined further. Solnick’s monograph analyses the highly experimental Prynne alongside the more traditional Ted Hughes and Derek Mahon (2017); David Farrier’s monograph ranges from the lyrics of Elizabeth Bishop to the highly experimental Bök (2019). Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne’s Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (2018) is deliberately broad ranging, recognising ‘the range of writing types to which the term “ecopoetics” might be 44  For more information on Bök’s The Xenotext: Book 1 (2015), see Farrier 2019 108–23 and John Charles Ryan’s ‘Biological Processes as Writerly? An Ecological Critique of DNABased Poetry.’ Environmental Humanities 9.1 (2017): 129–48. Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic (Toronto: Coach House, 2018) was written in response to microbiome and biomonitoring testing on the author’s own body.

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applied’ and invoking ‘a diversity of field-writing practices’ (5). However, the avant-garde and the mainstream are not entrenched in such invariably opposing camps, in some of the work from ecopoets from the UK, Ireland, and the Caribbean that I examine in this book. Poets’ formal and compositional strategies may vary throughout their careers, and even in the space of the same book. Alice Oswald’s lyrical The Thing in the Gap-­Stone Stile was followed by the more Modernist Dart. Karen McCarthy Woolf began her career with An Aviary of Small Birds, a collection of lyric elegies drawn from personal experience (McCarthy Woolf 2015). Yet she comments on her subversion of the lyric, and her quotation and refashioning of different voices, in an interview about Seasonal Disturbances (Reddick and McCarthy Woolf 2020). Kei Miller’s In Nearby Bushes develops formally innovative methods by reworking found texts. The later ecopoetry analysed in this book, especially the work of Oswald, Miller, and McCarthy Woolf, suggests that ideas associated with the Anthropocene lead poets to develop new formal strategies to unsettle notions of bounded place and human exceptionalism. Moreover, when it comes to Anthropocene-inspired anthologies, Sledmere and Williams’s The weird folds is deliberately eclectic in form, genre, and content. In their introduction, Sledmere and Williams comment that ‘Readers will brush against many forms and genres, from ‘classic’ lyric to experimental poetics: we offer poems as places where things can come together, be bedfellows or flickering kin. We suggest poetry as a mode where form—page arrangement, convention (and unconvention), figurative language, type and handwriting—allows things to be held in new relation’ (18). From the canonical lyrics of Seamus Heaney (Chap. 3) to the avant-garde work of Anthony Cody (Coda), the following chapters explore how poetry linked to Anthropocene issues holds people, places, and planetary processes in (often fractured) relation.

Poems from the Anthropocene Poems are ‘shards of the Anthropocene’ and ‘shadows from the future,’ writes Timothy Morton in his introduction to The weird folds (2020, 33). For Morton, then, they are both relics and harbingers. (Shards are splinters of something broken, but they are also the wing-cases of beetles. Morton is engaging with the Anthropocene’s sense of haunted time—the future geologist who digs into deep time and unearths relics of our present age—while elegantly gesturing to the biodiversity crisis.) Yet is there a

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possible future beyond shards and shadows, and how does poetry articulate it? The Anthropocene as a concept is not the preserve of stratigraphers, and it transcends disciplinary boundaries as an idea that captures the totality of human beings’ impacts on Earth’s systems. Poets have their own understanding of and opinions about the idea. From Spahr and Clover’s theses for the ‘#Misanthropocene’ to Petit’s poem ‘The Anthropocene,’ from Sledmere and Williams’s The weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene to stratigraphic poems in Magma’s Climate Change Issue, poets are creating new work and growing fresh insights from this stratum of what McCarthy Woolf terms ‘scar tissue.’ Geologists do not need to come to an agreement about where to plant the golden spike for Sledmere and Williams to raise the possibility that the poets they publish are writing ‘from the Anthropocene,’ although arts and humanities thinkers may add caveats to the term. Poetry practitioners respond to the concept with critique, metaphor, characterisation, imagery—and sometimes with outright mockery. The Anthropocene does not mark the ascent of ‘Man’; it is a threshold in people’s understanding of what some have done to Earth’s systems. Poetry from this unsettling time is alternately local, regional, national, international, and planetary—the work examined in this book often suggests enmeshed and rhizomatic links between these scales. Yet it is not universalising, and it remains highly cognisant of difference and diversity. Indeed, editorial projects inspired by the Anthropocene as a concept do not stop at geographical borders (in Sledmere and Williams’s anthology of ‘everyday poems from the anthropocene,’ Glaswegian poets rub shoulders with Chilean-British duo montenegro fisher, Indo-Swiss editor Pratyusha and Trinidadian-Scottish writer Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo. A glance at some of the recent work in anthropocene journal reveals contributors from Britain, Bangalore, Toronto, and the Spanish Pyrenees).45 Yet no anthology, journal, website, or book can ever hope to encapsulate the scale and scope of international poets’ engagement with the Anthropocene, and such projects may necessarily have an element of locality. They reflect the languages the editors speak or are able to print, the location of the press, the pressure from funding bodies to support regional or  national talent, or the support (or lack thereof) from different 45  These are specifically Anagha Smrithi Lillian Necakov, and Leia Sales Merinos translating fellow Spanish poet Ángelo Néstore.

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governments for literary production. Indeed, the Anthropocene concept could be accused of lingering, western bias, since it is often associated with that well-known article by Crutzen and Stoermer in the Geological Society of America’s bulletin. Yet collectives of writers, editors—and often scientists with literary interests too—are looking outwards to develop international links that are rhizomatic and eclectic. In this, the Anthropocenes these poets present may be living as well as stratigraphic. The organic and the vibrantly entangled are vividly present in wood-wide webs and water-­ systems, and even in the fossil origins of coal, oil, peat, and plastics. What becomes clear is that the later poets analysed here formulate their own views of the Anthropocene as a concept. For Kei Miller, the Anthropocene speaks of issues of imperialism and exploitation—an epoch that has lasted ‘hundreds of years’ for people who have endured colonialism, slavery, and their racist fallout (Magma, 81 111–2). Karen McCarthy Woolf mentions the ‘speed’ of changes to the planet, suggesting the Great Acceleration. She has posited that the Anthropocene might be the ‘age of sugar’46 (building on Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None and Tsing’s ‘Plantationocene’)—a form of racialised, environmental violence that draws out the crucial ethical dilemmas of Lewis and Maslin’s colonial threshold. The work of Hughes and Heaney resonates with a broad range of ideas associated with the Anthropocene, from nuclear technology and the ‘Great Acceleration’ to the carbon cycle, extinction, and the oil economy. Alice Oswald has been commissioned to write about climate change, and her work engages thematically with issues from water pollution to plastic in the sea, and with narratives of environmental science. The Anthropocene Working Group is not entirely unanimous in its intention to declare the Anthropocene as a formal unit of geological time. One reason for this is that the proposed epoch might have multifarious origins. Nature journal reported that a few members of the Working Group argued that ‘a clear signal that can be found globally in the geological record’ was not preferable to ‘acknowledging the progressive impacts of humans on the world, starting with prehistoric agriculture.’ An archaeologist who voted against a nuclear boundary proposed a 46  McCarthy Woolf raised this in a discussion between poets and geologists ahead of Magma’s Anthropocene Issue, on 27 February 2021. Fellow poet Janette Ayachi published the idea in her poem ‘Angels of the Anthropocene,’ published on Magma’s website. Magma: Current Issue. 5 Nov 2021. Web. 11 Nov 2021. https://magmapoetry.com/archive/ magma-81-anthropocene/poems/angels-of-the-anthropocene/

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‘time-­transgressive Anthropocene with multiple beginnings rather than a single moment of origin.’47 This argument resonates with Timothy Morton’s view that agriculture marks the origin of a perceived divide between ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ while capitalism, climate change, and extinction could even be viewed as stemming from this single originary moment (2016). In his introduction to Sledmere and Williams’s poetry anthology, Morton later points to colonialism and the Great Acceleration as corollaries of such ancient ways of thinking (2020, 27). A multifaceted, ‘time-­transgressive’ Anthropocene also suggests possibilities for the poetry and writing that arises from the Anthropocene to be transgressive in other ways. It might transgress perceived divides between human beings and nature (as with Karen McCarthy Woolf and Pascale Petit’s enmeshing of humans with rainforests and rivers). It might transition away from heteronormative ideas of gender and sex (as Kei Miller’s ecological ‘Anancy stories’ do). It may transgress in the way it sends up white, patriarchal science (like Kei Miller’s vernacular geographies and plant names, or Karen McCarthy Woolf’s ‘the Science of Life’ poetry sequence). It may transgress by challenging the political establishment over environmental issues (witness the ‘radical fury’ behind Hughes’s environmentalism, and Heaney’s taking up a conservation cause with those in power). It necessarily has its origins in the actions of (some) human beings—witness Timothy Morton’s quip that the Anthropocene was not caused by bacteria or lemons (2016, 23). Yet humans, of course, cannot be disassociated from nature; as Morton has elaborated, ‘The Anthropocene doesn’t destroy Nature. The Anthropocene is Nature in its toxic nightmare form’ (2016, 59). Yet how do poets convey the baffling complexity of this unsettling time, and do they allow space for hope, regeneration, and survival? For the poets analysed in this book, several main Anthropocene dilemmas stand out as particular preoccupations. These are climate change, the biodiversity crisis, the contamination of rivers and oceans, and the iniquitous impacts that these problems have on different groups of human beings. The narrative of a nuclear Anthropocene, favoured by the majority of the Anthropocene Working Group, is not a central poetic theme for Heaney, Oswald, Miller, Petit, or McCarthy Woolf (although it appears in some of the poems in Magma’s Anthropocene Issue, including Bevan’s 47  Meera Subramanian. ‘Anthropocene now: influential panel votes to recognize Earth’s new epoch.’ Nature news, 21 May 2019. Web. 05.07.21. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01641-5

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aforementioned ‘Uranium’s Daughters’ and Daniel Fraser’s ‘Blackwater’ (Magma, 81 13, 18)). Hughes’s research notes suggest that by the 1990s, he was equally preoccupied by nuclear technology, extinction, and climate change. Titles from The weird folds suggest similarly multifarious considerations of the term: Sarah Cave’s ‘after the end & other sibylline utterances’ (on apocalypse); Calum Rodger’s ‘3 ecchoes for ecco’ (considering the Capitalocene); Sascha Akhtar’s ‘No More Blood Babies—A USER’S GUIDE’ (on women’s sexuality at a time of overpopulation, presented as handwritten notes, intimate as a mind map or journal); and Nat Raha’s ‘after Nina Simone & Kathryn Yusoff’ (a link between land appropriation, extractive industries, and climate change, incorporating fragmentary found texts). What this means is that for these poets and literary practitioners, the Anthropocene is an interdisciplinary concept that inflects their discourse, regardless of where the ‘golden spike’ is placed. One would expect climate change to be a primary consideration for poets engaging with the Anthropocene. Indeed, some poetry critics are raising the possibility that an ‘Anthropocene ecopoetics’ (Auge and O’Brien) has climate change as its main focus (1), although this betrays a lack of engagement with the multitude of cultural and scientific debates about the Anthropocene. This book does not aim to analyse climate change poetry exclusively—the Anthropocene cannot be reduced to climatic matters alone. Yet all of the poets analysed in the forthcoming chapters engage with it formally, thematically, or both. The burgeoning range of climate change poetry projects in Anglophone countries testifies to the urgency with which recent literary art is treating issues of climate; as New Writing North’s Writing the Climate project puts it, climate change ‘is just one strand of our current ecological crisis, but the only one with a deadline.’48 Some earlier critics dismissed fiction and literary narrative as ill-equipped to conceptualise climate change, but poetry does not have to follow the conventions of these genres. For Amitav Ghosh, the Anthropocene (and climate change in particular) defies the conventional representative methods of literary fiction (2016, 8). Timothy Clark criticises traditional narrative forms on the grounds of their inability to go beyond the lifetimes and localities of individuals and represent the vastness of climate change (2016, 175). It was not until his 2019 monograph that he used the idea of the Anthropocene to examine contemporary North 48  New Writing North. ‘Writing the Climate.’ 2021. Web. Accessed 16.11.21. https:// newwritingnorth.com/projects/writing-the-climate/

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American poetry (69–77). Modern poetry is not obliged to follow a traditional narrative structure,49 and so offers the possibilities of radical shifts in time and location. Auge and O’Brien draw on the work of Solnick, Lidström, Garrard, and others to make the valuable point that poetry is not bound by mimesis; its openness to unpredictability and multiple levels of meaning make it an apt literary mode for grappling with the challenges of representing climate change (2). There is now a vast and expanding field of scholarly—and authorial—commentary on how literary arts engage with climate change.50 What matters for the purposes of this book is how the poets examined here represent this crucial dilemma associated with the Anthropocene. The editors of Magma poetry’s Climate Change Issue argue for the ability of poetry to ‘say the unsayable, address what’s not visible and observe what is, make stories about where we stand, find connections.’ They note that their issue of the poetry journal ranges from elegies, omens, deluges, and poems of climate injustice to poetic forms of science fiction. They publish ‘questioning, mischievous poems, and quirky shapes to upend thinking.’51 This small sample of recent climate change poetry shows how eclectic and wide ranging the poetry of climate change can be, and how it leads poets to reshape historical poetic conventions, such as the elegy. As I will argue shortly, certain poems from recent editorial projects on climate change name the Anthropocene and discuss issues of stratigraphy or geological traces. Recent climate change poetry joins forces with a robust, global scientific consensus, and a resurgent climate activism movement. Poetry associated with the Anthropocene may consider these issues; yet the Anthropocene remains a highly contested scientific and cultural concept, and some of the poets analysed here remain 49  By ‘narrative structure,’ I am referring to much-quoted models held up as examples for practising writers, such as Gustav Freytag’s famous pyramid, or Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. 50  For just a few examples of analyses of literary and scientific narrative engagements with climate change, see, for example, Marco Caracciolo’s Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene (Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2021.) For fiction, see Adeline Johns-Putra’s Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2019) and Adam Trexler’s  2015 Anthropocene Fictions (see Works Cited). A notable consideration of how poetry and poetics tackle climate change is Griffiths’s 2017 monograph, which argues in favour of Modernist strategies (see Chap. 2). See also Andrew Auge and Eugene O’Brien’s edited collection Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. 51  Fiona Moore, Eileen Pun, and Matt Howard’s editorial to Magma’s Climate Change Issue (Magma, 72, autumn 2018 5).

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more sceptical or tentative in their exploration of the Anthropocene than their writing on the subject of climate change. The poets analysed here often have a transdisciplinary understanding of ecopoetry, Anthropocene poetry, environmental science, and Anthropocene geology. They may be highly critical of some issues that such disciplines raise; they may choose to treat these with humour; or they may collaborate on equal terms with members of the scientific community. As will be explored in the forthcoming chapters, Hughes respects the sciences of biology and ecology, but is deeply sceptical about narratives of technological progress; Oswald provocatively blends ocean science and myth, while Petit is equally at home writing about the ‘coal age’ as the afterlife. McCarthy Woolf’s poems, written during an ocean science project, pull the beards of the white patriarchs who authored an Edwardian science encyclopaedia. These poets’ work suggests a multifaceted understanding of the Anthropocene that recognises climate change, while paying attention to how race, class, and gender inflect its origins and impacts; that confronts human-caused extinctions, while remaining cognisant of how events such as invasions and plantation agriculture may accelerate them. These cultural responses to the Anthropocene would appear to view it as a combination of human-caused impacts, many of them linked, that will leave their geological traces: radioactivity and plastics; mines dug by slave labour; ‘sacrifice zones’ polluted by oil; capitalist consumption and its carbon footprint; plantation agriculture; the transportation of species and people worldwide; and a long history of extinctions. The dilemmas of the Anthropocene are leading thinkers across disciplines to join forces. If some poets have questioned the Anthropocene as a concept, and the Anthropocene Working Group retains the ‘hard sciences’ majority that one would expect, interdisciplinary science-arts collaborations such as eXXpedition and Cape Farewell suggest that there are also many fruitful ways of breaching disciplinary boundaries. Science communication scholar Sam Illingworth completed a doctorate in the use of drones to monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide, and his multidisciplinary projects include the poetry, art, and science journal Consilience. Poet and geneticist Jemma Borg won the 2018 Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry with her poem ‘Unripe,’ which uses the central images of a small boy and a pine tree to explore inter-generational climate justice. Poets known for their environmental themes, from Forrest Gander to David Morley, have backgrounds in science. Magma poetry journal received Arts Council funding to invite scientists at the Cambridge Conservation Initiative to work with

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eight poets, who would write commissioned poems for the 2018 Climate Change Issue. The editors of Magma’s Anthropocene Issue built on this method by inviting geologists and environmental engineers to collaborate with poets for the 2021 Anthropocene Issue.52 Poetry from, and of, the Anthropocene is appropriately rhizomatic and hybrid, and it does not conform to anything as fixed as a literary genre. To borrow an insight from Samuel Solnick, ‘Although important, ecopoetics is only one of multiple critical/creative systems for exploring and engaging with the Anthropocene’ (57). This is because ‘in the Anthropocene, the ways we speak, write think and act are part of the (unpredictable) interrelated processes that constitute local and global ecosystems’ (57–8). Planetary systems, and some people’s impacts on them, are enveloping milieux to which culture responds; likewise the oil economy and the capitalist world-system. Graeme Macdonald raises the point that any modern novel could potentially be read as an oil-novel (2012, 7), regardless of whether or not it mentions the oil industry. Similarly, Timothy Morton has argued, in his distinctive, semi-flippant style, that any poem could be read as environmental: ‘All poems are environmental, because they include the spaces in which they are written and read—blank space around and between words, silence within the sound.’53 A more compelling argument than this one, which Morton has gestured towards elsewhere (2016, 81), would be that all poems are environmental at the level of their production, as they depend on the plastics and metals in the computer they are written on, or the pen and paper they are drafted on; energy for digital dissemination; paper for print distribution; and fossil fuels or electric vehicles to get the books to their readers. One could add, ‘Are all poems now Anthropocene poems?’ Not necessarily. This would imply an uncritical acceptance of the Anthropocene as a concept. It is clear that all poems now emerge from a context affected by the all-pervasive risks of climate change, and insidiously contaminated by global nuclear fallout—even if they are sung by Indigenous people in Amazonia, who bear no responsibility for these problems. Most (western) poems currently develop from a system pervaded by petroleum products such as plastic, underpinned by a fossil fuel economy in urgent need of 52  See the editorials of Magma: The Climate Change Issue 72 (autumn 2018): 5, and Magma: The Anthropocene Issue 81 (Winter 2021): 5. 53  Timothy Morton. ‘Writing Ecology.’ Originally published as ‘Escritura Ecológica.’ La Tempestad 10.65 (March 2009) 94–97; pages renumbered as 1–8 in translation.

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change, and dependent on consumer culture, with its environmental and human consequences. Yet whether this merits the label ‘Anthropocene’ and the declaration of a new epoch is a different matter. Moreover, the popularity of ecopoetry prizes, and ecopoetry anthologies and journals, suggests that writers, editors, and readers are currently more focused on the ‘eco-’ than the ‘Anthropo-’; poetry of the ‘self-conscious Anthropocene,’ as Lynn Keller calls it, is somewhat rarer. Yet, if one wished, one could read the popularity of ecopoetry as a symptom of the way that living in our current age, with its biocidal and climate-changing impacts, makes people in many cultures feel a visceral longing for ‘nature.’ The Anthropocene idea is clearly influential for poets. This means that it sometimes appears as an underlying stratum in projects that focus on issues that relate to proposed Anthropocene thresholds such as climate change or extinction, but which do not take stratigraphic debates as their main focus. Poems from Carol Ann Duffy’s 2019 project on declining insect populations, and from Magma’s Climate Change Issue, suggest that certain poets associate the Anthropocene with biodiversity loss, capitalist exploitation, and the uncannily long life of waste such as plastic—and especially with anthropocentric thinking. Duffy commissioned a poem from poet and philosopher Denise Riley, who came up with a satirical piece. Adapting Robert Burns, Riley’s poem ‘To a Lady, viewed by a Head-Louse’ sends up anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene: Let other species take their turns And do not keep so dour and mean Vaunting your old Anthropocene.54

Rhyme is deployed to poke fun at anthropocentrism, suggesting that it is decidedly old fashioned—the curt bathos of ‘mean’ undercutting the polysyllabic grandeur of the word ‘Anthropocene.’ Duffy’s anthology to highlight the plight of the world’s insects will be mentioned again in relation to Alice Oswald’s work. Magma’s 2018 Climate Change Issue contains poems that flag up their thematic engagement with the Anthropocene in their titles. Poet and 54  Carol Ann Duffy, ed. ‘Into thin air: Carol Ann Duffy presents poems about our vanishing insect world.’ Guardian 27 Apr 2019. Web. Accessed 23.07.21. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/27/into-thin-air-carol-ann-duffy-presents-poems-aboutour-vanishing-insect-world

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scholar Matthew Griffiths contributed ‘Pantones for the Anthropocene,’ which deploys Hudibrastic rhyme to mock human exceptionalism. Rather than the Modernist aesthetics of Eliot and Bunting that he favours in his critical work on climate change, the layered lines of Griffiths’s satirical poem have more in common with Byron’s comical rhymes in Don Juan: This bookmark gauges the depths of the human, Laid to the layers to show where a new one Rises like icing, a fresh fall of snow on A stiffening stratum, and so—with the golden Spike on the graphlines not otherwise seen— Say hello to the Man Age, so long to the Holocene, Earth gone the way of the spectrum of plasticine. (35)

The targets of his satire, here, are the masculinist and anthropocentric arrogance of planting the golden spike, the thin layer of evidence for this (the ‘icing’ of a consumer product, the ‘snow’ that is all too easily melted in the age of climate change), and the reduction of Earth to a human-­ owned commodity and plaything (the ‘Plasticene’). Also from the Climate Change Issue, Christine De Luca’s Shetlandic poem ‘Stotterin inta Anthropocene’ focuses, too, on rubbish—‘Sturkened [congealed] middens of Anthropocene’—and the impact this has on other species (‘birds is feeding plastic tae der laachter [nestlings]’) (61). But in ‘laachter,’ we hear an echo of laughter, albeit ironic. What Riley, Griffiths, and De Luca’s deployment of humour and irony suggests is that these authors take the Anthropocene concept with wry scepticism. Rhymes, in the case of Riley and Griffiths, build on the strata of earlier, canonical predecessors in order to poke fun at both the Commission for Quaternary Stratigraphy and anthropocentric thought. Meanwhile, De Luca’s use of Shetlandic provincialises the Anthropocene in location and language, taking it beyond the mainland and beyond mainstream Standard English. Since Timothy Morton envisages an Anthropocene that leaves space for comedy as well as tragedy (2016, 145), lighthearted poems engaging with the Anthropocene offer an important antidote to the depression and ‘eco-anxiety’ that many people feel about large-scale human impacts on Earth’s systems. From the humorous to the elegiac, from the lyric to the experimental, from the apocalyptic to the resurgent: the poetry analysed in the following pages is as diverse as definitions for the Anthropocene itself.

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Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. ———. ‘States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality in the Sea.’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 19.3 (Summer 2012): 476–93. ———. ‘Your Shell On Acid: Material Immersion, Anthropocene Dissolves.’ In Richard Grusin, ed. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2017. Pp. 89–120. Amos, Jonathan. ‘The Anthropocene: Canadian lake mud “symbolic of human changes to Earth”’. BBC News, Science & Environment sec, 11 Jul 2023. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66132769 Auge, Andrew, and Eugene O’Brien, eds. ‘Introduction’. Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 1–15. ———. ‘The Anthropocene at Sea: Temporality, paradox, compression.’ In Heise, Ursula, Jon Christensen and Michelle Neimann, eds. The Routledge companion to the environmental humanities. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. 153–61. Baldick, Chris. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. 4th edn. Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. London: Picador, 2000. Baxter, Stephen. Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time. New York: Forge, 2004. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983. Berlant, Lauren. ‘Genre Flailing.’ Capacious 1.2 (2018): 156–62. Bloomfield, Mandy. ‘Poetry.’ In John Parham, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. Pp. 71–87. Bonneuil, Christophe. ‘The Geological Turn: Narratives of the Anthropocene. In Clive Hamilton, François Gemenne and Christophe Bonneuil, eds. The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch. London: Routledge, 2015. Pp. 15–31. Braidotti, Rosi. ‘Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism’. In Richard Grusin, ed. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2018. Pp. 21–48. Bristow, Thomas. The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Campbell, Chris, and Michael Niblett. ‘Introduction.’ In Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett, eds. The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2016, pp. 1–16. Caracciolo, Marco. Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2021. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses.’ Critical Inquiry 35.2 (Winter 2009): 197–222.

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———. ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.’ New Literary History 43.1 (winter 2012): 1–18. ———. ‘Whose Anthropocene? A Response.’ Transformations in Environment and Society 2 (2016): 103–14 (107). ———. ‘The Politics of Climate Change is More than the Politics of Capitalism.’ Theory, Culture & Society 34.2–3 (2017): 25–37. Clark, Nigel. ‘The demon-seed: bioinvasion as the unsettling of environmental cosmopolitanism,’ Theory, Culture and Society 19.1–2 (2002): 102–25. Clark, Timothy. ‘Derangements of Scale.’ Telemorphosis: Theory in the Age of Climate Change 1 [no volume number]: 148–66. Clark, Timothy. ‘Towards A Deconstructive Environmental Criticism.’ Oxford Literary Review, 30.1 (2008): 45–68. ———. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. ———. The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. Colebrook, Clare. Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol 1. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2014. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2019. Drangsholt, Janne Stigen. ‘Homecomings: Poetic reformulations of dwelling in Jo Shapcott, Alice Oswald, and Lavinia Greenlaw.’ Nordic Journal of English Studies 15.1 (2016): 1–23. Farrier, David. Anthropcoene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2019. Garrard, Greg. ‘Heidegger, Heaney and the Problem of Dwelling.’ In Richard Kerridge and Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Abingdon: Routledge, 1991. Kindle. ———. ‘Heidegger, Heaney and the Problem of Dwelling.’ In Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells, eds. Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and literature. London: Zed, 1998, pp. 167–81. ———. ‘Heidegger, Nazism, Ecocriticism.’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment [no volume or issue number] 2010: 1–21. ———. ‘Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy.’ SubStance 127, 41.1 (2012): 40–60. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Cosgrove, Denis. Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. Kindle. Crutzen, Paul. ‘Geology of mankind.’ Nature 415.23 (2002) Web. 01.11. 21. https://www.nature.com/articles/415023a. Neil Sammells, eds. Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and literature. London: Zed, 1998. Pp. 167–81.

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———, ed and author. ‘Introduction’ to The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. Pp. 1–26. Hales, Katherine. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the 20th Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1987. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Abingdon: Routledge, 1991. ———. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke U.P. 2016. Harjo, Susan Shown. ‘My Turn: I Won’t Be Celebrating Columbus Day.’ Newsweek, Fall/Winter 1991, 32. HarperCollins. Letters to the Earth. London: William Collins, 2019. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990. Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. ———. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2016. Hume, Angela and Gillian Osborne, eds. ‘Ecopoetics as Expanded Critical Practice: An Introduction.’ Introduction to Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. Iowa City: Iowa UP 2018 pp. 1–18. Keller, Lynn. Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2017. Kelly, Jason M. ‘Anthropocenes: A Fractured Picture.’ In Jason M. Kelly, Philip V. Scarpino, Helen Berry, James Syvitski and Michel Meybeck, eds. Rivers of the Anthropocene. Oakland: California UP, 2018. Pp. 1–22. Knickerbocker, Scott. Ecopoetics: the Language of Nature, the Nature of Language. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. Parham, John. ‘Introduction: With or Without Us: Literature and the Anthropocene.’ In John Parham, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. Pp. 1–28. Pogue Harrison, Robert. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Print. Pyne, Stephen J. ‘California wildfires signal the arrival of a planetary fire age.’ The Conversation 1 Nov 2019. Web. 5 Nov 2019. https://theconversation.com/ california-­wildfires-­signal-­the-­arrival-­of-­a-­planetary-­fire-­age-­125972. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. 1993 [1991]. Cambridge, MA: 1993. ———. ‘On actor-network theory: a few clarifications.’ Soziale Welt, 47.4 (1996): 369–381. ———. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Trans. Catherine Porter. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017. Lewis, Simon L. and Mark A.  Maslin. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. London: Penguin, 2018.

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LeMenager, Stephanie. ‘Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre.’ In Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor, eds. Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times. 2017. Pp. 220–38. Macdonald, Graeme. ‘Oil and World Literature.’ American Book Review 33.3 (2012): 7–31. Massey, Doreen. ‘A Global Sense of Place.’ Marxism Today (June 1991): 24–9. ———. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. McCarthy, Francine, R Timothy Patterson, and other members of Team Crawford. ‘The varved succession of Crawford Lake Milton Ontario Canada as a candidate Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point for the Anthropocene series.’ The Anthropocene Review 10.1 (2023): 146–176 https://doi.org/ 10.1177/20530196221149281 McCarthy Woolf, Karen. An Aviary of Small Birds. Manchester: Carcanet, 2015. McCarthy Woolf, Karen, interviewee, and Forward Arts Foundation, interviewer. ‘Karen McCarthy Woolf in Conversation with the Forward Arts Foundation.’ 2015. https://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/forward-prizes-for-poetry/ karen-mccarthy-woolf/forward-arts-foundation-in-conversation-with-karenmccarthy-woolf/ McCarthy Woolf, Karen, interviewee, and Yvonne Reddick, interviewer, ‘Seasonal Disturbances,’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (summer 2020): 29.3 1–9. Carolyn Merchant. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. 2nd edn. New York: Harper, 1990. Milne, Heather. Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics. Iowa: Iowa UP, 2018. Mitchell, Alanna. ‘The Anthropocene is here - and tiny Crawford Lake has been chosen as the global ground zero.’ Canadian Geographic, 11 Jul 2023. https:// canadiangeographic.ca/articles/the-anthropocene-is-here-and-tiny-crawfordlake-has-been-chosen-as-the-­global-­ground-zero/ Morrison, Kathleen. ‘Provincializing the anthropocene.’ Seminar: A journal of Germanic studies 673 (Sept 2015): 75–80. Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. ———. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010. ———. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2013. Kindle. ———. ‘Cool Shade Futures.’ Foreword to Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams, eds. The weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene. Manchester: Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020. Pp. 27–34. Niblett, Michael, and Chris Campbell. ‘Introduction: Critical Environments: World-Ecology, World Literature, and the Caribbean.’ In Michael Niblett and

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Chris Campbell, eds. The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2016. Pp. 1–6. ———. World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890–1945. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. O’Brien, Eugene. ‘‘A Stain from the Sky is Descending’: The Poetics of Climate Change in Irish Poetry.’ In Andrew Auge and Eugene O’Brien, eds. Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 178–98. Reddick, Yvonne. Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Rob Nixon. ‘The Great Acceleration and the Great Divergence.’ MLA Profession 2014. Web. 8 Nov 2019. https://profession.mla.org/the-­great-­acceleration-­ and-­the-­great-­divergence-­vulnerability-­in-­the-­anthropocene/. Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. London: Polity, 1993. Andrew Revkin. ‘Confronting the ‘Anthropocene.” New York Times blog, 11 May 2011. Web. 5 Nov 2019. https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/ confronting-­the-­anthropocene/. Reddick, Yvonne and Marco Caracciolo. ‘Reading Anthropocene science: literary templates and the Anthropocene Working Group.’ Interconnections 1.2 (2022): 39–56. Rockström, Johan, W. L. Steffen, Kevin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chaplin III. ‘A safe operating space for humanity.’ Nature 461 (24 Sept 2009): 472–475. Schneiderman, Jill S. ‘The Anthropocene Controversy.’ Anthropocene Feminism. Ed. Richard Grusin. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2017. Pp. 169–96. Scott Bryson, J. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002. Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: South End, 1999. ———. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2016. 2nd edn. Skinner, Jonathan. ‘Editor’s statement.’ ecopoetics 1.1 (winter 2001a–02): 5–8. ———. ‘Why Ecopoetics?’ ecopoetics 1.1 (winter 2001b–02): 105–6. Sledmere, Maria and Rhian Williams, eds. The Weird Folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene. Manchester: Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020. Solnick, Samuel. Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, biology and technology in contemporary British and Irish poetry. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. Smith, Stan. Poetry and Displacement. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007. Spahr, Juliana. Well Then There Now. Boston: Black Sparrow, 2011. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Planetarity’ in Death of a Discipline. New  York: Columbia UP 2003, pp. 71–102.

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Steffen, Will, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill. ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’ Ambio 36.8 (Dec 2007): 614–21. Subramanian, Meera. ‘Anthropocene now: influential panel votes to recognize Earth’s new epoch.’ Nature News sec., 21 May 2019. Web. Accessed 28.10.21. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-­019-­01641-­5. Szerszynksi, Bronislaw and Nigel Clark. Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2020. Kindle. Tarlo, Harriet, ed. The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry. Bristol: Shearsman, 2011. ———. ‘Open Field: Reading Field as Place and Poetics.’ In Ian Davidson and Zoë Skoulding (eds.), Placing Poetry (Amsterdam and New  York: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 113–45. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2015. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, 2015. Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt, eds. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2017. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Vermeulen, Pieter. Literature and the Anthropocene. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. London: Allen Lane, 2019. Walls, Laura Dassow. ‘Earth.’ In John Parham, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2021. Pp. 37–53. Woods, Derek. ‘Scale Critique for the Anthropocene.’ Minnesota Review 83.1 (2014): 133–42. Wynter, Sylvia. Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View. Ed. Sylvia Wynter, Vera Lawrence Hyatt, and Rex Nettleford. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. 5–57. Jan Zalasiewicz et  al. ‘When did the Anthropocene Begin? A mid-Twentieth Century Boundary Level is Stratigraphically Optimal’. Quaternary International 383 (October 2015): 196–203. Zalasiewicz, Jan and Mark Williams. ‘The Anthropocene Ocean in Its Deep Time Context.’ In Davor Vidas and Peter Johan Schei, eds. The World Ocean in Globalisation. Leiden: Brill, 2011, pp. 19–35.

CHAPTER 3

‘The World in a Glance’: Ted Hughes, Anthropocene Scales, and Environmental Cosmopolitanism

An English poet of Irish, Welsh, and Gibraltarian ancestry drinks French wine with a Dutch businessman off the Cuban coast. In their floating hotel, the topic of dinner conversation is ‘radical environmental stuff.’ Their speech is ‘full of radical fury.’1 The poet’s travelogues show him helping to rescue a fishing eagle in Kenya, following tiger tracks in Bangladesh, and hooking a five-foot-long shark in the Caribbean Sea.2 This cosmopolitan character does not sound like the Ted Hughes who emerges from many earlier scholarly accounts: a Yorkshire animal-trapper turned Devon farmer, fisherman, and environmentalist, who would become the poetic voice of the British nation when he took up the Laureateship. He bears no resemblance to the provincial, apolitical, or conservative

1  Add Ms 88918/128 Section of a notebook thinner than A5, ruled, with silver cover, labelled ‘Cuba—March 98’ by the Estate of Ted Hughes. 117r; 114 r. 2  The eagle rescue on Lake Victoria in August 1983 is related at MS ADD 88918/122/4, navy blue covered A5 notebook, 85v, 86r. For the account of tiger tracks in the Sundarbans from November 1989, see BL Add MS 8918 129 7 notebook labelled 4 by archivist, 29r. The Cuban shark incident can be found at BL MS ADD 88981/128/3, section of silver-­ covered, ruled A5 notebook, labelled ‘Cuba—March 98’ by the Estate of Ted Hughes, 117r.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Y. Reddick, Anthropocene Poetry, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39389-1_3

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individual portrayed in some critical work.3 At home and abroad, Hughes made extensive notes about watching wildlife and worrying about ecological issues. (The discussion of ‘radical fury’ comes from the notebook entry in which Hughes describes one of the most far-flung, and lavish, of his fishing trips.)4 Hughes’s ‘radical environmental’ thinking is influenced by an important strain of international and cosmopolitan thought that puts him at the forefront of developments in twentieth-century environmentalism. Ted Hughes (1930–1998) lived to witness the birth and establishment of the modern environmental movement. From seeing water pollution during his boyhood to reading the landmark environmental writing of Rachel Carson; from the moon landings to the Cold War and the first Earth Day; from river pollution to Chernobyl and climate change, Hughes’s environmental awareness developed from his youth. Throughout adulthood, he kept himself informed about environmental science. In Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet, I place Hughes’s environmental writing and activism within the context of developments in British, American, and international environmental thinking. The book shows that Hughes’s international environmental writing and activism reached 3  A notable early reading of Hughes as a highly local poet is Seamus Heaney’s 1976 lecture and essay ‘Englands of the Mind’ (1980, 150–69). Such readings continue with Bate’s The Song of the Earth, in which we meet a Hughes who ‘dug himself in on a smallholding’ and ‘rarely went abroad’ (2000, 29). Bate’s 2015 biography revises this judgement and contains a much fuller account of Hughes’s travels. For a reading of Hughes as apolitical, see Sean O’Brien, The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1998. For the argument that Hughes was ‘Laureate of the Free Market,’ see Tom Paulin, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State. London: Faber & Faber, 1992. 4  It is important to note that Hughes travelled to Cuba in 1998, during the ‘special period’ that saw shortages of basic necessities such as food and imported foodstuffs. One of his fishing guides worked to earn extra fuel (‘Cuba—March 98’ by the Estate of Ted Hughes, 120r.) Hughes had been seriously ill, and this luxurious fishing trip would have lifted his spirits—yet he certainly was aware that he was surrounded by economic crisis. The mangrove where he fished remained unspoiled because no Americans came due to the revolution, and no Cubans were able to make the journey from the mainland (120r). Hughes had never seen such an ‘abundance’ of fish, but if anglers’ lavish seafood banquets continued, one wonders how much longer they would remain numerous (114r, 115r). Hughes and his wife were the guests of Paul van Vlissingen, a coal and oil businessman turned conservationist and philanthropist (Dan van der Vat, ‘Paul van Vlissingen,’ Guardian, 6 Sept 2006. Web. 31 Jan 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2006/sep/06/guardianobituaries.business.). The ‘Capitalocene’ is a time of severe inequalities, and there are no easy answers to the ethical and environmental challenges that it raises.

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their apogee in the 1980s and 1990s, although they had been developing for some decades. He auctioned his poem ‘The Black Rhino’ to raise funds for Zambian rhino conservation, and his writing responded to issues ranging from rare species in captivity, and rainforest preservation, to the Earth Summit (Reddick 2017, 269–87). This chapter interprets Hughes’s archives and environmental awareness through the lens of the Anthropocene. It builds on the foundations laid by earlier ecocritics, including the work of Susanna Lidström and Greg Garrard (2014), monographs by Samuel Solnick (2016) and Lidström (2015), and most notably Terry Gifford’s corpus of work on Hughes’s relationship with nature, his revisions of the pastoral, his awareness of environmental destruction, his scientific knowledge, and his involvement in environmental campaigns (1994, 1999, 2008, 2011a, Chap. 6, 2011b, 2018). Gifford’s placing of Hughes’s poetry within ‘the cycles and tensions of a creative-destructive universe’ (2012, 141) invites further scholarly consideration of how Hughes became aware of Earth’s creative and destructive systems, and the way humans contribute to such destruction. If an ecopoetic reading of Hughes might uncover environmental epiphanies and moments of communion and connection with nature, reading him in the light of Anthropocene theories sharpens our understanding of how he writes about environmental hazards, destruction, and breakdown. According to many current definitions of the Anthropocene, Hughes’s life and writing spanned major landmarks in the development of this proposed epoch. He did not need to know the term ‘Anthropocene’ for his work to examine, often at great length, all of its proposed major thresholds: the ‘Great Acceleration,’ environmentally damaging capitalism, nuclear technology, climate change, extinction, introduced species. Yet the idea of the Anthropocene also changes the way we read Hughes. Hughes’s environmental writing is analysed here, through the lens of insights into key aspects of the Anthropocene. From the ‘Capitalocene’ to nuclear technology and the global transport of introduced species, the concept of scalar dissonance offers a productive theoretical framework for analysing Hughes. Proposed by theorists of Anthropocene writing such as Timothy Clark and Lynn Keller (see Chap. 1), scale variation or scalar dissonance sees sudden shifts in scale from local to planetary, or gradual widening and narrowing of a poem’s scalar lens. It is such shifts in scale that enable Hughes to develop a sense of the ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ that Heise sees as necessary for one’s environmental awareness to encompass both local and planetary scales. Archival work on Hughes’s travel diaries, verse

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drafts, and draft poems, including an important anti-nuclear poem published for the first time in its complete form, brings these theoretical insights on scale to bear on draft materials and biographical information. Hughes’s rootedness is often privileged in the memoirs of those who knew him, by the way he is portrayed at literary festivals, and by certain scholarly accounts. Such localist readings rarely show Hughes the cosmopolitan environmentalist. Hughes was undeniably ‘a man of these islands,’ as Carol Hughes has called him.5 Yet even this turn of phrase evokes his Irish ancestry and Welsh surname. His fishing diaries show us the watercourses that he understood with a deeply local intimacy: Stump Pool, Gas Stove Pool, Old Woman Pit.6 However, Hughes has multiple regional affiliations in the UK.  His legacy plays an important role in the literary culture of several Yorkshire centres, from the Arvon Foundation centre at Hughes’s former home Lumb Bank, to Huddersfield’s Ted Hughes Network and its affiliated Ted Hughes Poetry Festival in Mexborough. Hughes’s university friend Lucas Myers comments that Hughes’s early prose displays his ‘Yorkshire-born sensibilities’ (85) and that his experiences—but not his intellect—were ‘parochial until his late twenties’ (84). Hughes ‘remained a Yorkshireman’ for Myers. The South Yorkshire founder of the Ted Hughes Network, Steve Ely, writes of Hughes’s distinctive Yorkshire localities and accent, his ‘parochial’ avoidance of mainstream poetic fashions (80). It is certain that there is a strong strain of rootedness in Hughes’s life and work. Hughes writes in unpublished autobiographical notes that on one side of his family, everyone lived within a mile of the farmhouse where they had dwelt since the fourteenth century.7 But this narrative of Yorkshire rootedness is far from the whole story. Hughes’s later life was shaped by Devon and by locations much farther afield; his regional affiliations are multiple and cannot be pinned down to one place. Alice Oswald called Season Songs and Moortown Diary ‘almost site-specific’;8 for her, they are grounded in Hughes’s farm at Moortown and his house at Court Green, as are many pages of the farming and fishing notes that helped to shape them. Hughes’s presence is inscribed on the Devon landscape in a literal sense, through a poetry trail at Stover Country  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/15/ted-hughes-british-library  MS Add 8818/122/5 fishing diary, large leatherbound ledger, 9r &v. 7  Add MS 88918/7/2 TS autobiographical notes, beginning ‘I owe my literary education, in its earlier phase, to my brother …’ 8  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/dec/03/poetry.tedhughes 5 6

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Park nature reserve, and his memorial stone on Dartmoor. However, Hughes published Remains of Elmet and Moortown Diary in the same year (1980), reflecting his plural regional affiliations. As Poet Laureate, he wrote of the monarchy as a unifying symbol for a nation ‘split like a schizo with nine minds’ (Letters, 530). Fellow Yorkshireman and future Laureate Simon Armitage commented that Hughes was a ‘supreme conservationist,’ that his Collected Poems ‘anchor contemporary poetry in a place closer to home.’9 But this begs the question, whose home? Hughes’s life was shaped by the globalising forces of the latter part of the twentieth century. From international literary business to fishing trips and global environmental campaigns, Hughes’s horizons gradually broadened as his career progressed. Correspondence and biographical accounts bear witness to this. In Christopher Reid’s edition of the Letters of Ted Hughes (2007), we read of Hughes’s early wish to go and live in Australia (LTH, 31), his honeymoon in Spain with Sylvia Plath (40–5), the time he spent living with her in Massachusetts from 1957 to the end of 1959, and a brief trip to Ireland (256). Encounters with wildlife on the Devon farm he ran with Carol Hughes and her father (320) rub shoulders with Hughes’s worries about overfishing in Iceland (370) and an Alaskan wildlife refuge being used to raise the price of oil company shares (540–1). Hughes’s environmental campaigns, fishing trips, and literary tours become increasingly international in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. They bear witness to his international literary success and to a level of cosmopolitan privilege that was a far cry from the ‘parsimony’ of his Yorkshire boyhood (LTH, 108). Bate’s work was the first full scholarly appraisal of Hughes’s notebooks, fishing diaries, and journals in the British Library. Some of these, he writes, ‘were written in loose blank verse,’ a form often used for fishing trips in particular (403). These ‘blank verse’ drafts are poetry in the making. Here, I show that they provide a fuller understanding of how Hughes considers issues prescient of the Anthropocene. Hughes’s literary journals, fishing diaries, draft poems, travel notebooks, and autobiographical prose in the British Library span his early adulthood to the last year of his life. They give us detailed accounts of farming and fishing in Devon, and visits to his relatives in Yorkshire—but 9  Simon Armitage. ‘Collected Poems By Ted Hughes’ (Edited By Paul Keegan) The Independent 24 Oct 2003. Web. 5 Aug 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­ enter tainment/books/reviews/collected-poems-by-ted-hughes-edited-by-paul-­ keegan-92803.html

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they also take us to Kenya, the USA, Iran, Mexico, Canada, and Australia. These accounts of the places that Hughes visited give us a glimpse of a life lived between local rootedness and the increasingly broad horizons of a global man of letters and environmental activist. Hughes remains a touchstone for environmental poets today, and Laureate Simon Armitage has described his Laurel Prize for environmental poetry as Hughes’s ‘legacy.’10 This suggests that Hughes’s work remains highly relevant for contemporary poets, and that it also leads one to consider how the Anthropocene offers new ways of reading the work of poets whose careers predate Crutzen and Stoermer’s publication of the term.

Hughes and the Anthropocene There are many ways in which Hughes’s work is prescient of the idea of the Anthropocene, and its implications for the way writers and theorists are thinking about place, scale, planet, and ecological interconnection. These include Hughes’s writing about environmentally damaging capitalism, his ways of evoking scale to create an expanded sense of place, his concerns about extinction, and his trenchant criticisms of nuclear technology. If the idea of considering humans as an integral part of Earth’s systems is not new, it has gained renewed importance in the Anthropocene, with the work of theorists such as Haraway, Tsing, and Morton. Hughes understood that human beings could have an impact on the water cycle and later on, climate systems. Hughes’s take on environmental interconnection is poetic and esoteric. His idea of what Haraway might term ‘making kin’ with other species is informed as much by his interest in animism as it is by his observations of wildlife and his reading of scientific publications: ‘While the mice in the field are listening to the Universe, and moving in the body of nature, where every living cell is sacred to every other, and all are interdependent, the Developer is peering at the field through a visor’ (WP, 130). This shows that Hughes understood ecological interconnection before James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis published their ‘Gaia hypothesis’ on the Earth as a single, self-regulating organism, in journals during the early 1970s.11 Hughes’s writing foreshadows not only Timothy 10  Anita Singh. Poet Laureate Simon Armitage to fund new ‘eco-poetry’ prize. 21 Nov 2019.Web.5Dec2019.https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/21/poet-laureate-simonarmitage-fund-new-eco-poetry-prize/ 11  Hughes acquired several books by James Lovelock, including Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Emory Rose QH313.L68 1982 HUGHES). Lovelock lived on the River Tamar, and with Hughes, he was part of the Westcountry Rivers Trust. Hughes met him in later life.

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Morton, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing’s writing about environmental meshes, but Stacey Alaimo’s concept of the ‘trans-corporeal.’ His writing is aware of how artificial pollutants permeate soil and water, ending up in the bodies of animals and humans—an awareness fostered by his reading of Rachel Carson (Brain 2001, 86). His 1985 protest-poem ‘the Best Worker in Europe’ laments that a young salmon’s blood vessels could be ‘Sewers of your Civilisation’ (CPH, 698). He attempted to publish a scathing letter about how agricultural chemicals were poisoning people and otters the following year (1992, 33). Writing about an estuary polluted by sewage, he pondered in an uncollected poem that the filth of what has managed    to become the world Is also a part    of a stainless perfection. (CPH, 590)

This is a poetic iteration of the idea that human actions cannot be viewed as separate from Earth’s systems. If Ursula Heise argues for a sense of ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ that remains cognizant of ‘the imbrication of local places, ecologies, and cultural practices in global networks’ (10, 210), this is precisely the kind of local and international awareness that Hughes’s work displays, beginning in the late 1950s and becoming increasingly expansive. Hughes’s archive is such a valuable resource because it shows where and when each of these developments in his environmental awareness took place. Hughes reworks prose from his notebooks as manuscript and typescript poems. The Birthday Letters poem that was published as ‘Flounders’ began its life as a journal entry written over four decades earlier. The environmental protest-poem ‘1984 on “The Tarka Trail”’ was drafted in a fishing diary. Most famously, Moortown Diary emerges from Hughes’s longstanding interest in recording wildlife, seasonal changes, and his surroundings. Research notes and travelogues show the influence of ideas and places from much farther afield than the UK: early American predictions about the dangers of climate change, Russian and Ukrainian nuclear accidents, worries about water pollution from Boston to Kenya. Hughes’s prose notebooks are dispersed, fragmented, impressionistic. The British Library presents them in the order in which Hughes left them, but they are not neatly sequenced; this chapter shows how issues that would be associated with the Anthropocene come to Hughes’s attention, and may be transformed into poems, many years later. Fishing, farming, and travel notebooks hover between prose and lineated verse. Scientific data and

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research notes rub shoulders with artwork and horoscopes. Accounts of wildlife watching share pages with character sketches of other poets. Hughes is aware of the importance of these documents for posterity, as he includes wry asides to his reader: ‘See fishing Diary for this fiasco.’12 The picture that emerges from Hughes’s notebooks is of a man anchored in Britain, but ranging widely beyond; of an intellectual whose global environmental writing and awareness was shaped by both local and international influences. He never lost sight of the scale and pervasiveness of human impacts on Earth’s systems. One particular draft article anticipates many of the debates that have become central to considerations of the Anthropocene. This environmental article from the archives speaks of human beings’ impact on future deposits, the ‘deep time’ of our evolutionary past, and the damage that capitalism is inflicting on our planet. The draft anticipates Anthropocene culture’s dizzying shifts in scale from local to planetary. In it, Hughes explains that he was out walking on the River Torridge, planning the creation of a sequence of pools that would hold migrating fish. His article begins in a localist vein, with his understanding of a river that he had ‘known … intimately.’13 Yet Hughes was confronted with riverbank trees festooned with plastic rubbish. The sight was ‘loathesome,’ a ‘municipal dump.’ Hughes then widens the focus of his article, considering ‘deep time’ and the environmental impact of the capitalist system: We know what has happened. Palaeolithic communities left small mountains of the indestructible shells of their shellfish feasts. The hunting communities left caves full of the Early cities collapsed into layers of broken crockery. And for centuries, little remained of societies but their crockery […]    No earlier time can be compared to ours, as a producer of refuse. Here whe we are, more of us alive than all the assembled dead. And all of us producing in our factories objects, industries, as hard as we can, or purchasing & throwing away.     The crucial factors are obvious: industrial productive might, & the consumer society that finances it.

12  ADD Ms 88981/128/3. Pages torn from exercise book—lined in blue, red margin, smaller than A4 [pencil label: ‘Vicks at Hatherleigh’]. Diary entry dated ‘June 29 83’ by Hughes, 98r. 13   Ted Hughes, draft article about pollution in the River Torridge. BL Add MS 88918/6/12. White A4 unlined paper, Labelled 17 and 18 by archivist. The entire article has been published online at https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/manuscript-draft-of-anarticle-on-river-pollution-by-ted-hughes

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Hughes is aware that overconsumption has created indelible marks on the Earth. The article continues by explaining that the plastic packaging of consumer goods is ‘difficult to destroy.’14 Scientists now know that discarded plastic is creating new types of rock; such ‘future fossils’ are being considered as an Anthropocene marker.15 Geographer Tim Cresswell’s poetry collection Plastiglomerate (2020) examines this concept. Hughes describes contemporary society as a ‘rubbishing’ society, and he follows with some prescient ideas about environmentally damaging consumerism as a political project: ‘Governments, according to the will of the enterprise of nations, have built escalated productivity into a total way of life. Productivity, expansion, progress—are all terms for manufacturing more things for a more & more depraved ravenous powerful appetite for them— or rather, not for them, not to possess them, but to buy them.’16 He writes that the thrill of acquiring new possessions is a substitute for the thrill of the chase, ‘a 500,000,000  year biological inbuilt genetic programme. Because the whole fundamental existence of the animal revolves around depends on the power & thrill & pleasure of that act—to seize, & carry home.’17 Hughes’s psychoanalysis of hunter-gatherers and bargain-­hunters is unorthodox, to say the least, but his reconsideration of human exceptionalism is perceptive. His article could be termed posthuman in its consideration of fifty millennia of mammalian behaviour. Here, also, is an interruption of ‘deep time’ into the present, a long view of history that foreshadows the Anthropocene’s preoccupation with human geological impacts. Moreover, Hughes is alert to political aspects of what some would call the Capitalocene: he considers consumerism to be an ideological project. When Hughes broadens the scale of this passage to consider the whole Earth, his deployment of a planetary perspective reveals the central problem with this narrative of capitalist production: ‘though Governments have groped their way finally to this great pragmatic truth [consumerism], they have been overtaken by the one other factors. The size of the productive/population rubbish-making population, & the smallness of 14   Ted Hughes, draft article about pollution in the River Torridge. BL Add MS 88918/6/12. White A4 unlined paper, Labelled 17 and 18 by archivist. The entire article has been published online at https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/manuscript-draftof-an-article-on-river-pollution-by-ted-hughes 15  See Patricia L. Corcoran, Charles J. Moore and Kelly Jazvac. ‘An anthropogenic marker horizon in the future rock record.’ GSA Today 4.6 (June 2014): 4–8. 16  Ted Hughes, draft article about pollution in the River Torridge. White A4 unlined paper, Labelled 17 and 18 by archivist. 17  Ted Hughes, draft article about pollution in the River Torridge. White A4 unlined paper, Labelled 17 and 18 by archivist.

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the earth.’18 Both Hughes’s draft poems and published work deploy such dizzying shifts in scale; this passage is thus prescient of Anthropocene theories of scale variance. Hughes’s work suggests that the polluted areas that would later be termed ‘sacrifice zones’ are a consequence of globalisation’s ravaging of the Earth: ‘Possess, discard, & move on. Seize, devour, enjoy, fling away, move on. Except—what we fling away no longer decays, & is poisonous. And there is no longer anywhere to move on to.’19 While the shift from local to planetary in this article exemplifies environmental cosmopolitanism, Hughes is aware of the ideological problems with capitalist globalisation, which he links to indelible human impacts on the planet. This article is prescient of what some have wryly termed the ‘Plasticene’ and ‘Wasteocene,’ but particularly of the Capitalocene.

America, the ‘Great Acceleration’ and the Capitalocene Hughes’s boyhood encounters with animals laid the foundations for his environmental awareness (WP, 1–24), but his time living in the USA with Plath in the late 1950s20 made him aware of pressing environmental issues that would inform his writing. The USA was also the location of two major landmark events that the Anthropocene Working Group favours for the beginning of the epoch in the middle of the twentieth century. These are the first nuclear bomb test at Alamogordo in 1945, and the programme of economic growth that led to the ‘Great Acceleration’ in western countries. The 1950s marked the beginning of the ‘Great Acceleration’: ‘the phenomenal growth of the human enterprise after the Second World War, both in economic activity, and hence consumption, and in resource use’ (Steffen et al. 2015, 92). People were migrating to cities, consuming more energy, travelling abroad for tourism, and using more extensive transport networks. Carbon dioxide levels were soaring as forests were felled (84–7). 18  Ted Hughes, draft article about pollution in the River Torridge. White A4 unlined paper, Labelled 20 by archivist. 19  Ted Hughes, draft article about pollution in the River Torridge. Ted Hughes. White A4 unlined paper, Labelled 22 by archivist. 20  Sylvia Plath was well informed about environmental issues. For Plath’s environmental concerns, see Heather Clark, Red Comet: the Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. London: Vintage, 2020. 537, 646. See also Terry Gifford. ‘Hughes’s Social Ecology’ in The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011 165–7 and Tracy Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath, Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001, 84–140. For Plath’s influence on Hughes’s environmentalism, see Yvonne Reddick, Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 105–6.

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Hughes was troubled by American consumer culture, criticising the ‘consumers’ he met for their ‘greed,’ although he also had a low opinion of territorial British parochialism (LTH, 114–116). Hughes wrote in 1970 of his worries about shareholders’ ‘impatient to cash in the world’ (WP, 130). This idea was important to him: he stressed again in 1998 that ‘we’re cashing in the whole globe’ (Pero, 54). Hughes’s concerns about overconsumption were a motivating factor for his environmentalism. His letters register his astonishment at how food processing distanced consumers from agriculture and the land (LTH, 106). Lavish American consumption contrasted starkly with the Yorkshire frugality that Hughes had been used to during his boyhood—‘American food is overpowering’ (108). Consumer capitalism was an ideological project for the USA and western countries during the Cold War, viewed as consolidating American economic hegemony and providing a bulwark against Communism (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 244). Hughes was clearly aware of the impact of consumerism on wild animals. Even fishing, which Hughes considered a vital way of connecting with nature (Pero, 53), turned wild American fish into products. He joked to his brother that any fish caught in the USA would have ‘tattooed on its underside “I’m an American too so treat me well and cook me with FRENCH’S HOTCHA SAUCE”’ (LTH, 131). His time in the USA certainly galvanised Hughes’s environmental awareness and activism. His friend Daniel Huws thought that he had ‘come back an environmentalist’ after his years there,21 although Hughes’s awareness of pollution and nuclear destruction had begun in Britain. Indeed, Hughes thought that the environmental movement originated in the USA. In a draft from the Birthday Letters project, Hughes noted that Americans were ‘Earliest in the world’ to realise that the environment ‘is actually in our hands.’22 Some journal entries and poetry drafts about fishing trips in the USA reveal that Hughes witnessed air pollution and litter in the sea.23 It was in the USA that Hughes began reading landmark works  Letter from Daniel Huws to Terry Gifford, 15.07.14, ctd in Gifford 2014: 4.  BL Add MS 88918/1/6 red notebook labelled ‘Hildrid History,’ marked ‘3.S’ by Hughes, 19r. 23  Hughes’s diary of his fishing trip to Winthrop Bay with Plath on the 10th of June 1959 records seeing the pollution caused by an aeroplane: ‘Black clouds were rivering from its exhaust.’ BL Add MS 88918/129/2 unbound MS diary entries on peach yellow paper from ringbinder, numbered 18 by archivist. Published online in ‘Notebooks of Ted Hughes, c. 1959–1964’ https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/notebooks-of-ted-hughes-c-1959-64. A later draft from the Birthday Letters project sees Plath snagging a silk stocking on a fish hook. BL Add MS 88918/1/6, red ruled notebook labelled ‘Hildrid History’ by its original owner, and ‘3.S’ by Hughes, 15v. 21 22

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of environmental writing by Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us and Under the Sea Wind (LTH, 127–8), and later The Edge of the Sea. These books contained very early predictions about a severe menace to our planet: climate change (Reddick 2017, 118).

Hughes and Climate Change The warming of our world is now acknowledged to be one of the greatest threats to life on Earth. Climate change is viewed as a factor in the global biodiversity crisis. As mentioned, some theorists see the Anthropocene epoch as marked out by climate change (Chakrabarty 2018; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Ghosh 2016). Since climate change can ‘defy the boundedness of “place”’ (Ghosh, 62), attempts to combat this threat must take place on local, international, and global levels.24 Archival evidence suggests that Hughes was aware of the dangers of climate change far earlier than any previous scholarship has recognised. When he read the work of Rachel Carson in the late 1950s, he became aware that that the usual ranges of ocean species were altering due to climate change (Carson 1955, 23–4). However, it was too early for Carson to grasp how perilous this problem might be. Rising sea levels and melting ice caps concerned Hughes from the early 1960s. In Hughes’s diary, between the famous 1960 Faber and Faber cocktail party where he met Eliot, and a drive to Yorkshire with Plath, are placed careful research notes on some alarming changes. Hughes writes: ‘Average increase of 2° in world temp would melt the poles, and naturally, & help of all the Co2, this is just about the rate of increase.’ He records that the sea level in New Jersey had risen by nine inches; the temperature in Canada had risen by five degrees in the space of fifty years.25 The geography of this passage indicates that he read it in a North American publication, but the probable date suggests that he did so in the UK. Here, Hughes’s awareness of human impacts on planetary processes is starkly evident. In the 24  For example, the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research programme recognises that ‘the transnational and global nature of the climate and environment’ requires action ‘at the Union level and beyond.’ European Commission. ‘Horizon 2020—Climate Action.’ https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/climateaction-environment-resource-efficiency-and-raw-materials 25  BL Add MS 88918/129/2, unbound manuscript research notes on unlined paper taken from a ringbinder, 44v (numbered by archivist). Hughes’s archive preserves the author’s original ordering of his papers—hence my suggestion of a date.

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early 1960s, the role of human actions in creating climate change was not widely understood outside the scientific community, but it was already known to have worldwide consequences. The year 1960 was when the scientist Charles David Keeling published his now famous ‘hockey stick graph’ showing the upsurge in CO2 levels.26 By the mid-1960s, environmental research revealed further, troubling insights. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson received an environmental report bristling with equations and climate data. The report links fossil fuel burning to changing temperatures, melting ice caps, and rising seas—and by this time, humans were named as the culprits.27 The wording of this report foreshadows the Anthropocene in uncanny ways: ‘Through his worldwide industrial civilization Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment’ (President’s Science Advisory Panel, 126). Hughes’s early understanding of the dangers of climate change puts him far ahead of his time. Hughes and his colleagues Daniel Weissbort and David Ross would publish an article suggesting that climate change was caused by humans in their magazine Your Environment in 1972 (Patterson). However, it would take until 1988 for the issue to be considered serious enough for the UN to establish the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate change haunts Hughes’s activism and art from the 1980s and 1990s. As the weather grew wilder, droughts in the West Country reached unprecedented severity. Droughts feature in ‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’ (1984) and ‘1984 on “The Tarka Trail”,’ which originates in the year of its title,28 but which was published nine years later. The concentration of pollutants in rivers during times of water shortage killed Hughes’s beloved salmon, and this was one of the motivating factors behind his campaigns against water pollution in the 1980s. He contributed a poem to a Greenpeace anthology about threatened coastlines,29 and made notes about his concern during a meeting of the body that became the West Country Rivers Trust: ‘Greenhouse Effect now likely to be

26  Charles D. Keeling. ‘The Concentration and Isotopic Abundances of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere.’ Tellus 12.2 (May 1960): 200–03. 27  President’s Science Advisory Panel. ‘Restoring the Quality of Our Environment: Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel, President’s Science Advisory Panel.’ November 1965. 28  Hughes drafts the poem in his diary. Add Ms 88918/128/4, red, ruled school notebook, labelled Singleton by former owner. Labelled A by archivist and numbered by archivist in reverse order. Dated ‘2nd August 1984’ by Hughes, 18v–17v. 29  Greenpeace. Coastline: Britain’s Threatened Heritage. London: Kingfisher, 1987.

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inevitable—Freak Droughts, Freak Floods, as well as rise of sea level.’30 The Atlantic salmon’s feeding grounds were known to be shrinking due to climate change in the 1990s, and Hughes argued at a public enquiry that this added to the catalogue of problems that were making matters worse for these prized fish.31 It is rather surprising that Hughes does not mention climate change in his environmental article for The Observer, ‘If’ (1992). However, he quite clearly engages with it five years later, in his poetry collection Tales from Ovid (1997). Here, Hughes changes Ovid’s original so that the god Jupiter withdraws ‘the blast/That fixes the Northern ice’ (878), unleashing a global flood (see Solnick 2016, 199; Reddick 2017, 283). Here, finally, Hughes is publishing poetry that engages with the urgent issue he first became aware of in the early 1960s. From the inception of his understanding of climate change to the end of his career, Hughes sees this as a global problem with local manifestations—an instance of ‘eco-­ cosmopolitanism’ that stems from a major issue in the Anthropocene. He was employing multiple scalar lenses to write about the problem, from a close focus on local droughts in the 1980s to a planetary perspective in Tales From Ovid (see below). At the end of his life, Hughes continued to research climate change science, alongside major nuclear threats. A 1997 issue of New Scientist provided the following information: ‘Effects in Costa Rica of Global Warming: 40% species gone in 90 s.’32 That year, he wrote that ‘I seriously feel the whole bickering struggle between commerce and husbandry will be overtaken on the grandest scale by global warming.’33

Hughes and Nuclear Technology Ted Hughes was enjoying a fishing holiday in Scotland when he realised that he might be in the fallout zone of one of the twentieth-century’s greatest nuclear disasters. On the 26th April 1986, a massive explosion at 30  BL MS ADD 88981/121/10, South West Rivers Trust documents. MS notes labelled ‘11 Oct 89.’ 31  BL Add MS 88918/121/6 TS ‘NET LIMITATIONS AND BYELAW PROPOSALS FOR THE RIVERS TAW AND TORRIDGE PROOF OF EVIDENCE’ 3. 32  88918/129/8/notebook 5 19r. Entry dated 4 December 1997. 33  Letter from Ted Hughes to Michael Martin. Ctd in Ed Douglas, ‘Portrait of a poet as eco warrior.’ The Observer poetry sec., 4 Nov 2007. Web. Accessed 20 Jan 2020. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2007/nov/04/poetry.tedhughes

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the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine released airborne nuclear contaminants for days before the accident could be contained. Hughes ruminated in his fishing diary: ‘Thoughts about radio-activity, falling in the showers, from last week’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station blow-up. In milk, & on vegetables.’34 The Chernobyl disaster, for sociologist Ulrich Beck, was an important threshold in public perceptions of environmental risk (2009, 36) and a crucial example of incomplete scientific knowledge and disinformation (116). This idea resonates with Alaimo’s concept of the trans-corporeal: Hughes’s writing is aware of the way in which fallout contaminates living tissues of all kinds. Yet he clearly also understood that radioactivity permeated weather systems and had no respect for national borders. His writing considers the multiple scales of this major issue, and his work on nuclear technology is prescient of later debates surrounding the Anthropocene. Hughes’s worries about nuclear technology go back to over two decades before Chernobyl, and they last until the end of his life. Nuclear holocausts haunt his poetry. They are inextricably linked to his sense of environmental crisis. His opposition to nuclear technology motivated his first act of environmental protest. Felicity Powell has tied Hughes’s ideas about nuclear technology to the Anthropocene, as ‘a desire to represent and deter such a disaster is the principal motivator behind Ted Hughes’s environmentalism and poetic vision (28).’ It is not the principal motivator—Hughes’s awareness of water pollution predates his concerns about nuclear weapons and waste,35 and data from New Scientist quoted above show that he became equally preoccupied by climate change. However, now that the majority of the Anthropocene Working Group are using radioactive deposits to argue for the Anthropocene epoch to begin with the nuclear age, Hughes’s writing about nuclear waste dumps, weapons, and nuclear accidents is ripe for re-evaluation. ‘[H]ow they can think of atom-bombing each other, I don’t know. What will be left?’ Plath wrote in 1950 (40). She had been reading about the victims of Nagasaki and escalating tensions between Russia and America. Her understanding of the dangers of nuclear technology helped 34  BL MS Add 8818/122/5, unbound manuscripts, brown leatherbound ledger, A4 sized, marked ‘LEDGER’ on the spine, ruled and gridmarked. 32v, fishing diary entry dated 15th May 1986 (archivist’s numbering). 35  Hughes wrote that his awareness of water pollution dated back to the early 1940s, when he witnessed fish dying due to silage pollution (CPH, 1211).

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to galvanise Hughes’s awareness (Reddick 2017, 130). Extensive research notes about nuclear waste and nuclear war also underpin Hughes’s poems on the subject. Four poems most clearly articulate Hughes’s concerns about nuclear technology. They speak of the threshold in human understanding when people became aware that they could damage Earth’s very systems and annihilate organic life. When we read these poems through the lens of the Anthropocene, they become uncannily resonant in our time. Three of these poems have been published, and one comes from Hughes’s extensive archive. Further archival documents also reveal new insights into Hughes’s anti-nuclear activism, and I link these to the concepts of the ‘Capitalocene’ and the ‘nuclear Anthropocene’ in this section. The first explicitly anti-nuclear poem that Hughes published was ‘A Woman Unconscious’ (1959), which examines human beings’ struggle to come to terms with thoughts of our annihilation, as our habitual way of thinking ‘Shies from the world-cancelling black’ (62). The Cold War brings an awareness of nuclear annihilation, which Hughes describes in distinctly environmental terms: Russia and America circle each other; Threats nudge an act that were without doubt A melting of the mould in the mother, Stones melting about the root, The quick of the earth burned out: The toil of all our ages a loss With leaf and insect. (CPH, 62)

The poem is prescient of Anthropocene theorists’ preoccupation with both the nuclear and the lithic. ‘Stones melting about the root’ suggests that Hughes may have been reading scientific articles about the new, artificial rocks created when the white heat of a nuclear explosion fuses sand.36 Yet if the Anthropocene Working Group’s favoured stratigraphic marker is framed in terms of its future presence in inert rock, Hughes’s poem gives an important, alternative perspective. He knew that radioactivity could 36  The new rock created during the ‘Trinity’ nuclear bomb tests in 1945 is named ‘trinitite.’ See Nelson Eby, Robert Hermes, Norman Charnley, and John Smoliga, ‘Trinitite—the atomic rock.’ Geology Today 26.5 (Sept–Oct 2010): 180.

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damage DNA (poetically reconfigured as ‘the mould in the mother’); he shows his reader that detonations also spell doom for nonhumans—‘leaf and insect.’ If the anti-nuclear protest that Hughes later joined began with largely human-centred concerns about politics and peace,37 Hughes’s poem shows an ethically important alertness to the more-than-human world that resonates with Stacy Alaimo’s contentions about the problems with the ‘geological turn’ (2017, 91). Here is an example of how cultural perspectives can raise ethical considerations that Anthropocene stratigraphy glosses over. Hughes’s developing environmental ethics are combined with more overtly political concerns, in the next anti-nuclear poem examined here. Also in 1959, Hughes wrote an anti-nuclear poem so contentious that publishing it would have breached the Official Secrets Act. Had he done so, he would have brought British readers to a shocked awareness that their government was dumping nuclear waste near their coasts. Hughes included a stanza of the poem in an article far later in his career (‘If’ 33). The entire poem can be found in the British Library’s archive: Blake comments on the statement used as a chant on the 1959 Aldermaston March. You’ll march along the vacant lanes To where some speechless mouths make stand While Leucoemia doubles its gains Throughout Wales and Cumberland. From every leader’s argument, From every youth, from every maid, From every marcher’s righteous chant Aldermaston’s costs are paid. Still your last year’s show of rage Depopulates the Irish Sea, And Aldermaston’s weekly wage Mounts in the bones of infancy.

37  The Aldermaston marches became more environmentally oriented during the early 1970s (McCormick 1995, 75).

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Now while once more you drive the goat And through this iron country tread The ministries take smiling note And Aldermaston shakes its head.38

Hughes explained in his 1992 article ‘If’ that ‘while we all worried about the bomb tests, the fall-out and the arms race,’ little was being said about what was happening to nuclear waste. Beyond the idyllic Cape Cod seascapes where Hughes and Plath had fished, the American government was dumping the radioactive waste from its weapons programmes. The British were jettisoning theirs in the Irish Sea. Hughes’s later article records that the maps of leukaemia cases resembled ‘target circles’ around nuclear sites. When he wanted to publish an article about the secret nuclear waste dumps in Your Environment in 1970, the Official Secrets Act silenced him. (He had read about hushed-up nuclear waste dumps in the American magazine The Nation.) In his 1959 poem, Hughes updates William Blake for the environmental age. Rhyming quatrains create a sense of deep cynicism redolent of Blake’s ‘London.’ Hughes is almost as critical of the protesters’ ignorance of the dangerous nuclear waste dumps as he is of the government. (‘Aldermaston’s costs’ were being paid for by the taxpayer at that point.) Earth’s dynamic systems mean that radioactivity cannot be confined: in the poem, nuclear waste permeates the sea, the ‘iron country,’ and human bodies, a systemic perspective that foreshadows Anthropocene theories. The poem is distinctly trans-corporeal in that it is aware of the insidious spread of radiation, its impact on ‘the bones of infancy.’ Hughes’s scepticism about nuclear disarmament protests did not last long. In much later life, when he published part of his Aldermaston poem, Hughes misremembered—or changed—one of the pronouns: ‘you’ becomes ‘we’ (‘If’, 33). This difference is telling, and it points to the beginning of Hughes’s activism. In 1960, Hughes and Plath took their daughter Frieda on an Aldermaston anti-nuclear march. This marks a threshold in Hughes’s environmentalism: he was not only writing about and observing environmental problems but protesting against them.

38  British Library ADD Ms. 88918/2/2 unbound. Uncollected poems. TS headed ‘WEEK-END COMPETITION.’ Hughes uses ‘Nicholas Farrar’ as his nom de plume—the name of the ancestor who features in the poem ‘Nicholas Ferrar.’

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The threat of nuclear war, and fallout from personal catastrophes, combine to inspire Hughes’s 1970 collection Crow. The year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and in the wake of Plath’s suicide,39 Hughes began work on one of his most trenchant criticisms of nuclear weapons. Influenced by the sparseness and irony of Eastern European poetry that he read in translation,40 Hughes creates war-poems for the age of the atom bomb. ‘Notes for a Little Play’ (1970) sees two ‘Mutations—at home in the nuclear glare’ surviving an atomic explosion. Hughes’s poem performs some significant shifts in scale. From the macro-scale of ‘the sun coming closer’—a metaphor for an incoming missile—Hughes zooms in to examine the impact of this on humans: ‘Next—clothes torn off’ (CPH, 212). These abrupt lines quickly shift focus to the macro-scale of views enabled by space technology: ‘the flame fills all space.’ The ‘mutations’ appear as Hughes’s poem ‘zooms in’ to the corporeal, organic scale of individual organisms. It is significant that Hughes does not say whether these creatures (‘hairy and slobbery, glossy and raw’) are human, nonhuman, or hybrids; the reader is left guessing. If the Anthropocene has been criticised by Haraway and others as a human-centred idea, this poem suggests that nuclear technology could render the very category of ‘the human’ obsolete. Gone are the neat, rhymed quatrains, the shapely containment of Hughes’s earlier anti-nuclear verse. The formal strategies that Hughes uses here are chosen carefully. The idea of total, worldwide annihilation leads Hughes to reshape and fragment his work, as if the poem itself was one of these ‘[m]utations.’ If Solnick has linked mutation in Crow to ­evolutionary processes (92–7), this reading of Crow through the lens of nuclear warfare uncovers far more disturbing nuclear dimensions. The first two stanzas are irregular in length, while the shift in focus to the last living survivors of the blast sees Hughes isolating all but two lines, emphasising 39  One of Hughes’s earliest plans for Crow is drafted on a film script from 1963. See BL Add MS 88918/11/1, manuscript notes written in a 1963 screenplay by Jon Manchip White 9. His friend, the artist Leonard Baskin, had suggested the project as a collaboration after Plath’s death, to help Hughes begin to recover. Hughes wrote to Baskin in 1964 that work on Crow was under way. BL Add MS 83684, postcard from Hughes to Baskin, 14.08.1964. Hughes dedicated Crow to the memory of his partner Assia Wevill and their daughter Shura. 40  Hughes’s Crow was also heavily influenced by translations of Eastern European poets, such as Vasco Popa, Miroslav Holub, and Jànos Pilinszky. For the translated work of Eastern European poets that he and Daniel Weissbort published, see Modern Poetry in Translation 1 (1965). For details of their influence on Crow, see Tara Bergin, ‘Hughes and Eastern Europeans’ in Terry Gifford, ed., Ted Hughes in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 113–22.

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their dislocation. He leaves the lines fragmented, as if atomised. Scale critique and scalar dissonance are deployed to consider annihilation on a planetary scale. The idea of the ‘nuclear Anthropocene’ is opening new formal possibilities for authors writing today, from Robert Macfarlane’s collaborative volume Ness (part-novel, part-poem, part-engraving) to more radical projects such as Bök’s aforementioned Xenotext (designed to survive a nuclear holocaust). The scalar and formal shifts in Hughes’s poetry about nuclear weapons adumbrate such contemporary developments. Delving into Hughes’s correspondence, too, one soon hits a stratum of radioactivity that is characteristic of the Anthropocene. The extent of his anti-nuclear activism has not previously been documented by scholars, and this book reveals that it continued into the 1980s. The years 1979 and 1980 saw Hughes taking several fishing trips to Ireland, sometimes combined with visits to his poet friends, Seamus Heaney and Richard Murphy. Yet one of the most significant insights into Hughes’s international environmental engagement comes from a draft letter. In Ireland, Hughes attended an “activist” anti-nuclear assembly in the small town where this friend of mine lives. Uranium’s been discovered all round the town, and there—and in 6 other places in Ireland—inspection drilling has started. It was interesting to see how alert and militant the Irish are. But they’re up against Rio Tinto—the international Mafia of mafias—who have already extinguished several small populations here & there in the world, & manipulate governments with great facility.41

Two strands of Hughes’s preoccupations recur here: his worries about nuclear technology, but also his concerns about environmentally irresponsible corporate greed. Describing a mining company as ‘the international Mafia of mafias’ is one of his most trenchant descriptions of a corporation utterly devoid of environmental and ethical principles. Hughes’s writing resonates with two significant ideas about the Anthropocene that are usually considered separately: the ‘nuclear Anthropocene’ narrative and Moore’s concept of the ‘Capitalocene.’ Scale critique—a local

41  ADD Ms 88981/128/3 White writing paper—smaller than A4. Letter to John (likely to be John Fisher, Hughes’s former English teacher), dated ‘5th March 80.’ 25r & v.

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manifestation of a tentacular corporation—enables Hughes to convey the worldwide extent of the problem. Hughes’s anti-nuclear writing continued in the years following the Irish demonstration. His enigmatic, uncollected poem ‘Waste’ mentions a ‘sand-flea’ that ‘argues so quietly/Through the Geiger counter.’ Hughes published this in the Poetry Book Supplement (1983), edited by that later Faber poet of climate change and international war, David Harsent.42 The poem responds to a rapid escalation in Cold War tensions that year, which included a simulated nuclear attack by NATO.43 ‘Waste’ illustrates that Hughes was aware of American research on organisms living on beaches where nuclear waste was being dumped. Scientists found that even tiny sand fleas were becoming radioactive (Gifford 2018, 277). Here, Hughes considers the speed at which different human historical cataclysms happen, placing them against the backdrop of wider environmental destruction. ‘[G]reen bones among what was Sunday dress’ and the ‘rearming of Asia’ certainly do evoke the aftermath of a nuclear strike or western concerns about NATO’s opponents (CPH, 687). Yet the sand flea’s mute arguments are small-scale but persistent: the dangers of waste from nuclear weapons programmes were a persistent environmental issue that Hughes wished to expose. Scale critique enables him to focus in on a small but powerful image of organic life, avoiding the God’s-eye or geological perspectives that Anthropocene cultural critics have problematised. Hughes’s poem is also cognisant of shifting timescales. The sudden violence of a nuclear strike is contrasted with the ‘slow violence’ of insidious environmental contamination; it is this contrast in environmental timeframes that Rob Nixon’s research seeks to expose, although Nixon’s focus is primarily on how insidious pollution affects the world’s poorest humans (2011). For Hughes, human history is invariably environmental history, and his writing suggests ways of extending Nixon’s arguments to give a fuller account of nonhuman lives, as well as human ones. A few years later, Hughes would write that animals are ‘extensions of ourselves,’ succumbing to the same contaminants as us, ‘[c]ell by watery cell’ (‘If’ 33). This idea of all-pervasive contamination was one that Carson’s work introduced 42  See Harsent’s Fire Songs (2014) for his writing about climate change and extinction, and Legion (2005) for his war-poetry. 43  For information about ‘Operation Able Archer,’ see declassified documents from the USA’s National Security Archive. Nate Jones and Lauren Harper. ‘The 1983 War Scare: “The Last Paroxysm” of the Cold War Part II.’ 21 May 2013. Web. 27 Jan 2020. https:// nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB427/

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Hughes to, but it resonates with much more recent concepts such as Alaimo’s trans-corporeality, Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene,’ and Tsing’s entanglements. The radioactive waste dumps damaged everything from sand fleas to humans—a significant ethical dimension that offers ways to problematise the ‘nuclear Anthropocene’ narrative. Hughes worried about nuclear issues well into the 1990s, and his 1992 review of Your World mentions work by a Russian nuclear physicist who stated that the death toll from the Chernobyl accident that might be as high as 7000: a far higher number than the initial body count (‘If’ 34). He sourced much of his information about nuclear technology from New Scientist44: Mayak in Southern Urals—5x more leakage than Chernobyl, Sellafield, & all world’s bomb tests put together. Contained in Lake Karachy—Stront 90 & Caesium 137: produced plutonium.45

The nuclear disaster at Mayak occurred in 1957, but such issues provide resonant imagery for poems published late in Hughes’s life. In Birthday Letters, persistent images of nuclear weapons are used metaphorically to evoke anger or the afterlife. Plath’s anger and grief are described as ‘plutonium,’ the ‘nuclear core’ that ‘Left your whole Eden radioactive’ (1086–7) in the elegy ‘Child’s Park.’ Even in one of Hughes’s most personal books, one can find radioactive traces of the nuclear issues that so preoccupied him and Plath—and which are so pertinent to recent arguments about the Anthropocene. The ‘nuclear Anthropocene’ must be conceptualised on vast spatial and temporal scales, from the personal and affective to the atomic; from bomb blast to future bedrock to planetary fallout. The scalar dissonance present in Hughes’s writing about nuclear weapons and waste is prescient of this important focus for Anthropocene culture. Half-lives and afterlives provide eerie metaphors for what will survive of our civilisation. Reading Hughes through the lens of the Anthropocene reveals new ways of viewing his writing about violence. From the ‘violence’46 of his early animal-poems to the ‘very sadistic man’ who emerges from accounts  Solnick references an undated letter that states that Hughes should be entitled to claim New Scientist on Laureate expenses, as the magazine is ‘relevant to my job as Poet Laureate and the business of writing poems.’ Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library, Box 56, Folder 20, ctd in Solnick 16. 45  BL Add MS 88918/129/8/notebook 5 19r. Diary entry dated 4 December 1997. 46  Hughes discusses the issue of violence in his poetry at length, during an interview with Ekbert Faas (WP 251–267). 44

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by Plath’s acquaintances (Bate, 6), and the violence described in Plath’s letters (loc 17096),47 Hughes’s poems and person are associated with violence. However, my analysis of Hughes’s anti-nuclear writing and activism shows that he supported a movement that was pacifist, as well as environmentalist. Hughes’s work documents the ‘nuclear Anthropocene’ almost from its beginning and reveals him to be staunchly opposed to the environmental violence of nuclear technology. If a human-created geological epoch is to be defined by such violence, it is important for the Anthropocene Working Group to be aware of the political and ideological ‘fallout’ that its formalisation would cause. Hughes’s Viewpoints: Local, Aerial, Inter-Planetary The military-industrial complex that created the atom bomb also gave rise to a technology that enables us to see our entire globe. Aerial views of the Earth from space have characterised many critics’ views of visual art in the Anthropocene. In both published and unpublished poetry, Hughes creates striking imagery that evokes shifting visual scales. Such shifts speak volumes about his views of globalisation, the space race, and technologies of mobility. They yield significant information about ways of seeing—and writing about seeing—in the Anthropocene. From the first Sputnik mission of 1957, views of the Earth from space marked a shift in human beings’ sense of scale and their own (in)significance. As Bonneuil and Fressoz put it, ‘The Anthropocene inherits a second element from the Cold War: a view of the Earth—and of our earthly issues—from above’ (60). Martin Heidegger, that philosopher of dwelling, wrote in 1966 of an ‘uprooting of man’; Hannah Arendt regarded this development as causing ‘alienation’ from the Earth (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 60–1). There are problems with disembodied views of the Earth from space—Donna Haraway deconstructs ‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ as a faux-objective stance that conceals a masculinist agenda (1991 loc 3870), while Alaimo finds such views ‘devoid of other species, as if the sixth great extinction had already concluded’ (2017, 91). More recently, art critic Emmelhainz argues that dislocating, ‘groundless’ views of the Earth from above are characteristic of Anthropocene art and that a ‘heightened sense of place’ is increasingly necessary to counteract 47  For Frieda Hughes’s balanced discussion of Plath’s account of domestic violence to her therapist, see her preface to Plath’s Letters, loc 283–07.

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this (n.p.). Yet views of the Earth from space may also enable people to witness the planet’s fragility and beauty, or the finitude of natural ‘resources.’ Ursula Heise contends that views of the Earth from space ‘were quickly appropriated by the environmentalist movement’ (2008, 22). Much of Hughes’s writing about the British Isles is highly local, but some surprising shifts in scale happen even when he is writing about his own back garden. Aerial views and microscopic close-ups combine in some carefully recorded nature-notes. At Court Green, the Devon house where he moved with his family in 1962 and where he would later settle, he recorded the progress of his orchard, trees, and plants. This work is significant for his poetry, as it develops the diaristic, observational method that he used to create collections such as Season Songs (1976) and Moortown Diary (1979). However, views of the Earth from space inform even this work, which one might expect to be highly local: May 30th: Front lawn Ash, the capillaries of a lung, dark on empty blue the few chalked clouds releasing its prongs. Its tubercules stir, jolt, creak their sap, massage their joints, feel for the curve of the earth in the wind’s massage. Bright midday. The dark load of the piled greens, path buried, bee buried under its load, its torso dark & taking the strains the laburnum, drip heavy crumblings, stayed butter thickness, butter yellow in the blue of the waist-­ high grass, buttercups breaking to separate assertion, swimming far out in a sea where they will drown. No scent to me, the orchard’s veils break over me. The apple trees emerald, the grass thick sea-water, half-blinding glitter, half blackness, plunge, circling wind, flailing of grass heads, twisting of the grass tresses. Boughs nod & nod—restricted to affirmatives, a denial that is grown in the form of affirmative. Etching bond of boughs, geometrician, abandon of attached leaves, quivering or flopping, roots working in the earth. In the flower plots, crumbled panoramas, Africa & Sinais, red baked grey, crumblings of black shadow, blistering summits for ants.48

Hughes’s account begins on the micro-scale: ‘capillaries’ are microscopically thin blood vessels. This is a scientifically informed metaphor, shaped by Hughes’s careful research. The viewpoint of the passage expands first to take in the clouds, then shrinks again to the perspective one would see through a hand lens (‘tubercules’ are small nodules on animal and plant tissue). Yet after an anatomically informed depiction of the tree, Hughes’s  BL Add MS 88918/128/1. Loose leaves torn from a lined notebook smaller than A5, 7r.

48

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writing ‘zooms out’ to consider the vast ‘curve of the earth.’ A bough is imagined as a ‘geometrician’—etymologically, an ‘earth-­measurer,’ again widening the scalar ambit of this passage. Satellite technology informs the end of this nature-writing entry, with Hughes evoking a panoramic view of continents and subcontinents. Even in the North Devon spot where Hughes would live most of his adult life, the atlas and the aerial photograph provide significant ways of seeing. Written a year after the astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to look down at the Earth from the space, Hughes’s prose notes show an early stage in the new, global ways of seeing that the space age contributed to, and which certain visual representations of the Anthropocene inherit (Alaimo 2017, 91; Demos, 13). Yet these are not necessarily totalising or hegemonic. The method of scaleshifting that Hughes perfected in these prose nature-­notes would provide an observational method for later poems, such as the ‘Spring Nature Notes’ (1974) later collected in Season Songs. In this poem-­sequence, a vast scalar lens (‘earth leans into its curve’) shrinks to a minute close-up view of insects (‘some flies have waded out/An inch from my window, to stand on the sky’ [CPH, 312]). Scale-shifting and space technology are particularly important from Crow (1970) onwards, and Hughes’s notebooks pinpoint one of the moments when he first viewed photographs and footage of the moon landings. His response to this historic event shows that he realised that he was witnessing an important threshold in the way humans viewed themselves, their planet, and their place in the universe. Yet his response is also that of a worried environmentalist. In July 1969, Hughes recorded his views about the Apollo 11 mission: Moon—shots last night. Armstrong inarticulate, nervy; Aldrin confident & easy. Incredible theorem of jargon to describe effect of kicking the dust on the gravity loss (1/6 gravity) moon. The bouncing run. Impossibility of failure or fault, in circumstances. Wives—at Press Conference. Every remark an evil omen, one would say. Unreal. Moon now contaminated. What the significance of it, & the consequences on talk & feeling? Very great? And what precisely?49

49  BL Add MS 88918/128/1. Unlined A4 sheet, 35 r. This sheaf of diary entries is labelled ‘1969 Richard? Gilbertson.’

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This notebook entry reveals information about the more esoteric aspects of Hughes’s environmental and poetic thinking. Deeply influenced by Robert Graves’s theory that the Muse was a moon-goddess (Graves, 6), Hughes is concerned about the ‘omens’ that might result from human beings trampling on the moon. Yet he is also concerned about pollution beyond the Earth. Hughes was right to worry that the moon was contaminated: the Apollo missions were later shown to have left the moon polluted by plutonium-238 (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 62). This notebook extract speaks volumes about Hughes’s rapidly developing environmental conscience. If Derek Woods’s concept of ‘scale critique’ in the Anthropocene responds to the Eames’s simulation, which shrinks Earth to an invisible speck in a spiral galaxy, then Hughes’s perspective on the moon landings articulates his concern about the massive scale of human impacts. If traces of human activity on the moon will be visible in the far future, one could argue that the Anthropocene concept needs to be expanded: it is not merely Earth’s systems that (certain) humans impact, but even some systems beyond our home planet. The image of the moon landings returns in Hughes’s poem ‘Crow and Mama,’ a catalogue of Crow’s crimes against the Earth that sees him crash landing on the moon, only to crawl out ‘Under his mother’s buttocks’ (220). The ideas that are developed in this poem have their genesis in Hughes’s awareness of shifting scales of perception. In addition to missions to the moon, Russian and American orbital telescopes of the late 1960s provided expanded optical scales for viewing the Earth’s place in space: [H]e peered out through the portholes at Creation And saw the stars millions of miles away and saw the future and the universe Opening and opening. (CPH, 219)

This image shows that the scalar ambit of Hughes’s poetry goes beyond the long-established trope of ‘Mother Earth’—beyond the solar system, even—expanding to encompass other parts of the universe. If the geological accounts of the Anthropocene discussed in the last chapter are purely terrestrial, future traces of human activity will of course include the remains of equipment from space programmes. Hughes’s poetic consideration of

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such distant traces can expand cultural interpretations of the Anthropocene to include human alterations beyond the Earth. Yet Hughes’s work also underscores the simple fact that space missions will hardly provide a realistic alternative to life on Earth. Both Hughes’s account of the 1969 moon landings and his poem ‘Crow and Mama’ raise complex questions about pollution, technology, and human hubris that are highly pertinent to the ethical dilemmas that the Anthropocene poses. If views of the Earth from space prompted Hughes to ponder the scale of human actions, his experiences of air travel50 prompt some significant shifts in scale between local and global views. His notebooks from the 1970s are an intriguing blend of nature-notes about his North Devon farm and travels to Iran, Bangladesh, and Australia. March 1976 was a busy time on the farm, and a cow was about to calve—but Hughes could not stay, as he had a plane to catch. Stopping over at Bahrein and Singapore, he finally touched down in Australia to see his brother and give poetry readings and interviews. Aerial views of countries from space provide an alternative sense of scale and perspective to the very grounded settings of the farming-diaries:      Flew south over hundreds of miles of mountain forest. Then scorched valleys & scattered homesteads, tangle of dirt roads, pocking of water-holes—Persia brown, lion brown. Suddenly—Tullamarine.      Again, small neat airport. Gerald & Joan fresh & neat—Gerald much slimmer, & looking very fit.      The Australian tatty ancientness everywhere—modern Australia just dragged onto it.      Their neat new-looking home—American English furnishings etc. Daze. Gerald’s den. His Jap swords in the steel box. My ear-ache. The Telegrams: Walter died yesterday.51

This passage creates the effect of ‘zooming out’ as Hughes flies over the outback. A further scalar shift happens when he maps his memories of Persia onto the landscape a continent away: these views are characteristic of late twentieth-century ways of perceiving the Earth, thanks to aviation 50  Hughes’s brother worked as an aircraft engineer in both wartime and peacetime (Gerald Hughes, 83–109, 133), while Hughes’s national service saw him working as a radar operator at an air force base (LTH, 5–11). An interest in aviation would thus have come naturally to him. 51  ADD. Ms. 88918/128/2 Pages torn from a ruled spiral-bound notebook. 9r–10r.

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and satellite technology. The passage then narrows its focus to the homely and domestic. However, the exotic consumer goods in Gerald’s Australian home speak of global networks of trade and technology. The ‘Great Acceleration’ had been in full swing for two and a half decades; Japanese swords and furniture from the Old World and the New indicate busy global trade. Hughes’s uncle’s death is relayed by telegram, so news from Yorkshire can reach Ted and Gerald on the other side of the globe, the following day—here is the ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey 1989) of faster communication networks. The enjoyable trip to Australia also provided a very prescient insight about aviation. After an interview with Melbourne Radio, Hughes flew to Perth in an aircraft that burned ‘57 tons’ of fuel.52 Hughes certainly knew of the contribution that aviation makes to fossil fuel burning—and hence to climate change. As videoconferencing software was not available in Hughes’s time, long-haul trips across the globe were necessary for him to take advantage of literary opportunities. Environmentalists would become more openly critical of the aviation industry two decades after Hughes’s death, when the activism of Greta Thunberg brought increased awareness of the environmental cost of air travel. Hughes’s poem ‘The Gulkana,’ first published in 1983, evokes the return flight from an Alaskan fishing trip. When analysed with reference to theories of the supposed ‘authenticity’ of the local versus environmental cosmopolitanism (Heise 2008), Hughes’s poem reveals some important insights. It also speaks volumes about his ambivalent views of technology. Aviation divorces the speaker from nature: I came back to myself. A spectre of fragments Lifted my quivering coffee, in the aircraft, And sipped at it. I imagined the whole 747 As if a small boy held it Making its noise. A spectre, Escaping the film’s flicker, peered from the porthole Under the sun’s cobalt core-darkness Down at Greenland’s corpse Tight-sheeted with snow-glare. Word by word The voice of the river moved in me. It was like lovesickness. (CPH, 668–9)

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It is significant that Hughes evokes a traveller who becomes a ‘spectre’— this contrasts markedly with the primal experience of contact with the Gulkana River described earlier in the poem. Experiencing the river is described as an unmediated and immersive encounter with natural forces: the rocks are ‘too rock-like,’ while the speaker’s inner self recognises his ‘home’ (666–67). This is not the localist environmental authenticity of one’s original ‘home’ that the early environmental movement focused on, but rather a primal experience of a locality brought about by travel. Viewing and the optical are crucial for this passage: the fictional world of the film and the distant perspective on Greenland from a ‘porthole’ remove the speaker from the Earth and environment. Seeing the Earth from above is depicted as disorientating, even unhealthy (the speaker’s coffee quivers with the motion of the engines but also with the movement of his hands, as he is exhausted by nerves and jetlag). This is Hughes at his most environmentally cosmopolitan; the paradox is that the speaker must leave Britain’s polluted waterways to experience a primal landscape and be distanced from the Earth via the technologies of mobility that enable him to travel to Alaska. This poem also contains a highly significant consideration of mobility and climate change. Greenland is envisaged as a ‘corpse.’ This no doubt a reference to its icy lifelessness, but by the time he published this poem, Hughes understood the impact that flying had on the ice caps. Hughes captured a further aerial view of Greenland a little later, deploying striking scale variance to sketch the scene in prose. In his fishing diary, shortly after drafting his 1987 conservation poem ‘The Black Rhino,’ Hughes deploys microscopic and macroscopic views of the icesheet: Sky cleared over the beginning of the ice—the sea puddled with rosettes & cultures, like moulds forming on a liquid. Round. Biggest, deep aquamarine. Gradually thinking as we go. Soon, large sucked & fissured deserts of it. [I]n the distance the black white-draped teats of Greenland. Soon, we’re flying over those flawlessly laundered mountains—draped gigantic furniture, without a crack of black—here at midsummer. Sun—a glare.53

From the vast panorama of sea and sky, the scalar ambit of the metaphors that Hughes uses gradually shrinks. The image of puddles for sea-ice shrinks the ice to a familiar scale, while the imagery of ‘cultures’ and ‘moulds’ narrows down the optical range of the passage to the microscopic. Here, Hughes’s interest in the sciences supplies the image of 53  Ted Hughes BL MS Add 88918/122/1, fishing diaries. White and blue notebook, just wider than A5, ruled, pages from front labelled from 37 onwards by the archivist. 37 r and v.

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‘cultures’; the idea that the sea-ice resembles a microbial specimen grown under lab conditions not only conveys its patchiness in minute detail but hints at human control of environmental processes. In these impressionistic notes, Hughes deploys multiple images for Greenland’s ice-mountains: he shifts back to the panoramic scale of ‘deserts,’ later feminising the mountains as ‘teats’ and deploying domestic images of ‘laundered’ sheets and ‘gigantic furniture.’ Yet the ‘glare’ of the sun hints at an environmental problem with vast, even atmospheric, implications: the hole in the ozone layer. This was a major environmental preoccupation at the time Hughes wrote the poem. The depletion of the ozone layer was most severe above Antarctica, but ozone had also thinned above the Arctic, allowing dangerous levels of ultraviolet light into Earth’s atmosphere. In 1987, the Montreal Protocol, drawing on Paul Crutzen’s research, aimed to limit ozone-depleting substances.54 Here was an example of human actions altering planetary systems—and of international co-operation to combat the harmful impacts of pollutants. Hughes would publish a poem that draws on such aerial views of Greenland, and which deploys the vocabulary of Arctic ozone depletion, the following year. One could also read the menace of climate change into Hughes’s mention of the sun’s ‘glare’: he had known about melting icecaps and rising sea levels for decades. Hughes revised his aerial perspectives on Greenland in his 1988 poem ‘Glimpse,’ which mourns a family member through the striking image of a hunted animal. Yet this poem develops its elegiac tone through an image that suggests contemporary worries about the ozone layer: When I peered down Onto Greenland’s appalling features Sheeted with snow-glare Under a hole of blaze in the violet [….] I mourned a little For my father. I thought of the pierced seal Down there under the ice. (740)

The ‘hole of blaze in the violet’ cannot fail to suggest ultraviolet light piercing the ozone layer, the wound in the atmosphere echoing the father’s 54  NASA. ‘NASA Data Aids Ozone Hole’s Journey to Recovery.’ 15 Apr 2020. Web. Accessed 10.12. 21. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020nasa-data-aids-ozonehole-s-journey-to-recovery

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illness, and the wound inflicted on the seal. Here is a poetic image for a climatic issue that provides the sombre backdrop to this otherwise highly personal elegy. An intricate network of imagery brings together dying father, hunted seal, and threatened planetary processes, suggesting a continuum of experiences that unites humans, animals, and nonhumans in a web of environmental risk—much of it human-caused.

Extinction, Invasives, Exploitation Hughes’s appreciation of nature and animals came from his boyhood hunting and trapping expeditions (WP, 10–15). However, he certainly knew that killing animals was fraught with ethical problems. One indicator associated with the Anthropocene is the possibility that humans are causing a sixth mass extinction. Hughes presents hunting as a major cause of this. His poem ‘The Last Migration’ depicts the extermination of the Irish elk, the aurochs, the passenger pigeon, and the buffalo, and later extinctions caused by the ‘rifling’ of human firearms. Commissioned for The Animal Ark in 1966, this poem is an early cultural response to a problem that conservationists had already noticed and which some would later come to associate with the term ‘Anthropocene.’55 Human-caused extinctions may be caused by the massive, global movements of species that Lewis and Maslin view as characteristic of the Anthropocene. Hughes witnessed at first hand the damage that invasive species could wreak, during a trip to East Africa. His son, Nicholas, was researching the Nile perch, a predator introduced into Lake Victoria by British colonial officials (Barel et  al. 1986). Fishing for enormous Nile perch provided Hughes and Nicholas with an enjoyable adventure (LTH, 464–470), but fish populations in the lake were under severe strain. Cichlid fish, unique to the lake, were almost extinct, and the invasive Nile perch were now resorting to cannibalism. Hughes recorded in his diary that ‘the Nile Perch are in a critical phase, the big ones’ empty stomachs, the little ones eating shrimps & each other. No other fish in their diet—as 55  Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo. ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines.’ Proceedings of the National Academy for Science 114.30 (10 July 2017): E6089–E6096 (E6089). Barel, C.D.N., R. Dorit, P. H. Greenwood, G. Fryer, N. Hughes, P. B. N. Jackson, H. Kawanabe, R. H. Lowe-McConnell, M. Nagoshi, A. J. Ribbink, E. Trewavas, F. Witte & K. Yamakoa. ‘Destruction of fisheries in Africa’s lakes.’ Nature 6014.315 (May 1086): 19–20 (p. 20).

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formerly. The Haplachromics, formerly 80% of the biomass, have disappeared from Nile Perch diets & from the net catch.’56 In an article for Nature published a few years afterwards, Nicholas Hughes and his colleagues would write that the introduction of the Nile perch ‘is not only an economic and ecological tragedy but also an enormous loss to evolutionary biology’ (Barel et al., 20). If the lithic focus of geological accounts of the Anthropocene pay little attention to the impact of human activities on animal bodies, the idea of a human-caused ‘ecological tragedy’ provides a much-needed alternative perspective. This reflects an important, contemporary developments in ecological thinking, which would later shape the way ecology and the Anthropocene is conceptualised. In the 1980s, ecologists became aware that ecosystems could absorb stresses up to a certain point, after which sudden, irreversible change would occur (Szerszynski and Clark, loc 742). Hughes’s writing is aware that ecological tragedies can also cause cataclysmic human tragedies. Human extinction is a possibility that his writing raises. He argued that resistance to the environmental movement was partly due to ‘a biologically inbuilt amnesia against the fears of extinction’ (129). The annihilation of the human race had troubled Hughes since the Cold War; theories of the Anthropocene, from both culture and science, have raised the spectre of human extinction. Some of the scientists interviewed in Bradshaw’s film Anthropocene, such as Anthropocene Working Group stratigrapher Jan Zalasiewicz, consider a human population collapse to be likely—although a few people would survive, as would ‘rats or cockroaches’ (Zalasiewicz, interviewed by Bradshaw). In philosophy and literary theory, Clare Colebrook links the destruction of nonhuman life to the possibility of human extinction (2016). Greg Garrard’s analysis of ‘worlds without us’ reveals how novels and films of the twentieth century began to envisage a planet without humans (2012). What Garrard finds is that a single image—in the fiction of Woolf and Lawrence, a lone hare—is deployed as a synecdoche to ‘stand in for ecological and geological timescales that defy human imagination. Paradoxically, the disanthropic imagination is often momentary or microcosmic’ (43). Hughes’s Tales from Ovid deploys shifts between such microcosmic images and the image of the planet, to imagine the ‘deletion’ of the human race. The Earth is likened to a tear, a bead of sweat—emblems of human grief and toil that 56  BL MS Add 88918/112/4 Navy blue A5 notebook. Pages umbered 62 to 116 by archivist. 65r.

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create dizzying scalar dissonance. Yet the ‘deletion’ of the human race comes about due to a cataclysmic flood, which shows that Hughes wishes the poem to be applicable to climate change. In this poem, Hughes suggests that humans have geological agency, but that such agency comes at the peril of their own self-annihilation. The ‘first and last forge’ evokes the fires of climate change and nuclear destruction but also processes that are titanic in comparison to human actions: the igneous heat of our planet’s creation, and the possibility that Earth could be swallowed by the sun in billions of years’ time.57 Published three years before the term ‘Anthropocene’ appeared in English, Hughes’s poem anticipates some of the most starkly anti-anthropocentric images in Anthropocene culture: the precious, fragile planet, human beings’ enmeshment in its systems, self-­ inflicted threats to human survival, and the dwarfing of our presence by the vast scales of ‘deep time’: earth’s and heaven’s lease for survival Is nothing more than a lease. That both must fall together— The globe and its brightness combined Like a tear Or a single bead of sweat— Into the bottomless fires of the first, last forge. (CPH, 877)

Works Cited Barel, C.D.N., R. Dorit, P. H. Greenwood, G. Fryer, N. Hughes, P. B. N. Jackson, H. Kawanabe, R. H. Lowe-McConnell, M. Nagoshi, A. J. Ribbink, E. Trewavas, F.  Witte & K.  Yamakoa. ‘Destruction of fisheries in Africa’s lakes.’ Nature 6014.315 (May 1986): 19–20. Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. Abingdon: Routledge, 1991. Beck, Ulrich. World at Risk. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001. Print. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1996. 57  Astrophysicists’ opinions differ about how this could happen, but it was hypothesised during Hughes’s lifetime. See David Appell, ‘The Sun Will Eventually Engulf Earth— Maybe.’ Scientific American, 1 Sept 2008. Web. Accessed 11 Sept 2020. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sun-will-eventually-engulf-earth-maybe/

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Carson, Rachel. The Edge of the Sea. Boston: Mariner, 1955. Carson, Rachel. The Edge of the Sea. Introd. Sue Hubbell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998 [1955]. Print. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘Anthropocene Time.’ History and Theory 57.1 (March 2018): 5–32. Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2012. Crist, Eileen. ‘On the Poverty of our Nomenclature.’ Environmental Humanities 3 (2013): 129–47. Crutzen, Paul J, and Eugene F. Stoermer. ‘The “Anthropocene.”’ Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. Ely, Steve. ‘The Parochial Courage of Ted Hughes.’ The Ted Hughes Society Journal 6.2 (2017): 78–85. Emmelhainz, Irmgard. ‘Conditions of Visuality Under the Anthropocene and Images of the Anthropocene to Come.’ E-flux 63 (March 2015). Web. 13 Dec 2019. https://www.e-­flux.com/journal/63/60882/conditions-­of-­visuality-­ under-­the-­anthropocene-­and-­images-­of-­the-­anthropocene-­to-­come/ Garrard, Greg. ‘Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy.’ SubStance 127, 41.1 (2012): 40–60. Ursula K. Heise. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Pero, Thomas R. ‘So Quickly It’s Over’. Wild Steelhead and Salmon (Winter 1999): 50–57. Powell, Felicity. ‘Ted Hughes and the Post-Nuclear Landscape.’ The Ted Hughes Society Journal VII.1 (2018): 27–37. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. Ed. Grevel Lindop. London: Faber & Faber 1997 [1948]. Gifford, Terry. ‘Gods of Mud: Hughes and the Post-Pastoral’. The Challenge of Ted Hughes. Ed. Keith Sagar. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1994. 129–30. ———. ‘“Go Fishing:” An Ecocentric or Egocentric imperative?’ In Joanny Moulin, ed. Lire Ted Hughes: New Selected Poems, 1957–1994. Paris: Editions du Temps 1999. Pp. 145–56. ———. ‘Rivers and Water Quality in the Work of Ted Hughes and Brian Clarke’. Concentric 31, (1st Mar. 2008): 71–91. ———. Ted Hughes. London: Routledge, 2009. ———. ‘Hughes’s Social Ecology’. The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes. Ed. Terry Gifford. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011a. Pp. 81–93. ———. Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. 2nd ed. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2011b [1995].

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———. ‘Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral and Post-Pastoral as Reading Strategies’. Critical Insights: Nature and Environment. Ed. Scott Slovic. Ipswich: Salam, 2012. Pp. 42–61. ———. ‘Hughes and Nature.’ In Terry Gifford, ed. Ted Hughes in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 273–82. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke U.P. 2016. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990 [1989]. Hughes, Ted. ‘Address given at the memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, at 12 Noon on Thursday, 1 December, 1977’, in Henry Williamson, the Man, the Writings: A Symposium (Padstow: Tabb House, 1980), 159–65. Hughes, Gerald. Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir. London: Robson, 2012. Lidström, Susanna. ‘ ‘Images adequate to our predicament’: Ecology, Environment and Ecopoetics’. Environmental Humanities 5 (2014): 35–53. Lidström, Susanna. Nature, Environment and Poetry: Ecocriticism and the poetics of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. Abingdon: Routledge 2015. Print. McCormick, John. The Global Environmental Movement. Chichester: Wiley, 1995. 2nd edn. Moore, Jason W. ‘The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis’ The Journal of Peasant Studies 44:3 (2017): 594–630. Myers, Lucas. Crow Steered Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Sewanee: Proctor’s Hall, 2001. Patterson, Walter C. ‘Inadvertent Climate Modification: Report of the Study of Man’s Impact on Climate.’ Review. Your Environment 3.1 (Spring 1972): 42–3. Print. Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950–1963. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962. Ed. Karen V Kukil. London: Faber & Faber, 2014. Plath, Sylvia. The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2: 1956-63. Eds Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil. London: Faber & Faber, 2018. Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago, Chicago UP, 1994. Reddick, Yvonne. Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017. Smith, Stan. Poetry and Displacement. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007. Solnick, Samuel. Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, biology and technology in contemporary British and Irish poetry. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Steffen, Will, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney and Cornelia Ludwig. ‘The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.’ The Anthropocene Review 2.1 (2015): 81–98.

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Wallis-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. London: Penguin, 2019. Wormald, Mark. ‘Irishwards: Ted Hughes, Freedom and Flow’. The Ted Hughes Society Journal 6.2 (2017): 58–77. Yalden, Derek. The History of British Mammals. London: Poseyer, 1999. ‘Your Shell On Acid: Material Immersion, Anthropocene Dissolves.’ In Richard Grusin, ed. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2017. Pp. 89–120. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Colin N. Waters, Mark Williams, Anthony D. Barnosky, Alejandro Cearreta, Paul Crutzen, Erle Ellis, Michael A.  Ellis, Ian J.  Fairchild, Jacques Grinevald, Peter K. Haff, Irka Hajdas, Reinhold Leinfelder, John McNeill, Eric O. Odada, Clement Poirier, Daniel Richter, Will Steffen, Colin Summerhayes, James P.M. Syvitski, Davor Vidas, Michael Wagreich, Scott L. Wing, Alexander P.  Wolfe, An Zhisheng and Naomi Oreskes. ‘When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal.’ Quaternary International 383 (2015): 196–203.

CHAPTER 4

Seamus Heaney’s Environmental Poetry: Conservation Causes, Deep Time, Shifting Scales, and Climate Change

In 2005, the unspoiled boglands and wetlands near Northern Ireland’s Lough Neagh were menaced by a new motorway. Many people raised their voices in protest. One of them was Seamus Heaney, who had received the Nobel Prize for Literature a decade earlier. He wrote to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland that ‘I have been alerted to the damage that will be done to the ecology in the Lough Beg/Creagh Bog area.’ He added that he had ‘known and loved this area since childhood and have written about it—or rather out of it—often.’ He continued, ‘It is one of the few undisturbed bits of wetland in mid-Ulster, a direct link to the environment our Mesolithic ancestors knew in the Bann Valley and a precious ‘lung’ in the countryside.’1 Here, Heaney’s letter has a local focus, defending an area near his boyhood home and locating an environmental source of his poetic inspiration. Yet as with Hughes, Heaney’s great friend among poets, the local relates to intricate, planetary networks. In District and Circle, the book Heaney published a year after he wrote this letter, the poet evokes the district of one’s home turf and the circle of the great globe. Local and international preoccupations are the backbone  Seamus Heaney. Letter to Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, 2005. Ctd in Connla Young. ‘Revealed: Seamus Heaney opposed route of new A6 carriageway.’ Irish News, 17 Nov 2016. Web. 10.01.2022. https://www.irishnews.com/news/2016/11/17/ news/revealed-seamus-heaney-opposed-route-of-new-a6-787716/ 1

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of this collection. Anthropocene theories of scale variance and deep time offer productive lenses for interpreting Heaney’s work. This chapter analyses how Heaney develops vast geographical and temporal scales in his poetry, deploying insights on previously unpublished archival poetry and prose. The archives show that conservation initiatives featured among the many causes that Heaney supported—an important aspect of his activities that previous scholars of his ecopoetry have not mentioned. Earlier scholarship on Heaney’s environmental poetry does not include analysis of his extensive archives, although archival work has illuminated many other critical accounts, including approaches to his composition process and the political and ideological aspects of his writing.2 The National Library of Ireland’s Heaney archive reveals unpublished draft poems that engage with ‘deep time,’ extinction, fossil fuels, and climate change. They also reveal that Heaney sold valuable manuscripts to raise funds for bog conservation. Evidence from limited-edition publications, campaign materials, environmental management documents, correspondence with the Seamus Heaney Estate, and information from environmental organisations reveals further details—including a commissioned piece, redolent of Carson and Hopkins, which Heaney wrote for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. This chapter links the issues mentioned in draft poems to Heaney’s comments in interviews and articles, to the causes to which he donated his poems, to the environmental organisations and campaigns he supported, to developments in environmental thinking at the time he wrote them, and to issues associated with the Anthropocene. Analysing Heaney’s comments about the growth of his environmental awareness during his boyhood, I contend that Heaney’s poetry can be read as ecopoetry from Death of a Naturalist (1966)—earlier than other scholars have argued. Taking Heaney’s bog-poems as its main focus, this chapter also encompasses related ecopoetic themes: water pollution, extinction, the water cycle, the carbon cycle, fossil fuels, rock strata, climate change, and the role that writing can play in wider environmental movements. My line of argument aims to expand readings of Heaney beyond a close focus on his poetry of place, identity politics, and rural nature, offering a more thorough analysis of the way he deploys 2  See, for example, the drafts in Tony Curtis, ed. The Art of Seamus Heaney. 4th edn. Bridgend: Seren, 2001 [1982]. 53–62.

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environmental scale, while recognising how he revises his earlier celebration of extracting peat from bogs, to create a more ecologically aware poetry of peat. This chapter joins the scholarly dialogue surrounding Heaney, climate change, and the Anthropocene, which ecocritics such as Farrier (2019), Auge (2021), and Xie (2022) have been exploring. Heaney’s boglands give a long view of environmental history, which is intrinsic to his vision of the land in Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975). By the time he revises his earlier bog-poems in District and Circle (2006), Heaney’s environmental awareness is sharpened; he is writing explicitly environmental poetry; he has contributed to environmental projects; and his bog-poetry includes not only a sense of prehistoric time, but a haunting awareness of a future imperilled by climate change. During the 1980s, Heaney employs dramatic shifts in scale to convey a sense of international responsibility for environmental futures: world as nest, globe as ovum. In 1995, Heaney received the Nobel Prize for Literature, while Paul Crutzen and his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their research on the ozone layer. In highly different disciplines, and in distinct ways, the two men’s work would later respond to widespread alarm about climate change. From the 1980s onwards, Heaney’s reputation in literary circles enabled him to lend powerful support to charities and organisations close to his heart. He opened exhibitions, judged poetry competitions, championed libraries, and gave poems to anthologies sold in aid of UNICEF, Amnesty International, and many other high-profile organisations.3 Multiple 3  Heaney judged the Arvon Foundation’s poetry competition with Ted Hughes in 1980. See Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, eds. Arvon Foundation Poetry Competition 1980 Anthology. Ulster Museum. A Personal Selection: Seamus Heaney. 20 August–24 October 1982. Ulster Museum Publication Number 248. Seamus Heaney, author, and Tim O’Neill, designer. ‘Columcille the Scribe’ limited-edition poem. Royal Irish Academy library, 2004. Seamus Heaney, poet, and John O’Connor, engraver. ‘The Earth House.’ National Library of Ireland Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again exhibition, 2021. Limited edition marked LO P 592. Heaney opened the ‘Face to Face with Your Past’ exhibition at Silkeborg Museum, Denmark, where he’d seen the Tollund Man bog-body, 2 Aug 1996. ‘The Man and the Bog,’ corrected proof, Silkeborg Museum. Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney papers, collection 960, box 86, folder 19. Seamus Heaney. ‘From the Republic of Conscience.’ Dublin: Amnesty International Irish Section, 1985. Seamus Heaney. ‘The Wishing Chair’ (later collected as ‘Squarings xxxix’ in Seeing Things). John F. Deane, ed. Thistledown: Poems for UNICEF. Dedalus, 1990. Brandes and Durkan 218.

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conservation causes benefited from using Heaney’s poems and prose for fundraising and consciousness-raising. In 1989, he donated ‘The Road at Frosses’ to an anthology sold in aid of World Wildlife Fund, and he found a very poetic way of supporting bog conservation that year—more on that later. In 1991, his poems featured alongside his friend T.  P. Flanagan’s evocative watercolour landscapes, on a series of posters for the Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation. ‘The man and the bog,’ Heaney’s essay on the famous Tollund Man bog-body, was written in 1996 for the museum at Silkeborg, Denmark, that houses famous bog-bodies. Heaney wrote that bog-bodies ‘erase the boundary-line between culture and nature,’4 anticipating profound challenges to human-centred thinking in work such as Latour’s Beyond Nature and Culture. ‘The man and the bog’ appeared in a ‘Wetlands Archaeology Research Project’ conference proceedings in 1998. By this point, there was increasing awareness that digging peat could damage the environment; the conference explored the tensions between industrial peat extraction, and preserving bog environments and the archaeological remains in them.5 Heaney lent further support to bog conservation in 1999 when his poem ‘The Child That’s Due’ from ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ was printed in a limited-edition broadside by the Bank of Ireland Group Treasury, with some signed copies for the Irish Peatland Conservation Council. The Bank of Ireland Group made a donation to the Irish Peatland Conservation Council’s ‘Save the Bogs’ campaign in recognition of Heaney’s contribution (Brandes and Durkan, 158). Heaney’s ‘Bann Valley Eclogue,’ later collected in Electric Light (2001), is an appropriate choice, given that the poem-sequence focuses on new human life, a new phase in history beyond the Troubles, and new life for wetlands and watercourses: ‘The valley will be washed like the new baby’

4  Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney papers Collection 960, box 89, folder 19. Proofs of Heaney’s talk ‘The man and the bog,’ Silkeborg Museum, Denmark, August 1996, 2. 5  Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney Papers collection 960, box 89, folder 19, two word-processed or faxed letters from Mogens Schou Jørgensen headed ‘Wetlands Archaeology Research Project’, regarding Heaney’s essay. See also https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ prehistoric/past/past25.html#Bog, accessed on 3 March 2023, which details the discussion of wetland environments and archaeology at the 1998 conference.

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(2001, 11).6 Heaney came to be viewed as an important voice in the fight to preserve landscapes, ecologies, and the cultural heritage they represent—often across borders. When the new motorway near Lough Neagh was proposed, Heaney was one of the first people whom Lady Mary Moyola, the widow of a former Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, contacted to help to oppose it.7 From 2005 onwards, Heaney spoke out against new motorways not only in Northern Ireland but also in the Republic of Ireland, on the grounds that cultural and environmental

6  Heaney writes on a draft of his poem ‘Belderg’ that he donated a page of the manuscript to the Irish Peatland Conservation Council to raise funds via sale at an auction in 1989. National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney manuscripts. MS 49,493/39 Fol 1 Manuscript draft of ‘Belderg’ beginning ‘26 July 1974 (1) Contributed to Auction, May 1989’ Manuscript on cream A4 paper, p. 135 (digital catalogue numbering). See also my analysis below. The 1989 anthology The Orange Dove of Fiji: Poems for The World Wide Fund for Nature contained Heaney’s poem ‘The Road at Frosses.’ This was later collected as ‘Squarings xxxi’ in Seeing Things (Brandes and Durkan, 215). The year 1991 saw Heaney contributing to a series of posters for the Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation, which paired artwork by T. P. Flanagan with sections of his poems. For example, T. P. Flanagan’s ‘Where Sheep Have Passed’ is paired with two stanzas of Heaney’s ‘Bogland’ for the ‘Peatlands’ poster. National Library of Ireland EPH F1089. Sections of Heaney’s poem ‘The Peninsula,’ from Door into the Dark (1969), features on the ‘Wetlands’ poster, an excerpt from ‘Exposure’ (1975) on ‘Woodlands,’ and an extract from ‘Fieldwork’ on ‘Meadowlands.’ I am thankful to Siobhan Coyle from Ulster Wildlife for images of the posters. In 1999, Heaney’s poem ‘The Child That’s Due’ from ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ was printed in a limited-edition broadside by the Bank of Ireland Group Treasury, with some signed copies for Irish Peatlands Conservation. The Bank of Ireland Group made a donation to the Irish Peatland Conservation Council’s ‘Save the Bog’ campaign in recognition of Heaney’s contribution (Brandes and Durkan, 158). The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ Northern Ireland branch notes that ‘Lough Beg near Toome is part of a landscape that Seamus Heaney called “the country of the mind”. The much-loved poet wrote about his experiences growing up in the area in poems like “The Strand at Lough Beg” and lent his support to a management plan from the RSPB to improve the site.’ Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. ‘Budget cuts impact Lough Beg.’ 1 Apr 2010. Web. Accessed 16.02.2022. ‘Lough Beg near Toome is part of a landscape that Seamus Heaney called “the country of the mind”. The much-loved poet wrote about his experiences growing up in the area in poems like “The Strand at Lough Beg” and lent his support to a management plan from the RSPB to improve the site.’ I am thankful to Catherine Heaney and the Estate of Seamus Heaney for bringing this to my attention. 7  Catherine Morrison. ‘Heaney backs campaign to save beloved wetlands.’ Irish News, 3 Apr 2007 p. 3. For political reasons, Heaney would not have seen Lady Moyola as an ally before the Good Friday Agreement of 1998: she was the widow of the Ulster Unionist James Chichester-Clark.

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heritage must be preserved.8 Conservation documents are not known for the lyricism of their prose, but in 2010, Heaney penned a beautifully written foreword to a wetland management plan for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ Northern Ireland branch. In both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, then, his conservation activities often focused on preserving the bogland environments that so captivated his poetry. Yet the conservation causes he backed included organisations operating on both sides of the Irish border, in Britain, and with a global remit. Heaney’s forthcoming Letters edited by Christopher Reid, his Collected Poems edited by Bernard O’Donoghue and Rosie Lavan, and Fintan O’Toole’s forthcoming biography will afford further valuable information about the poet’s life and work. Towards the end of his career, the literary community recognised Heaney as a major environmental writer: his poetry featured in ecopoetry anthologies such as The Thunder Mutters (2005) and Earth Shattering: Ecopoems (2007). His writing appeared alongside that of contemporaries who were deeply engaged in public discussions of climate change. In 2008, Granta magazine heralded the arrival of the ‘new nature writing,’ featuring Heaney’s essay ‘The whisper of love’9; the second article in the issue includes dire warnings about climate change.10 That same year, Heaney told fellow poet Dennis O’Driscoll that ‘environmental issues have to a large extent changed the mind of poetry’ (O’Driscoll, 407).

Nature, Place, Environment, and Earlier Critical Reception Early scholarship on Heaney tended to put him in his place. Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist (1966) saw him heralded as a poet of locality and nature. Critic C. B. Cox declared that his poems evoked ‘the soil-reek of

8  In a BBC broadcast from 2008, Heaney spoke out against a motorway that would pass near the historical sites at Tara in the Republic of Ireland. Irish Times. ‘Heaney claims motorway near Tara desecrates sacred landscape.’ 1 Mar 2008. Web. Accessed 17.02.22. https://advance.lexis.com/document/?pdmfid=1519360&crid=6cf81f4f-2247-4a6fb433-f805ce9e3fde&pddocfullpath=%2Fshared%2Fdocument%2Fnews%2Furn%3Aconten tItem%3A4RYD-36Y0-TX39-J18C-000009  Seamus Heaney. ‘The whisper of love.’ Granta 102 (summer 2008). https://granta. com/subjectobject-whisper/ 10  Jim Holt. ‘When the world turns ugly.’ Granta 102 (summer 2008): 16–21.

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Ireland, the colourful violence of his childhood on a farm in Derry.’11 According to such reviewers, Heaney belonged to what Blake Morrison has caricatured as ‘post-1945 nature poetry—an imprecisely defined genre, but one presided over by Ted Hughes’ (1982, 17). Michael Parker’s important literary life of Heaney occasionally depicts the poet as fixedly localist, evidencing ‘a fidelity to his origins, of race and place’ (29). Such a fidelity to race and place was fraught with political tensions. Heaney arrived at a political consciousness around 1956: the beginning of the IRA’s border campaign (Parker 1993, 15). After North (1975), critical debates turned to Heaney’s presentation of issues of historical memory and sectarian violence. Certain critics—notably Edna Longley—find Heaney’s North (1975) to be excessively redolent of Irish nationalism (Longley, 78). Blake Morrison saw North as speaking the ‘language of the tribe’ in order to give ‘sectarian killing in Northern Ireland a historical respectability’ (Morrison 1982, 68), while Neil Corcoran viewed Heaney as celebrating the ‘exhilaration, as well as the horror, of physical violence’ (123). David Lloyd comes to the simplistic conclusion that ‘[p]lace, identity and language mesh in Heaney, as in nationalism’ (328). (Yet poems such as ‘Funeral Rites’ from North could instead be viewed as expressing grief for a repeated history of territorial violence, and a longing for the ‘feud’ to be ‘placated’ (N 8).) Furthermore, as I have mentioned, Heaney gave poems from North to causes that protected boglands in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.12 Moreover, other critics have found Heaney’s engagement with place to avoid such monolithic ideologies. Eugene O’Brien has found that Heaney’s evocation of ‘English ground’ and a ‘European frame of reference’ broaden North to wider influences (1999, 4), while his later reading of Heaney with reference to postcolonial theory undercuts binary readings of self and other (2002, 211). Heaney’s work has been an important focus for ecocritics such as Terry Gifford 2011 [1995], Garrard (1998), Jonathan Bate (2000), Lidström

 C. B. Cox, ‘The Painter’s Eye’, Spectator, 20 May 1966, p. 638.  Specifically ‘Belderg’ for the Irish Peatland Conservation Council in 1989 and ‘Exposure’ for the Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation in 1991. The use of these poems is further discussed later in this chapter. The term ‘Ulster’ was used by unionists. Seamus Heaney, interviewee, and Mark Carruthers, interviewer. ‘Seamus Heaney: ‘If I described myself as an Ulsterman I’d have thought I was selling a bit of my birthright.’ Irish Times, 23 Jan 2011. Accessed24.01.22. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/seamus-heaney-if-i-describedmyself-as-an-ulsterman-i-d-have-thought-i-was-selling-a-bit-of-my-birthright-1.2077002 11 12

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(2015), Farrier (2019), Auge (2021), Corcoran (2021), and Xie (2022). Lidström and Garrard identify the inception of Heaney’s environmental cosmopolitanism in Station Island (1984) (2014, 45; also Lidström, 120), although such eco-cosmopolitan dimensions can be shown to occur well over a decade earlier. Jonathan Bate saw Heaney as ‘a poet of turf, bog and locality,’ who has subsequently ‘become ever more cosmopolitan in his interests’ (2000, 29). However, Bate’s analysis of Heaney’s poems focuses almost exclusively on the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, without venturing beyond. Bate writes that Heaney revisits ‘Glanmore, the farm of his childhood’ in Seeing Things (2000, 202), but Glanmore was in fact the farm of Heaney’s adulthood (P, 13), the site of his relocation to the Republic of Ireland in 1972. This conflation of Mossbawn in Derry with Glanmore in County Wicklow speaks of a critical tendency to focus on Heaney’s localism, at the expense of both his complex identity and the vaster scales of environmental concern that he considers. Lidström largely replicates Bate’s argument for the gradual broadening of Heaney’s geographical ambitions: she finds that Heaney’s work develops from ‘a sense-­ based understanding of a local environment to an understanding of a transformed relation between human, local and global natures’ (2015, 139). Yet Heaney’s poetry evidences an environmental awareness that is more sophisticated than a ‘sense-based understanding’: from his first collection, his poetry engages with environmental contamination. The later critical work on Heaney’s engagement with climate change that I have mentioned—by Auge, Corcoran, and Xie—further broadens the horizons of ecocritical dialogue on Heaney’s work. The archives are an important source of information about Heaney’s intellectual engagement with environmental issues and organisations. Part of Heaney’s archive was purchased by Emory University in 2003, and the poet donated many of his manuscripts to the National Library of Ireland in 2011, providing later ecocritics with an opportunity to research the development of Heaney’s ecopoetry and his support for environmental causes. However, Brandes and Durkan’s (2008) Heaney bibliography lists poems that appeared in an environmental anthology in 1989, and a limited edition sold in aid of a conservation cause in 1990.13 Even before the opening of 13  ‘The Road at Frosses’ was published in a World Wide Fund for Nature anthology whose contributors included British royalty (1989); ‘The Child that’s Due’ from ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ supported the aforementioned ‘Save the Bog’ campaign in 1990, as the Bank of Ireland Group treasury made a donation to the campaign in recognition of Heaney’s permission to print the poem. Brandes and Durkan 158, 215.

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the National Library of Ireland’s Heaney archive, then, it would have been possible for ecocritics to analyse Heaney’s engagement with environmental causes. Critical discourse also took some time to pick up on Heaney’s engagement with climate change. Scholarly analysis of Heaney’s climate change poetry was initially confined to a brief article, which examined a single poem (Wheatley 2014). (In contrast, reviewers of District and Circle in newspapers commented at length on the collection’s thematic consideration of climate change.)14 Andrew Auge claims that ‘Heaney’s poetry does not focus on the ecological significance of the bog, except, perhaps, in peripheral and tangential ways’ (43), and yet the ecology of the bog and Heaney’s later preoccupation with climate change are linked. The poet’s use of his bog-poems of the 1960s and 1970s, to support bog conservation in the 1980s and 1990s, shows that ecology became a significant consideration for him. Brendan Corcoran’s ecocritical reading of Heaney’s poetry is perceptive: he analyses the bog-poems of the 1970s in the context of the nascent environmental movement (122), of Heaney’s friend Ted Hughes’s environmental activities of the 1970s onwards (123), and of a growing public awareness of climate change that is reflected in District and Circle. Chao Xie’s comparative work on Heaney’s climate change poetry contains perceptive insights on how such poetry may inspire an ethic of care in the reader15—yet more can be said about Heaney’s support for environmental projects. These conservation activities mark much of Heaney’s work out as not merely environmental, but also environmentalist. Heaney, like Hughes, came to understand issues that would later be termed ‘environmental’ during his boyhood. Seeing polluted watercourses brought both poets to an awareness of the damage that human actions could inflict on the environment. The health of brooks and bogs was a concern that Heaney and Hughes later discussed (O’Driscoll, 336). In an interview with fellow writer Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney reminisced that ‘There was always a dread of allowing ‘lint water’ to get into the [River] Moyola, since it was deadly for the fish—lint water being the water left in a flax dam after the flax had been retted. And I also remembered the sight of the first white froth floating down the Moyola after Nestlé opened their factory at Castledawson’ (O’Driscoll, 336). The factory opened when 14  Benjamin Lytal. ‘The Plough Turned Round: District and Circle.’ Los Angeles Times, 18 Jun 2006, ‘R’sec. P.8. Rosemary Goring. ‘The magic circle’. The Herald [Glasgow], 01 Apr 2006: 4. 15  Chao Xie. ‘Reading Corporeality in the Climate Change Era: A Comparative Study of Seamus Heaney’s and Hua Hai’s Ecological Poetry.’ Kritika Kultura 38 (2022): 274–89.

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Heaney was four; even if he witnessed water pollution slightly later than he remembers, Heaney had a precocious understanding of the environmental costs of agriculture and industry. This understanding was fostered by his rural upbringing, which features so prominently in Death of a Naturalist and recurs in later work. A preoccupation with water pollution returns throughout Heaney’s career, from the title poem of his first collection, ‘Death of a Naturalist’ (DN), to the uncollected ‘Lint Water’ (Brandes and Durkan, 292) to ‘Augury’ (WO), ‘Summer 1969’ (N), ‘The Milk Factory’ (HL), and finally ‘Moyulla’, in his penultimate collection District and Circle. Water pollution is a local issue with vast ramifications: a poisoned brook will add its contaminants to a polluted ocean. Lawrence Buell’s model of ‘toxic discourse’ captures pollution’s pervasive seepage, evoking ‘communities, population groups, and finally the whole earth contaminated by occult toxic networks’ (1998, 648). The water cycle is global, and freshwater use is one of the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ that Steffen and his colleagues propose (2015). Heaney’s evocation of water pollution has a trans-Atlantic geographical reach as early as his third book. Influences from the USA, Ireland, England, and beyond combined to shape Heaney’s ecopoetry and environmental awareness, and his backing of conservation causes. His support for ecological issues was more muted than his friend Ted Hughes’s decades-long environmental campaigning. The English poet was first galvanised to action by what Heaney termed his ‘obsession’ with water pollution (O’Driscoll, 336). Another literary friend, the poet John Montague, was more overt in his environmental themes, during the 1960s and 1970s. Montague’s collections Poisoned Lands (1961) and The Rough Field (1972) were important to Heaney,16 and Heaney found that Montague ‘glorified fern and branch and waterfall,’ like the early Irish nature poets (1980, 143). Montague’s environmental protest-poem ‘Hymn to the New Omagh Road’ begins, ‘As the bull-dozer bites into the tree-ringed hill fort’ (273). This openly critical poem could be viewed as a forerunner of Heaney’s writing to oppose the construction of the new A6 bypass in Northern Ireland, and the motorway that would run near historical sites at Tara in the Republic of Ireland. Moreover, Heaney’s awareness of what would later be termed ‘ecopoetry’ developed cosmopolitan strains early in his career. From 1970 to 1971, Heaney took

 Email from Michael Parker to the present author, 29 March 2022.

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up a visiting post at the University of Berkeley, swapping the bogland for a Californian ‘lotus-land’ (O’Driscoll, 138). This inspires the vast perspectives of the moon and of trans-Atlantic travel in ‘Westering,’ at the end of Wintering Out. In the year of the first Earth Day, the 1970s’ liberal counterculture was in full swing. Heaney attended readings by the American environmental poets Robert Bly and Gary Snyder; he saw Snyder as having an ‘explicit concern’ with environmental issues (O’Driscoll, 407). These authors’ poetry resonated with ‘the Gaia factor’ in his own work (141). If the ‘Gaia factor’ had been clearly evident in Heaney’s earliest, uncollected poems, and owed a debt to Kavanagh, Montague, and Hewitt (P 131–49), it was also informed by these international influences. Heaney said that ‘What the Californian distance did was to lead me back into the Irish memory bank. And probably the fashion for Native American poetry, and Japanese and Chinese poetry, encouraged me to trust the ‘nature’ aspect of my own material’ (O’Driscoll, 142). Heaney’s ecopoetic intertexts contribute to the ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ of his work; as a result, shifts in geographical scale become especially evident in the latter half of his career.

Heaney’s Bog-Poems: Environmental History, Extinction, Extraction, and Conservation If you peer into a bogland pool or observe a cut peat-bank, you are literally looking down into prehistory. Bogs are formed in waterlogged soil when vegetation accumulates faster than it can decay. The resulting compacted organic matter becomes peat (or ‘turf,’ as Heaney often calls it in Ulster dialect). The Oxford English Dictionary defines a bog as ‘A piece of wet spongy ground, consisting chiefly of decayed or decaying moss and other vegetable matter.’ The word is derived from the Irish bogach, meaning ‘soft’ (OED). Upland bogs may be 10,000 years old—a peaty archive that dates back to the end of the last Ice Age. Lowland bogs began forming 4000 years ago and were created by changing climatic conditions and by human impacts such as deforestation (Renou-Wilson and Byrne, 232; O’Connell 1990). The Emory Rose Library archives show that Heaney

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researched the processes of bog formation in detail.17 He also read geographer E. Estyn Evans’s 1957 book Irish Folk Ways (Meredith, 133), which chronicled the sequences of landscape and culture over several thousand years. Miry vegetable matter may lack the glamour of Alpine glaciers, but bogs are significant environments for ecologists, especially in our age of climate change and extinction. A Polish bog was among the environments examined as a possible location for the start of the Anthropocene (see Chap. 2). The bog is Ireland’s ‘last great area of wilderness.’ Bogs store water, but they are also the most space-efficient carbon stores of all land ecosystems (Renou-Wilson, 141) and are thus crucial for mitigating climate change. They are important sites for rare animals and plants18 but are under threat from peat extraction, moorland burning, and farming.19 In 2011, towards the end of Heaney’s career, a survey revealed that most Irish people were in favour of peatland conservation. However, they saw domestic peat-cutting as culturally important, and did not always view this as contradictory to bog conservation (Renou-Wilson et  al. 2011, xii). However, extraction posed one of the greatest threats to peat-bogs during the twenty-first century (xii). At the time, there was little public understanding of the role that peatlands play in the carbon cycle and in climate change mitigation (xv). Indeed, there is ongoing controversy about banning peat-cutting on bogs designated as Special Areas of Conservation (O’Connor and Gearey, 382). And as the climate changes, the bogs themselves face further threats (Renou-Wilson et al. 2011, xiii). Heaney’s bog-­ poetry evidences a complex relationship with this landscape: early in his career, he celebrates the cutting of peat, and yet his later activities suggest that he was becoming increasingly aware of the environmental problems that this may cause, and he became a longstanding supporter of bogland restoration. Heaney’s poetry gives a nuanced sense of boglands as repositories of past landscapes, ancient creatures, and human interventions—often over the space of millennia. His descriptions of astonishingly well-preserved  Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney papers, collection 960, Box 89, folder 4, T. A. Barry. ‘Origins and Distribution of Peat-Types in the Bogs of Ireland.’ Undated article funded by Bord na Móna energy company. 18  Environmental Protection Agency, John Lucey and Yvonne Doris. Biodiversity in Ireland: A Review of Habitats and Species. Johnstown: Co. Wexford, 2001. https://www. epa.ie/pubs/reports/biodiversity/EPA_Biodiversity.pdf6 19  Irish Peatland Conservation Council. ‘Habitat loss of peatlands.’ N.D.  Web. http:// www.ipcc.ie/a-to-z-peatlands/peatland-action-plan/habitat-loss-of-peatlands/ 17

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prehistoric human ‘bog bodies’ are highly organic, revelling in metaphors of flora and fauna. This blurring of categories evokes Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘natureculture’: an idea that has informed important currents of thought in cultural thinking about the Anthropocene. Reading Heaney in relation to  the Anthropocene, one might consider how the bog-bodies suggest Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene’: an intricate network of living and non-­ living, of human and natural history. A bog is also a ‘hyperobject,’ to borrow Timothy Morton’s term—an entity ‘massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.’ As Morton’s examples include an oilfield or the Everglades (2013, loc 91), a bog is quite clearly one of these temporally transgressive entities. Heaney’s bogs, and the landscapes surrounding them, bear witness to the timescales of geological, climatic, prehistoric, historical, and extractive processes. The bog-poems evidence an engagement with Earth’s systems—water cycles, climate conditions, the carbon cycle—at least thirty years before the term ‘Anthropocene’ was published. Heaney’s interest in the bogland developed in early life. Michael Parker writes that for Heaney, ‘from childhood, bogland had been ‘a genuine obsession’, since it covered such a large area of his home territory’ (Parker 1993, 7). The most celebrated of Heaney’s bog-poems is ‘Digging,’ the opening of his debut volume. Heaney revisited the bogland with his friend, the painter T. P. Flanagan, in the late 1960s (Parker 1993, 87). ‘Digging’ is Heaney’s ars poetica (Lloyd, 326), placed between the writing-­desk and the peat-bank. It is his answer to Hughes’s ‘The Thought-­Fox,’ situating its author within a male line of peat-cutters and a developing canon of Faber poets. This poem has much to say about rural life, Northern Irish Catholic identity, masculinity, metaphor, and the act of writing. However, the images that evoke the materiality of peat and page yield valuable insights about human impacts on the living world. Digging certainly brings the speaker’s relatives close to plant life (‘flowerbeds’ and ‘potato drills,’ DN 1), but ‘the curt cuts of an edge/Through living roots’ invite the reader to consider more than the figurative roots of identity and rural life. Heaney described a ‘capillary root’ in Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry and thought that it remained undisturbed (P 138). In ‘Digging,’ disturbing the roots invariably raises several issues: Protestant land expropriation and cultural domination, but also the problems that might come of extracting peat and a thematic link to violent rural practices. Death of a Naturalist explores the violent power hierarchies between humans and animals, colonisers and

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colonised. Kittens appear as ‘pests’ to be drowned (DN, 11), turkeys are displayed in an ‘indifferent mortuary’ (24), and Irish peasants are satirically labelled as starving ‘brutes’ and ‘dogs’ (21). Here is a litany of violence towards farm animals (although the poems often justify this), and colonial persecution of the rural Irish, who are dehumanised and ‘animalised’ in the process. If we place ‘Digging’ alongside the bloodier poems in the collection and remember that it likens a pen to a gun, the poem suggests the damage done to living creatures and ‘living roots.’ It is this turn of phrase that foreshadows Heaney’s later consideration of peat-cutting as environmentally damaging. Moreover, Heaney’s title poem, ‘Death of a Naturalist,’ takes its vocabulary from the poet’s boyhood awareness of water pollution. It is thus ripe for re-evaluation as a poem that speaks of environmental concern. In ‘Death of a Naturalist,’ Heaney insists on verbs of putrefaction, such as ‘festered’ and ‘rotted’ (3). This suggests that the way humans exploit rivers is evidence of something rotten in the state, or in human behaviour. Heaney’s humorous evocation of a child’s fear that ‘The great slime kings/Were gathered there for vengeance’ (4) is a lighthearted look at a deeper concern about damaged waterways and wetlands. ‘Digging’ and ‘Death of a Naturalist’ open poetic windows into deep-­ rooted preoccupations for Heaney. The bog-poems in his first four collections are developments in an ongoing poetic project, which he revises and revisits in later books. Heaney spoke of his first four books as forming a ‘single movement’ in his work (O’Driscoll, 124), and the archives confirm that their compositions often overlapped.20 Thus, when Heaney ends his second collection, Door into the Dark (1969), with ‘Bogland,’ the poem glances backwards at ‘Digging’ and invites us to return to the bogland in later collections. Door into the Dark is haunted by revenants from environmental history, from pieces of wood petrified in lough-water that ‘Incarcerate ghosts/Of sap and season’ (25) to the ‘webbed marsh’ of unearthed clay (40). Lidström finds that ‘the bog poems are not explicitly concerned with environmental degradation’ (65), and yet, ecological dimensions are present.

20  For example, early manuscript drafts of ‘Bog Queen’ from North are juxtaposed with poems that would be published in Wintering Out and which are dated to 1969. NLI 49, 493/11. ‘Orange drums, Tyrone 1966’ was published in the year of its composition in The Listener (Brandes and Durkan), but this poem would not be collected until North.

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Heaney said that he saw ‘Bogland’ as relating to ‘our national consciousness’ (P 55) but also that he viewed the bogland as ‘a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it’ (P 54). His wording— done to it—shows that as far back as his 1974 commentary on this poem, he was thinking about how human actions might be damaging; this foreshadows his later activities to redress the degradation of boglands. An entire archival folder at the Emory Rose Library is entitled ‘Bogs,’ and it shows that Heaney researched peaty landscapes in extensive detail. From drainage, extraction, combustion, and peat-fired power stations, to bog formation and bog archaeology,21 Heaney’s reading during the 1970s was exhaustive and eclectic. It encompassed material about both the historical significance of bogs and highly damaging industrial-scale peat extraction. Industrial peat extraction in Ireland increased after the establishment of Bord na Móna (the Peat Board) in 1946 (O’Connor and Gearey, 383), and indeed Heaney’s research materials in the ‘Bogs’ folder include a Bord na Móna document that focuses on fuel and economics, drainage, and energy generation.22 Later in Heaney’s career, the cutting and combustion of peat would come to cause increasing concern. What Heaney unearths in ‘Bogland’ hints at species that are lost when environments change: They’ve taken the skeleton Of the Great Irish Elk Out of the peat, set it up An astounding crate full of air. (DD, 40–41)

It is important that Heaney’s first bog-body is not human at all, but animal. The Irish Elk was thought, in his time, to have been hunted to extinction. Indeed, it is the very creature that his friend Hughes had lamented in 1966 in his more explicitly environmentalist poem ‘The Last Migration.’ Heaney titles the animal ‘the Great Irish Elk,’ evoking precolonial, 21  Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney papers Collection 960, box 89, folder 4. See, for example, ‘The Moving Bog,’ Bord na Móna, undated booklet, T. A. Barry’s ‘Origins and Distribution of Peat-Types in the Bogs of Ireland,’ undated article funded by Bord na Móna energy company, and Leslie Gardner, ‘Bogland Harvest,’ Blackwoods, 1974. 22  Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney papers Collection 960, box 89, folder 4. ‘The Moving Bog,’ Bord na Móna, undated booklet.

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prehistoric Ireland. The epithet ‘Great,’ and Heaney’s use of capitals, certainly suggests a reverence for Irish animals and the history they evoke. (In fact, the creature’s range extended far beyond Ireland.)23 Heaney’s humorous metaphor, an ‘astounding crate full of air,’ considers the animal’s bones set up as museum pieces for human contemplation. His commentary on the poem reveals that an elk skeleton was found in a bog near his school and provided neighbours with an enjoyable opportunity for photographs (P 54). In the poem and in Heaney’s lecture about it, there is some tension between the use of the elk’s remains for human ends and the way it emblematises the formerly ‘great’ animals of prehistoric Ireland. Reading this poem with the Anthropocene in mind, one is reminded that the preserved animals, plants, and people that Heaney’s poems find in the bogland are relics of what Northern Europe was like in a different climate, with primal forest, extensive marshland, and roaming megafauna. Scientists have long argued that prehistoric hunting caused the worldwide extinction of the Irish Elk, although its extinction in Ireland has since been linked to (largely natural) changes to the climate and vegetation.24 Indeed, the Irish Elk was an example that Victorian palaeontologist Georges Cuvier used to prove that species could die out (Gould, 83); it is thus scientifically significant for the study of extinction. Reading this poem in the light of Anthropocene theories—the association of the Anthropocene with human-caused extinctions—this animal bog-body is an uncanny revenant, a reminder of lost species and past environments. Later in his career, Heaney reconsidered the elk as an environmental symbol. Examining the work of his friend, the painter Barrie Cooke, Heaney explicitly links the elk to artistic resistance against the destruction of nature: During the 1980s, in fact, [Cooke] permitted himself a kind of epical joy: images of the Great Irish Elk with its incandescent horns lifted towards the

23  The ‘Irish Elk’ is not actually an elk at all but an extinct species of giant deer. These creatures were widespread throughout Europe, Asia, and North Africa, but some of the best specimens are from Irish loughs. See A.J.  Stuart, P.A.  Kosintsev, T.F.G.  Higham, and A.M. Lister. ‘Pleistocene to Holocene extinction dynamics in giant deer and woolly mammoth.’ Nature 431 (2004): 684–89. 24  A.J. Stuart, P.A. Kosintsev, T.F.G. Higham and A.M. Lister. ‘Pleistocene to Holocene extinction dynamics in giant deer and woolly mammoth.’ Nature 431 (2004): 684–89.

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galaxies like receiving stations [….] There was an element of proclamation about it all, as if he were waving the banners of nature’s kingdom and mustering its forces for the battle against pollution and destruction which life on the planet has now turned into. (Heaney 2000, n.p.)

The Irish Elk is the subject of Barrie Cooke’s 1983 painting ‘Megaceros Hibernicus,’ among other artworks. Heaney’s interpretation of Cooke’s elk as an emblem of ‘the battle against pollution and destruction’ suggests the environmental strains that were developing in his own poetry. ‘Bogland’ continues to examine changed landscapes and vanished species: They’ll never dig coal here, Only the waterlogged trunks Of great firs, soft as pulp.

Those ‘great firs’ are relics from a time when the bogland was forested— and humans are responsible for felling them.25 Heaney’s poem is clearly an encounter with ‘deep time’: the deforestation he describes goes back at least 4000  years, while the Irish Elk dates from 10,000  years ago. (His turn of phrase ‘millions of years’ is a case of poetic licence (Meredith, 132)). Heaney is, of course, aware that peat is an early stage in the formation of coal.26 His choice to focus on the bogland, a living ecosystem and an organic archive rather than a stony deposit, resonates with Braidotti’s ‘zoe-centred’ interpretation of the Anthropocene (32). This ecocritical reading reveals the bog to be a complex record of extinct species, extirpated forests, and evidence of all that has been done to the landscape by humans27—and all of this is revealed by the exploitation of peat. By ending

25  For deforestation as a contributory factor to bog formation, see Birks, H.J.B. & Birks, H.H. Quaternary Palaeoecology. London: Edward Arnold, 1980. 26   National Geographic. ‘Bog.’ National Geographic, 1996–2020. Web. Accessed 26.05.20. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/bog/ 27  Heaney’s presentation of wood unearthed from the bog and uncovered in Lough Neagh is linked to Heaney’s later examination of a causeway of recently planted firs in a bog in Seeing Things—a ‘meaning made of trees’ (ST, 89).

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his collection with a ‘door’ into deep time, Heaney hints that he will delve deeper into this rich vein of peaty material in later work. Over twenty years after he first placed it in a collection, Heaney would use ‘Bogland’ to help to raise awareness of how important, and threatened, these unique landscapes had become. In 1991, he contributed the resonant opening stanzas of ‘Bogland’ to a series of signed posters printed to support the Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation. The posters pair Heaney’s poetry with paintings by T. P. Flanagan—an apt juxtaposition, given that their visit to the bogland and their exchange of ideas were foundational for their art. The poster contains the following information: Peatlands are under serious threat because of cutting, drainage, afforestation and erosion. Irish peatlands have their own unique characteristics and are therefore very important in a European and world context. We have a responsibility to conserve and restore what remains.28

Heaney’s use of his poem to support an ecological cause suggests that later in his career, he came to view even small-scale, domestic turf-cutting with greater ambivalence. The connotations that the bogland has for Heaney change and develop over the course of his career. By the time of his collection Wintering Out (1972), Heaney is using prehistoric Danish bog-bodies to consider historical colonialism and contemporary sectarian conflict. It is undeniable that Wintering Out resonates with all-too-human issues: in May 1969, Heaney wrote forty poems in the space of a week in response to fighting in Derry and bombings by protestant paramilitaries (Parker 1993, 90). Wintering Out was published in ‘the year of Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday’ (O’Driscoll, 121). The bogland invariably raises lexical echoes of the Bogside, a largely Catholic area of Derry (N, 58). However, Heaney expressed reservations about simplistically political poetry, and he resented being asked to write poems that amounted to ‘an IRA propaganda campaign’ (Heaney and Cole, n.p.). Landscapes and animals have multifaced

28  Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation poster, featuring T. P. Flanagan’s ‘Where Sheep Have Passed’ and two stanzas of Heaney’s ‘Bogland.’ National Library of Ireland EPH F1089. It is important to note that Flanagan is the dedicatee of ‘Bogland’ and was instrumental in the poem’s creation, although Flanagan’s painting ‘Bogland’ does not feature on the poster.

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meanings in this collection. A snipe evokes the hidden violence of snipers (19) but also the threat of the snipe’s extinction (Lidström and Garrard 2014, 45). Animals, plants, and landscapes remain important themes in the poems, yet they are not backdrops to the violence, but are often presented as the victims of colonial violence and capitalist expansion. After all, Heaney would later refer to colonialism as disrupting the ‘pristine ecology’ of precolonial life (CP). Indeed, much of Heaney’s work in Wintering Out is environmentally aware. An important shift from local to trans-Atlantic occurs in ‘Augury,’ which explores water pollution. ‘Augury’ presents a fish with its face opened like a ‘valve’ (42), a metaphorical evocation of what human beings do to pollute the water of rivers that might even suggest the ‘valves’ that release factory effluent. O’Driscoll points out that ‘Augury’ suggests an ‘early’ awareness of environmental issues (336). Heaney’s poem draws on his childhood observations of water pollution at Castledawson, but he writes it at a point when this issue was an important preoccupation for the environmentalists and creative practitioners around him. Hughes and his colleagues had recently published an article about the hazards of detergents to fish (Jones 1970, 55–59), and Hughes was aware that the resulting disease had originated in Ireland in the late 1960s (Gifford 2011 [1995], 148–9). Indeed, Heaney told O’Driscoll that for Hughes and Barrie Cooke, as fishermen, ‘the pollution of rivers […] was an obsession.’ Heaney’s understanding of river pollution from flax dams and factories meant that he was ‘an apt pupil’ for Cooke and Hughes (336). In its published form, ‘Augury’ consists of four pared-down quatrains. However, while he was drafting the poem, Heaney included imagery that focused more closely on the individual fish and the industrial processes that have damaged its health29:

29  National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney archive, MS 49 493–12 fol 1, labelled pp. 1–54 by archivist, manuscript, and annotated typescript drafts of poems, many of which were collected in Wintering Out. TS with MS amendments, cream A4 paper, p. 46 (digital catalogue numbering), ‘A Pollution.’

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Heaney’s revision of his title from ‘As We Roved Out’ to ‘A Pollution’, and finally to ‘Augury,’ transforms the tone of the poem. ‘A Pollution’ clearly names the environmental concerns that motivate the poem, and yet it is poetically dull. ‘As We Roved Out’ suggests the opening line of a ballad or folk-song30—a backward look rather than a prophetic warning. ‘Augury,’ on the other hand, raises the problem of threats to environmental futures. In the typescript, Heaney’s close focus on the suffering fish does heighten pathos, but the poem becomes broader in scope as he reworks it. The ‘wheels,’ ‘belts,’ and ‘race’ of the draft, which suggest the Nestlé factory, are edited out. In the published version, Heaney removes this local focus, creating a finished piece that is more applicable to global environmental dilemmas. The scalar ambit of ‘Augury’ widens beyond Ireland. Heaney’s speaker wishes to ‘soothe the hurt eye/Of the sun’ and ‘Unpoison great lakes’ (42). Heaney’s turn of phrase ‘great lakes’ cannot fail to evoke North America’s Great Lakes; the capitalisation in the typescript above confirms that this is the American location he was considering. The sun’s eye is affronted by sectarian murders and also by environmental destruction. Beginning with a close, local focus on an individual fish, and ending by wondering what can ‘fend us’ from environmental damage, Heaney explores a global ‘us’ that encompasses humans and nonhumans. This foreshadows the use of the first-person plural ‘we’ in his later poem ‘Höfn,’ evoking a shared, planetary predicament. If ‘Augury’ glances across the Atlantic, other poems are preoccupied with environmental problems from across the Irish Sea. Colonial environmental exploitation is a key concern in Wintering Out, and Heaney uses the examples of razed forests and extinct animals to sharpen his critique of British imperialist practices. His poems reflect the environmental violence of land dispossession and resource plunder; these tactics were wielded during a long history of colonial violence. Colonial control of the land paved the way for the Great Famine of 1845–1852,31 while warfare and colonisation also led to severe deforestation. ‘Almost seventy five per cent of Ireland was once wooded,’ says an Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation poster, to which Heaney contributed his poem ‘Exposure,’ rich in the imagery of rainy woodlands (although the Northern Irish Trust removed

30  See ‘As I was walking all alane’ or ‘As I was walking mine alane’ in Arthur Quiller-­ Couch, ed. The Oxford Book of Ballads. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1910. 868. 31  C. Kinealy, A death-dealing famine: the great hunger in Ireland. Chicago: Pluto, 1997.

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the first line of the poem, which describes a scene in Wicklow).32 Forestry scientists have noted that in times of historical conflict in Ireland, destroying forests was a tactic to remove cover and starve local inhabitants. The result was that when the Republic of Ireland gained independence in 1922, just over 1% of the land area was wooded.33 Losing the woods is a significant cultural loss as well as a natural one, and the impacts of deforestation are felt in Irish-language poetry (O’Brien 2021, 184–5); Heaney has commented on the importance of trees as a source of poetic inspiration for ancient Irish poets. For Heaney, the poetry of forests is a vestige of pagan religion, a ‘deep unconscious affiliation to the old mysteries of the grove’ (P, 186). Here is an important reason why Heaney’s lyric I often associates himself with woodlands. He appears as a ‘wood-kerne’ (N 68) and as that ‘wood-lover and tree-hugger’ Sweeney (P 186), from Station Island and Sweeney Astray to the end of his last collection, Human Chain. ‘Bog-Oak’ shows that the ancient wood pulled from the bog does not lead Heaney back to a Celtic history of ‘oak groves’ and ‘cutters of mistletoe’ (WO, 4), but to starving Irish rebels dragging themselves out of the woods. Heaney quotes from the English civil servant and poet Edmund Spenser’s 1596 treatise on the exploitation of Ireland, creating bitter irony (Parker 1934, 95–6). It is also significant that Heaney’s poetry relishes Place Name[s] that are redolent of the lost woodland groves. Heaney’s poem draws here on the dinnseanchas tradition, which ‘relate[s] the original meanings of place names’ (P 131). Certain Place Name poems contain important reflections on the history of formerly forested places. Derry is the name of both Heaney’s natal county and the town where he went to college.34 Derrygarve, which features as a moment of dinnseanchas in ‘A New Song’ (23), also derives from the Irish word doire: ‘oak grove’ (P 36). By the time we read ‘Midnight,’ the next poem to take us to the bog’s ‘turf-banks,’ Heaney turns his attention to deforestation, extinct animals, and what colonialism does to people, their language, and their environment. The ‘Forests coopered to wine-casks’ (WO, 35) are evidence 32   Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation poster, ‘Woodlands,’ 1991. Featuring T.  P. Flanagan’s painting ‘Lagan Twilight, Barnett’s Park, Belfast’ and two stanzas of Heaney’s poem ‘Exposure.’ 33  Marie-Christine Flechard, Matthew S. Carroll, Patricia J. Cohn, and Aine Ni Dhubhain. ‘The changing relationships between forestry and the local community in rural northwestern Ireland.’ Canadian Journal of Forestry Research 37 (2007): 1999–2009 (2001). 34  Heaney alludes to this in ‘Alphabets’ (HL, 2).

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of natural resources plundered after Cromwell’s invasion. Colonial control brings about an extinction that is Heaney’s main focus in ‘Midnight.’ Heaney comments that ‘The wolf has died out/In Ireland’ since the ‘professional wars’ (35). Lidström has remarked that this poem suggests that ‘the successful repression of rebellion results in the extinction of a species’ (91).35 However, the way deep time is employed in this poem merits further analysis. After mentioning these historic environmental losses, Heaney widens the poem’s temporal ambit. He places a contemporary view of Ireland (‘to-night’) in the context of ‘turf-banks’ (prehistoric ‘deep time’) and ‘basalt and granite’ (geological ‘deep time’) (35). If Hughes had mourned ‘the last wolf killed in Britain’ (CPH, 61) but celebrated human wolfishness in his collection Lupercal, Heaney’s take on this extinction is somewhat different. An old Irish epithet for the wolf is ‘Mac tire,’ ‘Son of the Land’ (Wild Ireland). Heaney creates a parallel between colonial extirpation of the wolf and colonial erosion of the Irish language, which leaves him expressing himself in English: ‘The tongue’s/Leashed in my throat’ (35).36

Deep Time and the ‘Bog People’ In the small hours of a spring night in 1970, Heaney set out to raise the Tollund Man.37 His poem ‘The Tollund Man’ appeared in print that summer (Brandes and Durkan, 302). The poem marks a threshold in Heaney’s writing, being his first published piece about the historical figures that Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob termed ‘the bog people.’ The poem speaks of human beings’ place in ‘deep time,’ and suggests their imbrication in inter-species meshes. Critics have commented at length on parallels between the Tollund Man as bridegroom to the goddess, and the Irish 35  Greg Garrad also commented on the extinction-poems in Wintering Out, in an unpublished PhD thesis (1999, 195). 36  The predicament of being an Irish writer who writes in English is one that is explored at length, notably by Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Heaney quotes in his epigraph to ‘The Wool Trade’ (WO, 27). Heaney tells O’Driscoll that he has reached ‘an un-anxious state’ about this predicament. He says that ‘I still believe that my English is inflected, perhaps better say by Ireland than by Irish, but at this stage that’s neither a cause for swank nor shyness’ (O’Driscoll, 315). 37  Heaney is careful to date his drafts: NLI 49, 493/11, manuscript draft labelled ‘For the Tollund Man’ by Heaney, on lined paper. Heaney dates the draft ‘9–10 March 1970 1–3 a.m’ and notes that he continued work on the poem in Ballydavid, a Gaelic-speaking village in the west of Ireland.

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nationalist as bridegroom to Mother Ireland—Edna Longley, for example, finds the comparison aesthetically strained and ideologically perilous (77, 93). Meanwhile, Heaney’s feminisation and sexualisation of the land is understandably troubling to feminist critics.38 Later critics have revised such readings: David Farrier has delved into the ‘deep time’ of the bog-­ poems (2019, 35–43), and Brendan Corcoran has even called the Tollund Man ‘a consummate face of the Anthropocene’ (116). For the purposes of this analysis, the vastness of Heaney’s timescales and geographical scales is what is most significant. When Heaney wishes to ‘Consecrate the cauldron bog/Our holy ground and pray/Him to make germinate [the murdered Catholics]’ (37) shortly after commenting on the Tollund Man’s location in Aarhus, he creates a complex act of environmental mapping, symbolically linking Irish and Danish bogs. Heaney’s poem quite clearly evokes the sense of being in two places at once—both ‘lost’ and ‘at home’ during the imagined visit to Denmark. ‘Our holy ground’ is rich in ambiguity— the setting evokes ‘our’ Northern Irish Catholic turf, but the poem was in fact written in a small Gaelic-speaking village on the west coast of the Republic of Ireland—a setting that one might expect to inspire poetry about the ‘primal Gaeltacht’ (O’Driscoll, 124). One could interpret ‘Our holy ground’ as the bogs of Europe, ancient or modern. Early Iron Age Denmark was occupied by people whom P. V. Glob describes as ‘Celtic’ (134). Heaney points to common cultural and geographical features that are shared in Northern Europe, without turning away from the violent specificities of history. Peat-bogs occur all over Europe’s most northerly countries, corresponding to low temperatures and high rainfall.39 Bog-­ bodies, too, occur throughout ‘the whole of Europe’ (Glob, 101). There is also an international, political reason why Heaney creates such m ­ etaphors 38  See, for example, Patricia Coughlan, “Bog Queens’: The Representation of Women in the poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney. M.  Allen, ed. Seamus Heaney: New Casebooks. London: Palgrave, 1997. Pp. 185–205. 39  F. Tanneberger, C. Tegetmeyer, S. Busse, A. Barthelmes, S. Shumka, A. Moles Mariné, K.  Jenderedjian, G.M.  Steiner, F.  Essl, J.  Etzold, C.  Mendes, A.  Kozulin, P.  Frankard, Đ. Milanović, A. Ganeva, I. Apostolova, A. Alegro, P. Delipetrou, J. Navrátilová, M. Risager, A. Leivits, A.M. Fosaa, S. Tuominen, F. Muller, T. Bakuradze, M. Sommer, K. Christanis, E. Szurdoki, H. Oskarsson, S.H. Brink, J. Connolly, L. Bragazza, G. Martinelli, O. Aleksāns, A. Priede, D. Sungaila, L. Melovski, T. Belous, D. Saveljić, F. de Vries, A. Moen, W. Dembek, J.  Mateus, J.  Hanganu, A.  Sirin, A.  Markina, M.  Napreenko, P.  Lazarević, V. Šefferová Stanová, P.  Skoberne, P.  Heras Pérez, X.  Pontevedra-Pombal, J.  Lonnstad, M.  Küchler, C. Wüst-Galley, S. Kirca, O. Mykytiuk, R. Lindsay and H. Joosten. ‘The Peatland Map of Europe.’ Mires and Peat 19 (2017): 1–17.

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of environmental connection. The year after Wintering Out was published, an important rapprochement between Denmark and Ireland occurred. The European Union expanded to include both countries, along with Britain, in 1973. The 1970s would see environmental issues becoming a major focus of the EU’s policies.40 Heaney does not suggest a Utopian, pan-European culture that erases differences or overlooks historical bloodshed. However, the ground beneath our feet and the ‘deep time’ of vegetation, rainfall, and peat formation provide symbols of connection in times of division. Heaney, with his awareness of etymology, deploys words with their roots in Celtic or Germanic languages to suggest the hybrid cultural roots of Northern Ireland. The ‘cauldron bog’ is unmistakably Irish, and indeed Heaney writes of this etymology in his introduction to Bog Poems. However, he notes that the word used during his childhood was ‘moss,’ which evokes ‘older strains of Norse’ (N 5; see also Bog Poems, n.p.). Yet Heaney sometimes uses the word ‘fen’ (WO, 36), which has Germanic roots. ‘Fen’ brings with it a marshy whiff of Beowulf’s ancient Scandinavian setting, while ‘the Fens’ are situated in England’s East Anglia. ‘Fen’ is the word of Germanic origin that Glob’s translator uses (Glob trans. Bruce-­ Mitford, 18). Etymologically, lexically, and geographically, then, Heaney’s bog-poems contain traces of environmental cosmopolitan dimensions that evoke a complex sense of hybridity. Indeed, a close analysis of lexical parallels between Heaney’s work and Glob’s shows how the poet developed his images of human and nonhuman, deep time and Earth’s systems. Heaney’s debt to Glob’s book is well known to scholars (e.g. Lidström, 65), and Heaney acknowledges it in Wintering Out (ix). Yet Heaney’s reading of Glob in translation informed his blending of human and nonhuman imagery. Consider the following passage: The evening stillness was only broken, now and again, by the grating love-­ call of the snipe. The dead man, too, deep down in the umber-brown peat, seemed to have come alive. He lay on his damp bed as though asleep, resting on his side, the head inclined a little forward, arms and legs bent. His face wore a gentle expression—the eyes lightly closed, the lips softly pursed, as if in silent prayer. […] 40  European Union. ‘The history of the European Union.’ 13.11.19. Web. 20 Feb 2020. https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/history_en#1970-1979

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The dead man who lay there was two thousand years old. A few hours earlier he had been brought out from the sheltering peat by two men who, their spring sowing completed, had now to think of the cold winter days to come, and were occupied in cutting peat for the tile stove and kitchen range. As they worked, they suddenly saw in the peat-layer a face so fresh that they could only suppose they had stumbled on a recent murder. (Glob trans. Bruce-Mitford, 18)

It is not difficult to see how the image of rural peat-cutters uncovering the ancient man’s body would have appealed to the author of ‘Digging.’ Even the call of the snipe is a detail that appears in both Glob’s fens and the Northern Irish bogland in Wintering Out (in ‘The Backward Look,’ the aforementioned meditation on language-loss and species loss). The Tollund Man was initially thought to be a recent murder victim—hence Heaney’s imaginative link between the bog-bodies and murdered Catholics. Heaney develops a plethora of ecological imagery from Glob’s work, suggesting human beings’ immersion in nature: the ‘winter seeds’ (WO, 36) in the Tollund Man’s stomach are mentioned by Glob in the passage above, and here is the source of the idea that these seeds would ‘germinate, grow and ripen’ under the influence of the fertility goddess Nerthus (163). This idea inspired Heaney’s draft title for his collection: Winter Seeds.41 ‘Honeycombed’ peat-workings occur in both books (Glob, 42, WO, 36). The honeycomb is a visual image of ancient peat excavations; the honeycomb hints at common traits that humans share with bees: gregariousness and co-operation, bog-queens and queen bees. A highly organic image is thus used for a process of fuel extraction that would later come to be viewed more critically. Heaney’s ‘cauldron bog’ (37) suggests mythical Norse and Irish cauldrons of rebirth, but ‘cauldron bog’ is also the technical term used for a round bog in a hollow (Glob, 44). The Tollund Man is unmistakably ‘peat-brown’ (Glob, 36), reminding us that we are part of the centuries-long process of the carbon cycle. Indeed, Glob explains the process of carbon-dating bog-bodies, so Heaney was aware of

41  National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney papers, annotated typescript drafts of poems for inclusion in WINTER SEEDS, MS 49,493 fol 19.

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this link between the carbon that makes up our bodies, and ‘deep time.’42 Diggers working peat into honeycombs, bogs as cauldrons, humans, and plants with carbon in common: Heaney’s metaphors stress human beings’ deep imbrication in earth-systems, a concept that resonates with Haraway’s idea of the ‘Chthulucene’ (2016). The temporal scale of the poem is vast: the Tollund Man is nearly 2000 years old (Glob, 19). Heaney’s integration of the dead into nature’s cycles draws on a long canon of elegies, but the vast timeframes unsettle and transform this elegiac mode. As far back as Milton’s Lycidas, elegists have returned the dead to nature’s processes of decay and regeneration (Ramazani, 99). However, Heaney goes far beyond the timeframe of Lycidas’s progression from wintry ivy to vernal flowers. Heaney suggests that the death of the physical body is not the end of its generative powers but instead marks the continuation of its material agency; this suggests a view of the Anthropocene as a time of what Jane Bennett terms ‘vibrant matter’ (2009) that happens to include human beings, rather than a time of grandiose human terraforming. Considering this poem with reference to Anthropocene theories, Heaney is integrating both the Tollund Man and more recent victims in vast systems of rainfall, vegetation, soil, and ultimately preservation in the very bogland strata their civilisations have disturbed for peat-cutting; not quite a ‘geologic turn,’ but one that suggests the vast temporalities and geographical extent of ‘hyperobjects.’ Indeed, a sequence of geological and prehistoric poems about ‘deep time’ surrounds ‘The Tollund Man’ like the peaty matrix from which he was raised. The poems range from the flintiness of ‘Tinder’ to the bog-poem ‘Nerthus,’ to human alterations to geology in ‘Cairn Maker’ and ‘Navvy.’ ‘The Tollund Man’ and ‘Nerthus’ are notable because of their broad geographical and temporal scope. In a collection where the earth-goddess 42  Glob gives detailed information about the radioactivity, carbon, and how human tissues are permeable to radiation from beyond the Earth: ‘All living things contain a constant quantity of this radio-active carbon as a result of cosmic radiation from outer space, which produces the radio-active carbon dioxide absorbed by all green plants and by sea-water. From these sources it passes into men and animals’ (45). When the Grauballe Man’s antiquity was disputed, Glob detailed the process of carbon dating: ‘The public were looking in particular to a dating from the Carbon-14 laboratory at the National Museum, but this had to wait for various adjustments, as nuclear explosions in 1956 had raised the general level of radioactivity in the atmosphere all over the world’ (61). Heaney’s work is not so preoccupied with technicalities, but this does mean that Glob’s book is prescient of the narrative of the ‘nuclear Anthropocene.’

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Nerthus is represented by ‘an ash-fork staked in peat’ (38), a cairn-maker robs ‘stones’ nests’ (39), and a navvy’s wrists are grafted to ‘shale’ (40), vast arboreal and geological cycles persistently enmesh human and tree, lithic and living. Heaney’s most sustained excavation of the bogland is the powerful sequence of bog-poems at the heart of North (1975). ‘Deep time’ so captivated Heaney at this stage that he declared himself ‘haunted’ by the bog-­ bodies in Glob’s book.43 North represents the culmination of several years of research and redrafting. The collection includes the poems that Heaney published in the limited-edition pamphlet Bog Poems, produced by Ted Hughes’s sister Olwyn and illustrated with Barrie Cooke’s peaty watercolours. However, the archives also contain highly important draft poetry and prose. Heaney went to visit the Danish bog-bodies in October 1973, a trip so significant that he describes it as a ‘pilgrimage.’ The following year, he reviewed Glob’s next book The Mound People (1974) in The Listener. In the same notebook in which he drafts ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces’ from North, Heaney penned his review of Glob that reveals important new insights about his perception of the land’s ‘deep history’: I was so haunted by P.V. Glob’s earlier book, The Bog People, that I ended up in Denmark last October, making a pilgrimage from one bog-stained corpse to another. And when I say pilgrimage, I mean it, because a number of these bog-bodies had been sacrificial victims, and in their preserved condition they had the status of saints of an Iron Age religion. Almost two thousand years ago they had been sunk in bogs sacred to the mother goddess, and the tannic acid in the peat had enbalmed [sic] them. [….] I remember driving through the flat shorelands misty country land country with a dyke and the North Sea on one hand, low fields on the other, and these silent hives of earth lying all about, and experiencing a sense of the oldness and ghostliness of the whole territory. Professor Glob’s great gift as a writer is his ability to communicate this mysterious ancient mysterious atmosphere, its numinous atmosphere.

43  NLI 49,493–33, red grid-squared A4 spiral-bound ENRI notebook labelled ‘Bits of— NORTH Stations Beowulf Revidus’ by Heaney, draft of review of The Mound People by P. V. Glob, page beginning ‘I was so haunted by P.V. Glob’s earlier book,’ p. 32 (digital catalogue numbering).

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This draft of the review yields valuable information about how Heaney develops his depiction of ‘deep time’ in Bog Poems and North (1975). The Anthropocene is ‘marked by haunted time’ (Farrier 2014, 1), and Heaney uses the word ‘haunted’ advisedly here. ‘Oldness,’ ‘ghostliness,’ ‘ancient’: Heaney’s choice of vocabulary echoes the geological traces that human beings leave behind. Heaney continues drawing parallels between Denmark and Ireland: ‘here, as in Denmark, our sense of the past and their sense of the landscape and perhaps our own sense of identity are inextricably woven interwoven.’44 This linkage of Ireland and Denmark not only creates a cosmopolitan sense of ‘interwoven’ cultural significance but finds a shared environmental source in prehistoric ‘deep time.’ In this draft review, Heaney might be at risk of downplaying the violence of Viking incursions into Ireland, and of armed Irish resistance to them. Elsewhere, though, he is acutely aware of the violence of Norse and ancient Irish societies—and paradoxically, he even raises this as a source of common ground between the two cultures. He wrote in a broadcast about North: ‘the Norse, like ourselves, were a compact and violent society, much given to nursing their sense of honour and ancestry to the point of violence.’45 By the time North was published in 1975, Heaney had relocated to rural Wicklow, in the Republic of Ireland. He had met Glob during one of his Danish ‘pilgrimages’ (O’Driscoll, xxiv). The sources of North are, surprisingly, not only Irish and Danish, but occasionally English. Heaney was encouraged by Hughes to write ‘bog poems’ (O’Driscoll, 189). Heaney’s visits to English archaeological sites, as well as Irish and Danish ones, inspired the poems in North (O’Driscoll, 163). A section of ‘Bone Dreams’ about encountering a mole was first published with the title ‘In Devon’ (Brandes and Durkan, 305). This both complicates readings of Heaney’s discourse as the ‘language of the tribe,’ or the language of locality, and highlights how glacial processes affect fauna. (Moles did not return to Ireland after the last Ice Age, because the sea level rose too quickly for

44  NLI 49,493–33, red grid-squared A4 spiral-bound ENRI notebook labelled ‘Bits of— NORTH Stations Beowulf Revidus’ by Heaney, MS, draft review of The Mound People by P. V. Glob, page beginning ‘The mound people were an aristocratic caste’, p. 31 (digital catalogue numbering). 45  NLI MS 49,493/46. MS text of a 1975 broadcast about and poetry reading from North, titled ‘Broadcast of North Poems: 6th June 1975,’ A4 unlined cream paper, page numbered (1) by Heaney.

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them to travel across from what is now mainland Britain.)46 Fragments of ‘North’ and ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces’ are recycled from an earlier poem about Hamlet, destined for a reading to celebrate Shakespeare at Southwark Cathedral.47 North has eclectic links to world cultures: in addition to the Prince of Denmark, there are Baudelaire and Provençal Latin from France; the work of Goya and Federico García Lorca, encountered during Heaney’s travels in Spain; Inuit soapstone; the Greek myth of Hercules and Antaeus. Heaney’s manuscript drafts evoke locations that are more cosmopolitan yet. Heaney considered including Maori customs,48 and he even coins the turn of phrase ‘bog-Latin,’49 a pun on the Old English ‘book-Latin.’ Adding further threads to Heaney’s tapestry of multilingual wordplay, the Danish word ‘bog’ means ‘book.’50 North develops a cosmopolitan environmental lexis, its author’s own form of ‘bog-Latin,’ meshing local with planetary, learned with earthy, ‘deep time’ with the recent past. Heaney’s first foray into ‘deep time’ in North is ‘Belderg.’ This poem combines the lithic with the organic in a way that bridges the geological ‘deep time’ of stone strata with timeframes that the human mind can more easily comprehend and relate to emotionally. The liveliness of prehistoric stone artefacts is celebrated in Heaney’s work: his imagery of the ‘eye’ and ‘marrow’ of a quernstone (N 4–5) brings a sense of the once-vibrant human eyes that saw to shape them and the human bones with which they were interred. The ‘landscape fossilised’ is described in its geological accretions in Heaney’s manuscript drafts51: 46  See also Edna Longley’s view that ‘moles … focus differences between the Irish and English terrains’ (82). 47  NLI Ms 49,493–35 fol 2 TS on A4 paper, titled ‘A FLOURISH FOR THE PRINCE OF DENMARK,’ p. 52 (digital catalogue numbering). Heaney notes that he did not attend the planned reading due to the birth of his daughter. 48  NLI 49 493–36, TS draft of ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces,’ A4 typescript on cream paper beginning ‘magnified on display,’ p. 33 (digital catalogue numbering). 49  National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney archive. MS 49 493–37, folder 1, first TS draft of ‘Bone Dream’ (published as ‘Bone Dreams’) with handwritten amendments, cream A4 paper, p. 9 (digital catalogue numbering). 50  Richard Brown, ‘Bog Poems and Book Poems: Doubleness, Self-Translation and Pun in Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon.’ In Neil Corcoran, ed. The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland. Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1992. 153–67 (p. 153). 51  NLI MS 49,493/39/Fol 3 manuscript draft of what would become ‘Belderg,’ labelled 6 by Heaney, cream A4 paper, p. 140 (digital catalogue numbering).

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This manuscript is important because Heaney’s line, ‘you clear a space forever,’ raises questions about how human beings can shape the geological future. Accretions on the site illustrate soil-forming processes at work and human participation in these processes. Heaney’s evocation of human impacts—copper extraction, bronze-smelting, moving stones—can also lead us to consider how the more invasive processes of modern mining are altering future strata, and indeed, these traces are uncovered by the extractive process of peat-cutting. He originally considered ending the poem with the following, stony stanza: And made grist of the ground; sedimentary, metamorphic, palimpsest, crucible, death and count, pollen count phantom limb and wound.52

The scientific language of geological formations and the ‘crucible’ of bronze-smelting are juxtaposed with the vocabulary of haunting, and the organic connotations of pollen, to develop a ‘palimpsest’ that meshes human and nonhuman elements. The ‘sedimentary’ and ‘metamorphic’ are unmistakably drawn from a geological lexis, yet when Heaney decides to substitute these terms for the more organic images of grist, tree, and vertebrae in the published poem (N 5), he evokes complex webs of human and nonhuman agents. It is significant that he evokes Earth’s systems as vibrantly organic, without focusing on the lithic alone. In Heaney’s poetry, the ground is unmistakably living, shifting, agential. Human claims on territory are reimagined and subverted. ‘Belderg’ is also important to Heaney’s environmental thinking because of a further development, which would occur over a decade after the publication of North. May 1989 saw Heaney contributing a draft of his poem ‘Belderg’ to an auction in aid of the Irish Peatland Conservation Council.53

52  NLI 49 493–36 fol 1. MS draft of ‘Belderg’ beginning ‘There were the burnt plug-­ marks,’ pen on cream unlined A4 paper, p.  28 (digital catalogue numbering). My transcription. 53  National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney manuscripts. MS 49,493/39 Fol 1 Manuscript draft of ‘Bogland’ beginning ‘26 July 1974 (1) Contributed to Auction, May 1989’ Manuscript on cream A4 paper, p. 135 (digital catalogue numbering).

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In 1987, Hughes auctioned ‘The Black Rhino’ to the conservation charity Rhino Rescue (Reddick 2017, 278). Thus, Heaney could be viewed as borrowing Hughes’s method of using poems to raise funds for environmental causes. This could be seen as an important development in Heaney’s view of peatlands. After all, drainage and disturbance are required to uncover the archaeological  remains that Heaney’s poetry celebrates; ‘the processes of exposure and hence discovery (drainage and peat cutting) are also ultimately the agents of destruction’ (O’Connor and Gearey, 383). An important shift in Heaney’s environmental awareness has occurred between his drafting of the manuscript in 1974 and his use of the poem to help repair damaged peatlands in 1989. From peatland as palimpsest, fuel source, and conservation site, to a specific bog-revenant, Heaney’s next ‘bog bodies’ in North are the women in ‘Come to the Bower’ and ‘Bog Queen.’ Rebirth from ‘deep time’ is most vividly conveyed in Heaney’s ‘Bog Queen.’ This woman, whom Heaney calls ‘the Viking queen of Ulster’54 in his typescripts, is a ‘Danish Viking’ unearthed in County Down, Ireland (Glob, 103–4)—the cosmopolitan within the local. Critics including Edna Longley see this poem as drawing on the aisling tradition of representing Ireland as feminine, yet this historical figure’s Scandinavian origins somewhat complicate Longley’s reading of the poem as ‘presenting Ireland as her landscape’ (79). Heaney elaborates on images of a feminised Ireland and the possible hybridity that the Viking queen embodies in his 1975 broadcast of poems from North when he says that Ireland and its rivers are often thought of as feminine, but this Viking queen was also ‘a part of the land.’55 Geological imagery in the poem links her to Ice Age valleys and fossil trees. Heaney’s ‘Baltic amber’ (N 25) is a highly specific detail that places the bog-queen within vast networks of trade and invasion and which originates in fossil forests dating back to the Carboniferous, 350 million years ago. Heaney further develops the ‘deep timeframe’ of this poem by evoking glaciation, the process that led to the formation of raised bogs. The bog-queen describes her sash as a ‘black glacier,’ her breasts as ‘soft moraines,’ and landscapes in both Scandinavia and Ireland as ‘fjords’ (N 26). The word ‘fjord’ shares 54  NLI 49,493–34 fol 1, typescript of ‘Bog Queen’ labelled ‘THE VIKING QUEEN OF ULSTER’, TS on A4 cream paper, p. 31 (digital catalogue numbering). 55  NLI MS 49,493/46. MS text of a 1975 broadcast about and poetry reading from North, titled ‘Broadcast of North Poems: 6th June 1975,’ A4 unlined cream paper, page numbered (2) by Heaney.

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its Norse etymology with ‘Strang and Carling fjords’ (Strangford and Carlingford) in Heaney’s preceding poem ‘Funeral Rites’ (N, 8). Norway’s fjords and Northern Ireland’s ‘fords’ were flooded by rising seas, after being scoured out by the great glaciers that once covered much of the Earth’s surface. Planetary histories and human histories are juxtaposed in the poem. Glacial processes shape not only Ireland’s coastline, but the bogland. The ‘floe of history’ and ‘melting grave’ (N, 34, 36) in ‘Kinship’ evoke the retreating glaciers that have paved the way for bog formation.56 Geology and fossilisation also lend a lithic antiquity to Heaney’s drafts of ‘Kinship.’ Extinct species and felled forests haunt the poem in its draft versions: in manuscript form, ‘Kinship’ contains the line, ‘Bog-fir lies heraldic as elks’ horns.’57 This conflation of tree with elk reinforces Heaney’s evocation of species from ‘deep time’—a long view of the bogland that revisits his awareness of extinction. In draft form, ‘Kinship’ explicitly evokes peat as a product of ancient photosynthesis: Earth-pantry, bone-vault, enbalmer [sic] of sacrifice and broken armies, sucker of sunlight and blood.58

If Heaney’s mention of ‘blood’ might appear nationalistic, the preserved ‘sunlight’ calls up a timeframe from before national politics. Peat is, of course, the captured energy of the sun—an explicit engagement with the terraforming processes of ‘deep time.’ Human and natural histories collide in this draft, which is redolent of the ‘haunted time’ that David Farrier views as characteristic of Anthropocene writing. In a collection so preoccupied with peat and hearth, home turf, and expropriation, one wonders why Heaney did not publish more material 56  National Geographic. ‘Bog.’ 1996–2020. Web. Accessed 26.05.20. https://www. nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/bog/ 57  NLI MS49,439/39 Fol 4 manuscript of ‘Kinship’ on cream unlined A4 paper, headed ‘I love the shaky floors of memory’, p. 165 (digital catalogue numbering). 58  Heaney MS 49,493/39/Fol 3. Draft of ‘Kinship.’ TS labelled ‘11’ by Heaney, beginning ‘Quagmire, swampland, morass’: on A4 cream paper, p. 94 (digital catalogue numbering). Heaney’s original spelling is retained. An early section of ‘Turf Burning’ appears as in a typescript draft as a section of ‘Kinship’: NLI 49,493 fol 1 TS draft beginning ‘I love the quaking floors of memory’, p. 49 (digital catalogue numbering).

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about the composition and combustion of peat. The answer lies in the archives. An important draft poem, ‘Turf Burning,’ reveals Heaney’s preoccupation with peat as both fossil fuel and symbol of Catholic ritual. The poem is not listed in Brandes and Durkan’s bibliography; it remained unpublished in Heaney’s lifetime, and it may be consulted by the public at the National Library of Ireland’s archive. It exists in manuscript and typescript form, suggesting that Heaney was considering it for publication in a magazine and for possible inclusion in North. Variously titled ‘Burning Turf’ and ‘Turf Burning,’ the poem weaves together a rich vocabulary of lichen and liturgy, nature and ritual. A typescript draft which Heaney annotates heavily by hand begins with the poet giving the peat an anthropomorphic voice. The poem thus echoes the antiquity of Old English riddles, which often feature speaking objects. He uses the phrases ‘undead’ and ‘undying matter,’ richly evocative of the carbon cycle. His description of peat as the ‘de profundis’ (‘out of the depths’) of reeds and lichens suggests not only Oscar Wilde’s celebrated prison letter, but matter rising from deep time and the deep earth. The draft is redolent of Bennett’s concept of ‘vibrant matter’—the physical and chemical dynamism of material things, an important concept for ecocriticism. It is significant that Heaney evokes reeds and lichens: if Stacy Alaimo has critiqued the Anthropocene for being excessively focused on the lithic, this poem is a stark reminder of the living origins of fossil fuels. The draft continues with the ancient lexis of Latin hymns and the Old Testament tabernacle, adding further accretions of history to this poetic examination of ‘deep time.’ Heaney’s epigraph to the draft poem is drawn from the thirteenth-century hymn ‘Dies Irae:’ ‘Solvet saeclum in favilla’ means ‘the generation will be dissolved to ash.’ ‘Saecula,’ the Classical plural that Heaney uses, can mean ‘generations’ but also ‘ages,’ a translation that chimes with the ‘centuries’ of deep time that Heaney mentions later in the draft. Heaney later develops the poem in a typescript that uses neat, hymnodic quatrains. The vocabulary of the typescript—the ‘choir’ of sparks, the ‘pyre’ of the peat, and the Christlike ‘mystical body’ which this draft describes as being sacrificed—evokes the religious atmosphere of censer and chancel.59 Yet the earlier typescript I mention, with handwritten amendments, is more ambitious in scope, as it ranges between ‘deep time’ and the religious calendar, between organic and inorganic, with the rural 59  NLI 49,493–34 fol 2. Typescript drafts of ‘TURF BURNING’ on cream A4 paper, one with manuscript amendments, pp. 58, 59 (digital catalogue numbering).

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hearth functioning as a synecdoche for the Catholic North. The earlier draft of ‘Turf Burning’ that I mention here evokes the materiality of peat and the carbon cycle more successfully than many of the poems published in North. It does not carry the emotional weight of poems such as ‘Funeral Rites,’ and its persistently religious tenor would have given ammunition to critics who accused Heaney of univocal sectarian bias—this might be why he omitted it from his published collection. Heaney’s evocation of censer, hearth, and pyre does not appear to seek to convey an environmental message. Yet this is his most extensive engagement with peat as a fuel, and it has important environmental implications. When we read ‘Turf Burning’ in our time of climate change, the juxtaposition of a fossil fuel with the Dies irae’s vision of an age of fire becomes urgently relevant. Contemporary environmental poets rework the Dies irae as a fiery climate apocalypse— witness the conflagrations in the ‘Dies Irae’ section of Dom Bury’s Rite of Passage (2021, 31–40). In our time, we could reread ‘Turf Burning’ as an elegy for the ‘Pyrocene.’ If the temporal ambit of ‘Turf Burning’ is vast, the poems that Heaney published in North perform acts of ‘scale variance’ that add optical breadth to the collection’s localities and lexis. Heaney said in his draft text for a 1975 radio broadcast that his book emerged from ‘a concern with the north; and or more precisely, a concern to unite two different norths.’60 The collection is structured so that vast, even planetary, images occur at the opening and closing movements of the book. North engages with a broad geographical ambit, and an optic wide enough to take in Earth’s vast systems opens out in the poems that begin and end the book’s two main poetic sections. After two dedicatory poems, Heaney’s ‘Antaeus’ opens ‘Part I’ of the collection with a broad panorama of ‘earth’s long contour.’ The mythical Greek giant Antaeus, who derived his phenomenal strength from his mother Earth, suggests a dual lens of territory and planetarity, the time of Classical antiquity clashing with the date of composition that Heaney appends to the poem. Not only Antaeus, but Atlas, broaden the scalar ambit of the poem: the world-supporting Titan, Atlas, suggests the vastness contained within the pages of an atlas (N 3). Mythical beings believed to support the Earth are mentioned again near the beginning of this section, with the Norse ‘world-tree of balanced stones’ (5) adding beliefs from Viking Dublin to the book’s moments of eclectic 60  NLI MS 49,493/46. MS text of a 1975 broadcast, titled ‘Broadcast of North Poems: 6th June 1975,’ A4 unlined cream paper, page numbered (1) by Heaney.

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environmental cosmopolitanism. In the final poem ‘Exposure,’ the scalar remit of North broadens dramatically as the poem takes wing. (Heaney employed a similarly dramatic shift at the end of Wintering Out, where ‘Westering’ evokes a map of the moon seen in California.) The scene in ‘Exposure’ is ‘December in Wicklow,’ but Heaney juxtaposes the close-up nature-­images of ‘haws and rose-hips’ with a vast, even inter-planetary, optic (67). The ‘falling star,’ ‘meteorite,’ and ‘comet’s pulsing rose’ (67) are presented as extra-terrestrial portents that evoke issues beyond Heaney’s home turf and the turf wars of sectarian conflict.

Field Work in the Oilfield? Petroculture, Fossil Fuels, Deep Time, and the ‘Capitalocene’ Driving, aviation, mechanised farming, shipping, military vehicles, explosives, extractive industries, climate change. A single, volatile substance unites all these products of fossil fuel capitalism. Heaney is usually remembered as a poet of peat-culture, but this section shows how he engages with petroculture: the culture of oil. In a draft of one of his verse-letters written during the Troubles, contemporaneous with the drafts of Wintering Out, Heaney engages with the power of oil to fuel violence: a ‘crude wind’ that ‘would go up in a petrol bomb.’61 In Field Work (1979), Heaney’s poems strike oil. While Heaney’s poetry has mentioned petroleum products previously, Field Work contains his first exploration of their source in the oilfield. Oil is an Anthropocene issue par excellence: everyday substances such as plastic and petrol link consumers to the lithic past, but the environmental impacts of these products will last for thousands of years. The role of oil in human-caused environmental damage is so extensive that Jill Schneiderman cites ‘Petrolcene’ as an alternative name for the Anthropocene (172). Fossil fuels provided the abundant energy required for the ‘Great Acceleration’ (Szeman, 286). For many theorists of petroculture, the oil industry is all-pervasive. Imre Szeman views oil as ‘hegemonic’ (283), while for LeMenager, it is ‘habitus for modern humans’ (29). Samuel Solnick puts it pithily: oil is in so many consumer products that ‘The personal is not just political, it’s petroleum’ (2021, 229). The act of reading printed text is currently dependent on oil, which is used for 61  NLI MS49,493/12, Folder 3, manuscript poem titled ‘To Kit,’ cream unlined A4 paper, archived with the drafts of Wintering Out, p. 116 (digital catalogue numbering).

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transporting trees to the paper factory, manufacturing ink for the pages, and distributing books to readers. Since Graeme Macdonald has wondered if every modern novel could be considered as an oil-novel (2012, 7), a similar analytical move could be made to examine the way Heaney’s poetry reflects the oil economy as an enveloping milieu. One could even look back on Heaney’s career and read ‘Digging’ as an example of petroculture: plastic pens and commercial ink are both usually derived from oil. The 1970s witnessed the development of Ireland’s offshore fossil hydrocarbon reserves, specifically natural gas.62 Meanwhile, the ‘oil shock’ of 1973 brought this explosive commodity to the forefront of many authors’ minds, inspiring fiction by writers such as Italo Calvino.63 Heaney is hardly as self-consciously preoccupied with oil as poets engaging with the Niger Delta or the Gulf of Mexico.64 Yet the industries, processes, and violence that Heaney mentions are embedded in the oil economy, in ways that are inevitable for many authors of the late twentieth century. Oil seeps through Heaney’s work. Farrier discusses Heaney’s engagement with driving and the products of the petroleum industry (44–6), yet an even wider network of extractive industries, oil-enabled violence, and climate change is at work here. If Bate saw driving as separating Heaney from nature (2000, 203), Anthropocene theories suggest that driving illustrates the writer’s participation in a vast, sprawling network of agents, from petroleum reserves and multinational corporations, to fossil algae and carbon dioxide molecules. Heaney begins by linking oil to environmental violence, corporate greed, and certain specific forms of sectarian violence. Later in his career, his linkage of oil to climate change acquires a persistent urgency. ‘Triptych’ from Field Work contains Heaney’s most explicit, early critique of the 62   Department for Communications, Climate Action & Environment. ‘Oil & Gas: Exploration and Production.’ 2020. Web. Accessed 20 Feb 2020. https://www.dccae.gov. ie/en-ie/natural-resources/topics/Oil-Gas-Exploration-Production/Pages/home.aspx 63  Graeme Macdonald. ‘Research Note: The Resources of Fiction.’ Reviews in Cultural Theory 4. 2 (2013): 1–24. 64  For oil-poetry from North America, see ‘Brent Crude’ and ‘Dynamic Positioning’ in Juliana Spahr’s That Winter the Wolf Came. Oakland: Commune, 2015. See also Jonathan Skinner’s ‘Auger’ from Poets for Living Waters’ 20 Apr 2011. Web. 26 May 2020. https:// poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/from-auger-by-jonathan-skinner/. For an ecocritical analysis of Nigerian oil-poetry by Ogaga Ifowodo and Tanure Ojaide, see Yvonne Reddick, ‘Palm oil and crude oil: environmental damage, resource conflict and literary strategies in the Niger Delta.’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 26.3 (Summer 2019): 688–721.

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petroleum industry. This trio of poems serves as a ‘recital of elegies’ for recent victims of violence (FW, 14), but its middle section sets this violence against the backdrop of the petroleum industry’s enabling of military and environmental violence. Heaney’s mention of the petroleum industry here resonates with ideas about the ‘deep time’ of the geological past, the ‘Capitalocene,’ and the ‘deep time’ of environmental futures: My people think money And talk weather. Oil-rigs lull their future On single acquisitive stems. Silence Has shoaled into the trawlers’ echo-sounders. The ground we kept our ear to for so long Is flayed or calloused, and its entrails Tented by an impious augury. (FW, 13)

Here, Heaney condenses the ‘deep time’ of fossil fuel formation, and the much shorter timeframes of petroleum profiteering, into two lines. His decision to juxtapose the ‘acquisitive’ oil-rigs with the trawler boat points to two forms of drastic modification to the sediments and structures of the seabed, all in the name of capitalist progress. Sub-surface structures are likely to be preserved in future strata (interview with Jan Zalasiewicz in Bradshaw, Anthropocene). The idea of endless expansion that ‘lulls’ people’s future anticipates Moore’s theories of the ‘Capitalocene.’ The word ‘augury’ suggests an omen of future environmental destruction, linking to the title of Heaney’s earlier poem ‘Augury’ and to the word ‘auger’; this oil-drilling pun is also employed by Jonathan Skinner, in his poem ‘Auger’ (see footnote 64). The specific petroleum industry processes that Heaney targets in this poem fill an important conceptual gap. It is easy to overlook the extraction of oil, even if one is alert to its uses and effects. Imre Szeman has pointed out that ‘oil is a resource whose production is almost entirely dissociated from its consumption’ (283): Heaney’s poem bridges this dissociation by linking drilling rig to trawler fuel and petrol bomb. By placing the ‘Oil-­ rigs’ a few lines away from an ‘explosion’ that shakes a ‘well,’ Heaney introduces a double meaning that plays on both water wells and oil wells. (He will make this link yet clearer in The Spirit Level, where an earthy sequence about pottery refers to ‘Burning wells’—the Kuwaiti wellheads and oil-trenches that burned during the First Gulf War (SL, 3).) The

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‘explosions’ Heaney mentions elsewhere in the poem evoke the petrol bombs of the Troubles, including a devastating IRA restaurant bombing the year before Field Work was published.65 Even the ‘gelignite’ that features as the IRA’s favoured explosive in North (52) had oil-derived glycerol among its ingredients.66 British military power is presented as oil-powered in the last section of Heaney’s ‘Triptych.’ The third section of the poem describes ‘the thick rotations/Of an army helicopter patrolling.’67 Drilling rig, trawler, petrol bomb, patrol helicopter, and damage to the earth itself are caught in a vast web of oil-related violence. In ‘Glanmore Sonnets,’ one might expect Heaney’s poetry to swap political turmoil and petro-politics for ‘hedgebacks and hayfields’ (O’Driscoll, 151). However, even in this hopeful, rural sonnet-sequence about Heaney’s move to a tranquil corner of the Republic of Ireland, the weather is unusual—and a root cause is oil: Glanmore Sonnets FOR ANN SADDLEMYER our heartiest welcome     I Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground. The mildest February for twenty years Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors. Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe. Now the good life could be to cross a field And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled. Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense And I am quickened with a redolence. (33)

This poem of regeneration and ‘the good life’ nevertheless begins and ends with unseasonable events. ‘The mildest February for twenty years’ 65  For the La Mon restaurant petrol bomb, see BBC On This Day archive. ‘Belfast bomb suspects rounded up.’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/18/ newsid_2550000/2550869.stm 66  Marco Pagliaro. Glycerol: The Renewable Platform Chemical. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2017. 1–21. 67  Heaney discusses this 1972 Civil Rights march at Newry with O’Driscoll (119–20).

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precedes a silence (‘no sound’) that is ‘Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors’ (33). The mild spring ties in thematically with the freshness of the ‘earth new from the lathe’ and the speaker’s ‘quickened’ awareness of nature—but an early spring with ‘no sound’ strikes an unsettling note in this otherwise idyllic poem. Any poet evoking a silent spring cannot fail to raise echoes of Rachel Carson’s warnings about the dangers of pesticides. Chemical pesticides are derived from petrochemicals, and their consequences are far-reaching: ‘Many meadow flowers, such as orchids and cowslips, cannot survive intensive farming techniques, including the use of fertilisers and pesticides,’ one reads in the nature conservation poster to which Heaney contributed a poem from Field Work.68 The ‘gargling tractors’ contrast with the traditional rural labour that one sees in Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist: cutting peat by hand in ‘Digging,’ ploughing with a horse-plough in ‘Follower.’ Moreover, on a formal level, this poem does not run smoothly. The iambic metre stumbles and becomes irregular on ‘Vulnerable’; the feet invert to halting trochees in ‘distant gargling tractors.’ An oil-fuelled internal combustion engine trips up the metre and alters the rhyme scheme of what would otherwise be a regular Shakespearean sonnet. Here, Heaney suggests the link between mechanised agriculture and human-caused environmental change—the ‘gargling’ inevitably suggesting the liquidity of petrol and engine-oil. Two years before Heaney published Field Work, Ted Hughes and his co-editors Ross and Weissbort had published a colleague’s article suggesting that climate change was caused by humans.69 Even if it was too early for Heaney to understand the full magnitude of climate change, an unnaturally mild February and ‘freakish Easter snows’ in the final line of the poem (33, not quoted above) read as uncanny auguries when one examines them in our own age of accelerating climate change. Climate Change, Place, and Planet The Anthropocene suggests a bafflingly complex ‘mesh’ of nonhuman and human agents, where everything is touched by the all-pervasive influence of climate change. District and Circle is Heaney’s most sustained 68  Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation poster. ‘Meadowlands,’ 1991. Featuring two stanzas from Heaney’s ‘Field Work’ and T. P. Flanagan’s ‘A Summer Meadow.’ 69  Walter C. Patterson. ‘Inadvertent Climate Modification: Report of the Study of Man’s Impact on Climate’. Review. Your Environment 3.1 (Spring 1972): 42–3.

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consideration of this major threat, and of related ecological issues. The book raises the questions: what is the environmental cost of human actions? What does climate change threaten to do to humans, flora, fauna—and the Earth itself? District and Circle is Heaney’s most environmentally aware collection. He does revisit the familiar ground of the bogland, but with a transformed understanding of the threats that menace it, since he had supported multiple projects to protect peatlands. His revisions of some of his earlier subject matter provoked wry remarks by reviewers, including ‘The bog man cometh (again).’70 Nevertheless, reviewers picked up on the book’s responses to urgent environmental issues, more rapidly than ecocritics initially did. Andrew Motion, Hughes’s successor as the UK’s Laureate, spotted that Heaney’s ‘ “adoring” of the natural world was intensified by worry about the planet.’71 There is clear evidence that Heaney is breaking new ground as well as revisiting old haunts. District and Circle is Heaney’s most extensive deployment of prose poetry; this form lends a conversational, essayistic feel to sequences such as ‘Found Prose.’ Thematic developments are also abundant. Among the reassuring poems about rural life, Heaney develops important new work with a whiff of wildfire smoke, a taint of toxicity. ‘Rilke: After the Fire’ with its ‘Scorched linden trees’ (DC, 16) foreshadows Heaney’s engagement with melting glaciers in the later poem ‘Höfn.’ This is not the first time that his poetry has read as an augury of the ‘Pyrocene,’ a vision of the planet scorched by the fires of climate change. The ‘blasted weeping rock-walls’ of the London Underground (DC, 19) suggest damage done to the very strata beneath our feet, by excavation or the Blitz. This is prescient of geologist Jan Zalasiewicz’s view that underground structures are the ones most likely to be preserved in the rock strata of the future (Bradshaw), but it also has more mythical resonances for authors engaging with the Anthropocene. Heaney’s use of the journey ‘underground, into the earth, into the dark’ (O’Driscoll, 411), the Classical katabasis, is a device redolent of the ‘haunted time’ of Anthropocene culture. Journeying to the underworld is

70  Stephen Knight. ‘District and Circle by Seamus Heaney: The bog man cometh (again).’ Independent, 9 Apr 2006. Web. 2nd Apr 2020. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­ entertainment/books/reviews/district-and-circle-by-seamus-heaney-6104219.html 71  Andrew Motion. ‘Digging Deep.’ The Guardian, 1 Apr 2006. Web. 2 Apr 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/apr/01/poetry.seamusheaney1

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a point of departure for more recent authors such as Robert Macfarlane to explore the Anthropocene (2019, 16–17, 177). When Heaney groups a series of poems about climate change and pollution together, from ‘In Iowa’ to ‘Moyulla,’ he produces a very specific effect. He could have opted to space the poems out, interspersing them with more meditative environmental poems, such as the gently elegiac ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore.’ His decision to present his poems about climate change and pollution together intensifies the tone of ‘environmental lament’ (O’Driscoll, 411) that he creates. Poem after poem in this sequence mourns environmental destruction, redoubling the ‘green’ undertones of this ecopoetic sequence. Heaney’s speaker frequently appears behind the wheel of his car. This trope spans Heaney’s career, from ‘The Tollund Man’ in Wintering Out to ‘Route 110’ in Human Chain. Heaney revises and changes his presentation of motorised vehicles as his awareness of climate change develops. His use of the trope of driving, and its imbrication in geological and climate-­ changing processes, is analysed by Farrier (2019, 44–6). Moreover, the poet is highly cognisant of his own participation in the damaging fossil fuel economy—‘I go on driving my car, I’m afraid, and flying in the aeroplanes’ (O’Driscoll, 411). Vehicles, especially farm vehicles, are used again to link fieldwork to the oilfield. If Heaney’s first Glanmore sonnet had hinted at the connection between a ‘gargling’ tractor and an unnaturally mild spring, the later sonnet ‘In Iowa’ links a farm vehicle and petroleum products to a disturbing climate change epiphany. The poem’s speaker appears with ‘sleet-glit pelting hard against the windscreen.’ Heaney’s use of the word ‘glit,’ an archaic past participle of ‘glide’ (OED), is chosen carefully for what it connotes. The oddness of the word gives the reader pause, as it looks so much like ‘guilt.’ That hint of culpability suggests that the speaker has some role to play in the changing climate that has ‘wilted corn stalks,’ an image of agriculture permanently altered by mechanisation and climate change. If early poems such as ‘Follower’ (DN, 12) had placed Heaney’s speaker in a reassuring, local tradition of agricultural labour, this poem is evidence of a profound shift in people’s relationship with the earth. When Heaney writes that snow ‘took the shine off oil in the black-­ toothed gears’ of the Iowa mowing machine, the ‘shine’ is figurative as well as literal—the ‘acquisitive’ oil economy has lost its lustre. The owner

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of mechanised farm machinery72 and the speaker at the wheel of his car are reluctant participants in a vast, global web of petroleum profits and climate crisis, and the consequences are grave. The speaker’s understanding of climate change comes as a sudden, quasi-religious revelation—‘the veil in tatters’ evokes Matthew 27:51, a rupture in human understanding that Heaney presents to be as significant as the death of Christ. In keeping with Clark’s idea that the concept of the Anthropocene is a threshold in human thinking, Heaney presents this realisation as fundamental enough to shake the speaker’s belief in a benevolent god. The lines, ‘In the slush and rush and hiss/Not of parted but as of rising waters’ (52), end the poem with a subversion of the parted Red Sea in Exodus, replaced by the eerie sound of melting icecaps. Slush, rush, hiss: Heaney’s onomatopoeia forces his reader to hear the coming flood in the mind’s ear. This lends immediacy to the vast timescales of climate change: a threat too often considered as a menace for the far future, but which was already wreaking havoc with global weather-patterns when Heaney wrote this poem. In the last chapter, we saw how looking down at Greenland’s glaciers inspired Hughes to write of human and animal suffering, in the context of the hole in the ozone layer. When Heaney looks down on an Icelandic glacier, his response is rather different. Here are the first four lines of his poem ‘Höfn’:         Höfn The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt. What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt Comes wallowing across the delta flats And miles-deep shag-ice makes its move? (DC, 53)

While Hughes evoked a splitting of the self in ‘The Gulkana’ and used the lyric ‘I’ to contemplate emotions in ‘Glimpse,’ Heaney’s choice of pronoun is initially ‘we.’73 The melting is quite clearly a predicament that affects all of humanity. The poem’s perspective narrows to the viewpoint of a speaker whose fear inherits elements of Romantic sublimity,74 but 72  The mowing machine is conspicuous because the poem is set ‘among the Mennonites,’ whose most conservative members eschew mechanised farm equipment. 73  Heaney comments on his shift in focus from introspective lyric ‘I’ to collective ‘we’ in other poems, in his discussion with O’Driscoll (89). 74  For Edmund Burke’s treatise on how the ‘terrible’ inspires a sense of sublimity, see A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).

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Heaney also adds far more contemporary dimensions. Heaney’s daughter Catherine Heaney has said that ‘The late poem ‘Höfn’ is his clearest expression of anxiety about environmental issues.’75 Flying over an Icelandic glacier, the speaker in Heaney’s poem feels torn between admiring the glacier’s elemental power and recognising its vulnerability; between the lyric impulse of individual epiphany and a recognition of collective risk and responsibility. As Heaney develops the poem in manuscript and word-­ processed drafts, he alters pronouns, tenses, and imagery to create a sense of shared, ongoing implication in this major issue. In a typescript with manuscript amendments (including some jottings about Heaney’s busy schedule), he changes the tense of ‘asked’ to ‘ask,’ framing climate change as an ongoing and perennial dilemma. The vocabulary of ‘meltdown, hellfire and firepower’ in this draft evokes the language of nuclear accidents, damnation, and warfare.76 As Heaney develops the poem, these are removed in order to emphasise the language of cold, elemental forces. In a manuscript draft dated ‘June 6 2004,’ Heaney addresses a reader or an interlocutor directly: ‘you.’ Gone is the material suggesting nuclear technology and firearms, as such technologies are less implicated in climate change than the fossil fuel infrastructure that currently underpins so much of modern life—including the speaker’s plane flight over the glacier. The word ‘pre-human’ in this draft marks the manuscript out as an engagement with the ‘deep time’ of climatic and glaciological processes. Such an engagement with ‘haunted time’ (Farrier 2014, 1) is a characteristic of the culture of the Anthropocene, and of course a pioneering proposal for the Anthropocene linked it to anthropogenic climate change (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Yet the final lines in manuscript—‘Please sir, please sir, don’t/Use the word evil to me’—77 conclude the draft with a mock-Dickensian address to an unidentified character, which does not quite match the powerful, steadfast lyric ‘defiance’ of Heaney’s published environmental work. (When O’Driscoll asked him about whether poetry could change hearts and minds on environmental issues, Heaney replied, ‘defiance is actually part of the lyric job’ (406).) The version of the poem that Heaney published in his collection ends with

75  Email from Catherine Heaney at the Seamus Heaney Estate to Yvonne Reddick. 16.02.2022. 76  NLI MS 49,493/126 fol 1. Seamus Heaney. ‘Höfn’—TS with MS amendments p. 29. 77  NLI MS 49,493/126 fol 1. Seamus Heaney. ‘Höfn’—TS with MS amendments, MS draft p. 31.

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a hard-hitting final line that has both greater concision and richer aesthetic resonance: ‘And every warm, mouthwatering word of mouth’ (2006, 53). Moreover, Heaney’s personification and ‘animalisation’ of the glacier also suggest its vulnerability. The line of compound nouns that he keeps in these two drafts, and retains in the collected version, is redolent of the Norse-style kennings that he perfected in North78: ‘Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff.’ Heaney selects the term ‘Undead’ to suggest an uncanny, liminal state. Considered from a geological and climatic standpoint, the glacier’s days are indeed numbered. Heaney’s metaphors of milt and grist, pelt and scruff, suggest parts of fish, grain, and animals, some of them processed by humans—an intricate mesh of human and nonhuman agents that evokes people’s participation in Earth’s systems. However, this participation is presented as ethically compromised. Heaney’s mention of a glacial ‘tongue’ is drawn from the same geographical lexicon as his measure of deep time, the ‘aeon’ (one thousand million years, OED). Going back one ‘aeon’ takes us back to long before the origins of climate change in human actions; to long before the last ice age, even. Heaney’s use of the term ‘aeon’ is his most dizzying engagement with ‘deep time,’ contrasting the vast timeframes of environmental history with the comparative briefness of human perspectives. The tongue is a metaphor for the act of speaking and reciting poetry, as it is so often in Heaney’s work,79 and also for the efficacy (or failure) of words. However, the poem suggests further environmental readings. The last line connects ‘all that warm, mouth-­ watering word of mouth’ (53) to the melting of the ice, explicitly linking warming air to human breath. In an interview with O’Driscoll, Heaney discussed the shock of learning that the glacier he had just flown over was 78  These are ‘periphrastic expressions used instead of the simple name of a thing, characteristic of Old Teutonic, and esp. Old Norse, poetry’ (OED). See, for example, Heaney’s use of kennings to evoke the bog: ‘Earth-pantry, bone-vault,/sun-bank’ (North, 34). 79  Earlier in Heaney’s work, the image of the tongue has been a multifaceted and recurrent symbol of language, Irishness, and utterance. In Wintering Out (1972), words ‘Fading, in the gallery of the tongue,’ with a quotation from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as its epigraph, elaborate on Joyce’s thought that English wielded by an Englishman is different from English used by the Irish subject (WO, 27). In ‘The Government of the Tongue’ (1986), Heaney writes that poetry has the power to suggest alternative forms of thought but is not subservient to political agendas. ‘[N]o lyric has ever stopped a tank,’ but the power of poetry is ‘to hold in a single thought reality and justice’ (FK, 189–90). For Heaney’s ‘On His Work in the English Tongue,’ an elegy for Hughes, and a section from Beowulf that speaks volumes about how Heaney employs and interprets work in the ‘English tongue,’ see Electric Light 2001 61–63.

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melting: ‘As a ‘child of earth,’ I’ve rarely felt more exposed’ (411). In the collected poem, three-line stanzas are followed by a single, concluding line, as if those three glacial tongues were shrinking in the space it takes us to read the poem. As David Wheatley has suggested, ‘[l]ike the glacier, the poem melts away before our eyes’ (36). Heaney’s last line raises questions about the effectiveness of words—whether written or spoken—when faced with such a vast issue. One of the most significant short environmental poems in District and Circle is ‘On the Spot,’ which follows ‘Höfn.’ It is important not only for its backward glances at the canon, but for the way it evidences the scale-­ shifting that has come to preoccupy cultural works engaging with the Anthropocene. The poem was written in response to a commission by two younger poets with environmental preoccupations: John Burnside and Maurice O’Riordan. Forty years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s classic, O’Riordan and Burnside published this poem in Wild Reckoning: An Anthology Provoked by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (2004). The project arose from a collaboration between poets and environmental scientists. The book came as close to achieving a political impact as can be expected of a volume of verse: Wild Reckoning was selected on the radio programme Desert Island Discs by the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King.80 Heaney’s shapely, elegiac sonnet begins with the speaker encountering a nest of eggs—a familiar enough trope from his earlier poems about rural life. However, it quickly becomes clear that something is awry. A sudden shift in ideas recalls Clark’s argument that the Anthropocene is a threshold in human beings’ understanding of their environmental impacts: A cold clutch, a whole nestful, all but hidden In last year’s autumn leaf-mould, and I knew By the mattness and the stillness of them, rotten Making death sweat of a morning dew.

What is so significant about this poem is that it is not only an ‘environmental lament’ for the recent loss of animal lives; it grieves for environmental futures. The egg, the quintessential image of fertility and springtime regeneration, was an important trope in Silent Spring, as the pesticide 80  Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. 13 Apr 2018. Web. 3 Apr 2020. https://gulbenkian. pt/uk-branch/publication/wild-reckoning/

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DDT can cause the shells of birds’ eggs to thin. Moreover, the placement of the poem between ‘Höfn’ and ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime,’ which are preoccupied with environmental pasts, throws into relief its preoccupation with the impacts of climate change on the future. After the ‘undead’ glacier, Heaney’s image of the ‘death sweat’ reinforces his emphasis on time going awry, with the idea of eggs killed before their time becoming a powerful metaphor for the end times. The scalar lens of the poem widens considerably at the end: proof positive Of what conspired on the spot to addle Matter in its planetary standoff. (54)

If Wordsworth’s ‘spot of time’ is the foundation for Bate’s argument for the importance of the local, Heaney’s poem is aware that a focus on the ‘spot’ is no longer adequate. It would be naïve for a poet of his era to lament the death of the eggs without considering the ‘planetary’ implications of climate change and its impacts on biodiversity. The way he deploys prepositions in this poem creates hard-hitting effects: the title begins with ‘on’ and the last line ends with ‘off,’ a lexical device that suggests life being abruptly extinguished.81 Heaney begins with the image of the egg to allow his reader to glimpse a planetary perspective, but it is a glimpse that is subtle and aesthetically contained. If Heaney had begun his poem with a vast image, such as a burning rainforest or a contaminated ocean, he would have risked overwhelming the reader82; the sudden widening of the poem’s scalar ambit is a tactic that he has deployed successfully in earlier poems. Yet Heaney’s poem is important for the ethical consideration it accords to other species. If his earlier metaphors for global environmental futures had often been tinged with anthropocentrism, the symbolic resonance of egg and Earth calls up the spectre of extinction, a ‘haunted time’ that is an augury of a spring without birdsong. 81  For this insight about prepositions, I am indebted to John McAuliffe’s discussion of this poem at the ‘Planting Poems: Seamus Heaney’s Ecopoetry’ workshop for the British Academy at the Rylands Library on 13 November 2021. 82  Other ecopoets embrace just such disorienting perspectives. Juliana Spahr’s sequence ‘Unnamed Dragonfly Species’ intercuts a prose-like text about the melting of ice caps with a litany of extinct or endangered animal names (Well Then There Now, Jaffrey: Black Sparrow 2011, 75–93). Heaney’s work did not develop in such an experimental vein, and his poetry employs relatively traditional forms, such as the pentameter and the sonnet.

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Heaney follows this meditation on fragile eggs and our fragile planet’s future, with a spectral presence from deep time. In his last collected bog-­ poem, ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ from District and Circle, Heaney evokes an array of interlinked environmental problems: climate change, the fossil fuel economy, acid rain, changes to the biosphere—and there is a degree of ambivalence about disturbing bogland environments for peat extraction. Published six years after the term ‘Anthropocene’ had appeared in Crutzen and Stoermer’s landmark article, this poem articulates the widespread changes to Earth’s systems wrought by human actions. ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ is one of the most important poems in District and Circle. Not only is it the longest sequence in the collection, but it attracts readerly attention by revisiting the boglands that are the subject of some of Heaney’s most distinctive work of the 1970s, and which he has revisited subsequently in work such as the cease-fire poem ‘Tollund’ (1994). Heaney originally envisaged ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ as part of a single, long poem that included the title-sequence ‘District and Circle’ (Corcoran, 219), yet his setting of it as a standalone sequence highlights it as a bog-poem. ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ has a great deal to say about human history, resurrection, mortality, contemporary modulations of the sonnet, and indeed about Heaney’s father, whom the Tollund Man resembles in the final sonnet—but for the purposes of this analysis, my main focus is how the poem weaves in considerations of environmental change and damage. The poem is redolent of ‘deep time,’ of the ‘haunted time’ that is a hallmark of Anthropocene culture. Here, the Tollund Man speaks in regular, half-rhymed sonnets, lending this voice from prehistory a Shakespearean gravitas. He is one of the few bog-people to whom Heaney gives a voice. The poem creates further temporal compression between the Iron Age and the present age: ‘Lapping myself in time’ (55). Corcoran has interpreted this character as ‘a figure of literal awakening to ecological threat’ (222). Indeed, Heaney imagines the Tollund Man rising from his display case in response to threats that this poem frames as environmental: I reawoke to revel in the spirit They strengthened when they chose to put me down For their own good. And to a sixth-sensed threat: Panicked snipe offshooting into twilight, Then going awry, larks quietened in the sun, Clear alteration in the bog-pooled rain. (55)

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The Tollund Man was sacrificed in the belief that he ‘germinated into spring,’ as Heaney puts it (Heaney and Cole, n.p.). Heaney’s revision of this idea suggests that contemporary society lacks reverence for the earth. The ‘Panicked snipe’ no longer symbolise the displaced Irish language, as they had in Heaney’s earlier poem ‘A Backward Look,’ but go ‘awry’ in response to ecological threats. Heaney’s trope of the lark quietening suggests further issues—habitat loss, the pesticides that troubled Rachel Carson, or mechanised agriculture that leaves no room for ground-nesting birds. Heaney’s line ‘Clear alteration in the bog-pooled rain,’ with the richly significative wordplay on ‘clear,’ suggests multiple environmental interpretations. Acid rain causes watercourses to become lifeless—abnormally ‘clear’—and of course this alteration is ‘clear’ to an observer. Altered rain also speaks of the shifting weather-patterns associated with climate change. Heaney suggests the link between climate change and peat burning in this poem. In a similar vein to the earlier draft ‘Turf Burning,’ he focuses closely on the materiality of peat, its appearance, formation, and combustion: Scone of peat, composite bog-dough They trampled like a muddy vintage, then Slabbed and spread and turned to dry in sun— Though never kindling-dry the whole way through— A dead-weight, slow-burn lukewarmth in the flue, Ashless, flameless, its very smoke a sullen Waft of swamp-breath. (55)

Heaney’s distinctive poetic sound-effects are used to their full potential here: as in ‘Digging,’ one can almost hear the squelch and slap of the boggy turf being excavated in the slurping ‘s’-sounds of ‘scone,’ ‘slabbed,’ ‘spread,’ ‘slow,’ ‘sullen,’ and ‘swamp.’ Yet, if ‘Turf Burning’ suggested a religious burnt offering, the peat smoke is described as ‘swamp-breath,’ ‘sullen,’ and offering only ‘lukewarm’ heat: the process of burning it has fewer positive connotations. Here, Heaney is more ambivalent about the extraction and burning of peat than in his bog-poems from the 1960s and 1970s. The line, ‘I was like turned turf in the breath of God’ (55), applies religious language to the Tollund Man’s resurrection; as will be argued shortly, his presence also suggests a pre-Christian ritual of regeneration. Such regeneration is particularly necessary given that the poem has

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mentioned the ‘Clear alteration in the bog-pooled rain’: burning peat has long-term impacts on the bogland itself. The following stanza hints at the consequences of burning fossil fuels: Late as it was, The early bird still sang, the meadow hay Still buttercupped and daisied, sky was new. I smelled the air, exhaust fumes, silage reek, Heard from my heather bed the thickened traffic And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue. (56)

When the poem appeared in The Guardian in April 2005, its vernal images were timely. Yet the poem raises the possibility of a silent spring or a spring where the time is out of joint (‘the early bird still sang’ although it is ‘late’—perhaps too late). Peat burning, ‘exhaust fumes,’ and ‘transatlantic flights’ acidify the bog-pooled rain. Heaney’s poem also evokes a reason why all these climate-altering processes are under way: commerce. The Tollund Man presents himself as a ghostly figure who refuses to participate in digitised, twenty-first-century business: ‘In check-out lines, at cashpoints, in those queues/Of wired, far-faced smilers, I stood off’ (57). Jason W. Moore’s idea of the ‘Capitalocene’ is applicable to these lines; Heaney points to consumer culture as responsible for environmentally costly flights and cars. Intricate links between humans and their environment, between deep time and the present, are stressed as they are in the earlier bog-poems. Yet this poem offers different possibilities for the future. Heaney’s earlier Grauballe Man was like long-dead ‘bog oak’ and lithic ‘basalt,’ static as an ‘eel arrested’ (N 28). In contrast, the imagery of ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ stresses this character’s powers of regeneration, suggesting a glimmer of hope for environmental futures. The Tollund Man is described using multiple metaphors and similes of vigorous growth: ‘wrists as ‘silver birches,’ hands as ‘young sward,’ his head ‘a head of kale,/Shedding water,’ his form like a ‘Bulrush, head in air’ (DC, 56–7). The rushes that the ancient bog-man hopes will remain ‘Damp until transplanted’ wither to ‘dust,’ a word redolent not merely of Christian beliefs about the body, but also a reminder of the vibrant nature of seemingly insignificant matter. The rushes he hopes to use for bogland restoration may have suffered, just as the blackberries in ‘Blackberry-Picking’ decayed; but the Tollund Man wonders about a ritual for regrowth: ‘should I shake [dust] off/Or mix it

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in with spit in pollen’s name/And my own?’ The end of the poem links the urban setting of the sequence to Heaney’s relatives’ workmanlike, rural practice of cutting peat, but with the difference that the Tollund Man does not set to with a turf-spade and start cutting; instead, the ritual of spitting on the plant-dust in the Tollund Man’s hands could be seen as a spell to ensure that land and vegetation will flourish again: As a man would, cutting turf, I straightened, spat on my hands, felt benefit And spirited myself into the street. (57)

The Tollund Man enters the city to ensure that new life will germinate. The poem suggests Heaney’s awareness that peat-cutting damaged boglands, his activities in support of bogland restoration, and his understanding of climate change; the Tollund Man symbolises a wish to repair human beings’ damaged relationship with their environment. Heaney’s poem puts forward the prehistoric bog-body as a symbol of environmental resilience. When asked if the poem was ‘environmental protest or lament,’ Heaney commented that: Naturally, when the Iron Age bog man awakes and walks abroad in the world of the twenty-first century, he senses that all is not well in the earth and the air […] So ‘environmental lament’ is a very good way of describing it, but the charge in the actual writing came from identifying with the man as somebody who had ‘gathered … [his] staying powers.’ [….] Basically, he’s the voice of a poet repossessing himself and his subject. At the same time, he’s still the Tollund Man who was put down in the bog in order that new life would spring up. A principle of regeneration.’ (O’Driscoll, 411)

‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ is one of the more cautiously optimistic environmental poems in Heaney’s collection. On a typescript draft of his poem, Heaney outlines the thought-processes and symbols behind his imagery, in some manuscript notes: The resurrection The reincarnation—(disembodied) Display Case Head & body reunited. Ephete Opening of the organs

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of sense The cleansing of the organs of perception Renewal of value in & contact with organic ‘life’ (Mix spit & dust to cure blind man)83

Ritual and resurrection, at once pre-Christian, Catholic, and ecological, give the Tollund Man’s actions a ceremonial gravitas. But mixing spit and dust also suggests a cure for the inner blindness that leads to human exceptionalism and environmental destruction. The ‘Renewal of value in & contact with organic ‘life’ ’ that Heaney writes of in his draft speaks of precisely the values that the environmental movement espouses. The Tollund Man carries winter seeds, in Heaney’s earlier poem about him. If Heaney’s ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ suggests environmental redress, it springs from the generative forces of vegetation, which offer a grain of hope in the fight against climate change. Orb, Ovum, Earth, and ‘Earth’s Immunity System’ Even if Heaney knows that all is not well ‘in the earth and air,’ he employs dramatic shifts in scale to convey an environmentally conscious ethic of care at both local and planetary levels. Such shifts in scale become increasingly evident in his writing from the late 1980s onwards. This section traces how such multi-scalar effects develop and considers the way Heaney uses them in two later pieces with contrasting aims: a poem that adapts work by French poet Eugène Guillevic, and Heaney’s prose foreword to an environmental management plan for Lough Beg. Heaney’s images of the whole Earth work against the panoptic, militarised visions of the Earth from space that Latour, Haraway, and others have criticised, instead employing highly organic metaphors that evoke environmental resilience. Indeed, Heaney’s view of ‘home’ was developing planetary implications towards the end of his career. When asked by George Morgan in 1998 to explain his idea of ‘home,’ Heaney’s answer encapsulated both local ideas of dwelling and an expansive, planetary perspective. I’m not quite sure what “home” means other than that deep sense of planetary, experiential, creaturely, animal “at-homeness” which I’m trying to 83  NLI 49,493/126 fol 3 ‘THE TOLLUND MAN IN SPRINGTIME,’ TS with MS amendments, cream A4 paper, p. 111 (digital catalogue numbering). My transcription.

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express in the metaphor of “slumbering at the heart of systems.” When I hear the word “home,” I hear the sound the earth might make humming on its axis. Something Wordsworthian. [….] Something centred and deeply harmonious, yes. I’d have to be a bit Heideggerian here, and coin a term like “in-dwelling.” [….] I credit all that nostalgic part of my being but I also want to put it to the test, to remind it that we are made up of homelessness as well as centredness. (Heaney and Morgan, n.p.)

The interviewer mentions with ‘From the Land of the Unspoken’ in The Haw Lantern, which evokes a bar of platinum used for measurements worldwide (20). The duality of universal and particular that Heaney evokes here—the intimacy of being ‘at home,’ the vastness of the Earth— applies to much of his later ecopoetry. Although he had previously conjured up the ‘curve of the world,’ images of the whole Earth begin to appear more frequently in Heaney’s poetry from the late 1980s onwards. From a response to the Blue Marble image to a revision of a Breton herbal, these images convey an environmentally conscious sense of Earth’s preciousness and vulnerability. ‘Alphabets’ alludes to Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: the sequence evokes the growth of the author’s mind. Yet it is also, in part, the growth of the poet’s awareness of what would become the ‘Gaia factor’ in his poetry. When Heaney ends four quatrains of recollections about writing in his youth, with ‘A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O’ (HL, 1), he evokes the expansion in scalar awareness that would occur through education. Writing of adulthood, ‘the figure of the universe’ becomes significant, reflecting the advances in technology that enabled astronauts to perceive the finitude and fragility of their planet: As from his small window The astronaut sees all he has sprung from, The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O Like a magnified and buoyant ovum. (HL (1987), 3)

This stanza performs several scalar shifts: the ‘small window’ containing the O of the Earth is scaled down to a microscopic gaze that enables the human eye to see the ovum. This poem does replicate some binary gender stereotypes—astronaut as male, Earth as female, and the male gaze as all-­ seeing and scientific—but also evokes the planet’s generative powers.

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Heaney does not say whether the ovum is associated with any particular species. This poem suggests that plants, animals, and people spring from the same source. Heaney’s stately, cumulative adaptation of the pentameter line—‘The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O’—piles up adjectives to evoke the expansive majesty of the Earth in a striking example of scale variance. In Human Chain (2010), dramatic shifts from local to planetary occur in a free translation from French. The work of Breton poet Eugène Guillevic was an obvious choice for Heaney to adapt, as it resonates with his own poetic preoccupations. The two authors respond to the lithic and prehistoric ‘deep time’ of stone age monuments. Guillevic’s Carnac (1961), which Irish poet John Montague had translated in 1999, takes readers on a trip to the distant past nine years before North. Heaney also responds to the shared ‘Celtic’ heritage of Brittany and Ireland, and Guillevic’s close attention to the plants and creatures of the heath and coast. Heaney selects sections from L’herbier de la Bretagne (The Brittany Herbal, 1980). One might expect Heaney’s ‘A Herbal’ to let us view nature through a hand lens, or perhaps to transpose Guillevic’s references to his beloved Brittany coast84 to the bogland. However, Heaney’s adaptation of the French poet widens the scalar ambit of the original: If you know a bit About the universe It’s because you’ve taken it in Like that, Looked as hard As you look into yourself, Into the rat hole, Through the vetch and dock That mantled it. Because you’ve laid your cheek Against the rush clump And known soft stone to break On the quarry floor.        * 84  Eugène Guillevic. ‘La Bretagne’ is mentioned four times, once in the title and three times in the poems (locs 1671, 1747).

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Between heather and marigold, Between sphagnum and buttercup, Between dandelion and broom, Between forget-me-not and honeysuckle, As between clear blue and cloud, Between haystack and sunset sky, Between oak tree and slated roof, I had my existence. I was there. Me in place and the place in me.       * Where can it be found again, An elsewhere world, beyond Maps and atlases, Where all is woven into And of itself, like a nest Of crosshatched grass blades? (HC, 42–3)

Here is a ‘literal’ translation of Guillevic’s lines that seeks to remain as close as possible to the original. It brings to light what Heaney has changed: Between saxifrage and heather, Between moss and periwinkle, Between dandelion and broom, Between forget-me-not and ivy, As between blue sky and cloud, Between the sky and the boat, Between the oak and the slate roof, I existed. I was there. I played the part of the place. * If you know A bit about the universe,

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It’s because you’ve looked hard, As if within yourself, Into the rock, Into the unknown plant That grows against it, Because on the lichen You have laid your cheek. Then the sky and the ocean Did not throw you back. * Where, then, could we find Through the atlases A territory where everything is interwoven Like a blade of grass?85

Both poets examine a scalar ambit as tiny as moss and as broad as the universe: an excellent example of scale variance. Human beings are presented as imbricated in the environment in a way that resonates with the Anthropocene’s preoccupation with how we alter Earth’s systems. Yet the environment is also present within the self. Looking into oneself reveals a glimpse of stone, lichen, or vetch: a holistic view of human and nonhuman interdependence. Indeed, Heaney’s version of Guillevic’s poem adumbrates posthumanism by deconstructing a unitary concept of the self. Susanna Lidström acknowledges that ‘these lines suggest both the idea of a global interconnectedness and the world as a system, in the reference to ‘Maps and atlases.’ ’ She also sees these lines as considering how that sense of planetary context and connectedness can be represented in a way that relates it to the experience of the local environment, signified by the ‘crosshatched grass blades’ (137–8). Her point about the world as a system is highly applicable to the concept of the Anthropocene. However,

85  The present author’s translation. Capital letters have been kept for the beginning of each line, and asterisks are left-justified, in keeping with Guillevic’s original: Guillevic locs 1850–1877.

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her analysis does not engage with how Heaney’s adaptation of a Francophone text further broadens his presentation of place. This is not an experience of ‘the local environment’—‘A Herbal’ presents intricate layers of localities. Firstly, there is the Breton setting of Guillevic’s original. Secondly, there is the setting of Heaney’s translation, which could be anywhere: Heaney has taken the decision to remove all Place Name[s]. He could have chosen to create ‘A Mossbawn Herbal’ or ‘A Glanmore Herbal,’ but instead he gives his readers a poem-sequence set anywhere where heather and buttercups grow. The references to rush clumps and sphagnum moss invariably call up Heaney’s preoccupation with the bogland, but even the dialect word he uses, ‘headrigs’ (41), is common to Northern Ireland, Scotland, and the North of England (OED). Heaney changes the order of Guillevic’s original; it is telling that he delays Guillevic’s expansive glance across the atlas to the last canto. He further emphasises the planetary of his version of the poem by adapting Guillevic’s word ‘territory’ to ‘world.’ If Guillevic is specific about a single ‘blade of grass,’ Heaney pluralises the grass blades and transforms them into a ‘nest,’ the image that he used to evoke an environmental ethic of care for future, nonhuman lives in ‘On the Spot.’ A powerful symbol for creaturely craft and care, the nest that comprises the ‘elsewhere world’ suggests a way of treasuring Earth without staking out nationalist territories—a perspective beyond the human preoccupation with ‘Maps and atlases.’ In that single, resonant image of the nest, Heaney interweaves local and planetary. The organic nest is also an important countercurrent to the Anthropocene’s preoccupation with the stony and inert; its ‘woven’ texture resonates with Haraway’s focus on the webs and nets that bind all species together. A nest of grass blades takes Heaney’s work from the ‘deep time’ of the bogland towards a different timeframe: the fragile, intricate, interwoven future of life itself. Because of his deep sensitivity to place and planet, and his ability to see a local lough as an indicator of global threats, Heaney continued to support conservation causes that protected environments with unique cultural and ecological heritage. In the same year that his version of Guillevic was published in Human Chain, Heaney’s writing about place and globe appeared in a very different context. Environmental management plans are not usually renowned for the lyrical quality of their prose. But when the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds approached Heaney, asking for his help with its pragmatically titled Lough Beg Management Plan in 2010, he responded with a resonant essay that begins with the personal and ends with the planetary. Heaney even reviewed the entire Management

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Plan, and made suggestions, before it was published. According to Seamus Burns, who worked with Heaney on the Management Plan, ‘he certainly played his part in the co-ordinated management of the Lough Beg wet grassland management, the legacy of which continues to this day and will do for many years to come in the area.’86 Lough Beg and its surroundings are highly significant for Heaney: ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ (1979), with its ‘lowland clays and waters’ (1979, 17), is the setting of his elegy for his murdered cousin, Colum McCartney. Heaney responded to the RSPB’s request by penning the following: New Ferry, Church Island, The Mullach, Aughrim… In the following pages, those names are to be found on a map showing the local wild life habitats, but for me and for anyone of my generation brought up in the Lough Beg area, they belong first and foremost in memory and imagination. They evoke a dream land that was once the real land, a shore at evening, quiet water, wind in the grass, the calls of birds, maybe a man or woman out in a back field just standing looking, counting cattle, listening. The Lough Beg Management Plan intends to make that country of the mind a reality once again. It wants to bring back a landscape where the peewit and the curlew and the whirring snipe are as common as they used to be on those 1940s evenings when I’d go with my father to check on our cattle on the strand. In the meantime, as a result of different threats—pollution and development and drainage and undergrazing among them—the wet and the weeds and the wilderness have suffered, and the bird life and flora and fauna that gave our part of the world its secret beauty have been sadly diminished. But now there is a realization by the people who own and live by these wetlands that they can reverse this trend. What is most hopeful and heartening is the news that local farmers are prepared to co-operate with the sponsors of this Management Plan. These families have a precious corner of our planet in their keeping and deserve high praise for taking thought and taking care of it for future generations. In doing so, they make themselves examples at local level of what has to happen globally—they are helping the earth’s immunity system to contend with the dangers it now faces everywhere.87

 Email from Seamus Burns to Yvonne Reddick, 16.02.22.  Seamus Heaney. ‘Foreword.’ In RSPB. Lough Beg Management Plan. 2010.

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Heaney’s foreword for the RSPB is redolent of his own place-­ preoccupations—but as will be shown shortly, the ‘Gaia factor’ in his work also gives it important planetary dimensions. The first line calls up the etymologies of Place Name[s] in Irish poetry (Preoccupations, 131), a regional Northern Irish version of the poetic countries of the mind in his essay ‘Englands of the Mind’ (Preoccupations, 150–169). The recitation of Place Name[s] recalls his earlier evocation of the shipping forecast in Field Work: ‘Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea’ (1979, 39); the mention of the snipe is a backward glance at Heaney’s poem ‘The Backward Look,’ itself preoccupied with dwindling bird populations (1972, 19–20). When one examines Heaney’s foreword, one sees how he draws on the work of seminal environmental poets and prose writers—one English, one American. His turn of phrase ‘the wet and the weeds and the wilderness’ is of course a reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Inversnaid’—‘Long live the weeds and the wilderness’ (Hughes and Heaney, 215). This was clearly an important poem to Heaney and his friend Hughes, as it also appears in the anthology of poems they edited for children; Hopkins is read as an ecological poet by critics such as John Parham (2010). Yet Rachel Carson’s idyllic opening paragraph of Silent Spring (1962) is also a touchstone for Heaney. Here are Carson’s opening sentences: ‘There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above green fields. […] The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life’ (Carson, 21). Heaney presents the home ground of his poetry as of great literary, cultural, historical, and environmental significance88; and yet, in order to do so, he draws on a foundational environmental intertext from America. His foreword places the local within a global context, a metonymic device that evokes an ethic of care: ‘a precious corner of our planet,’ ‘examples at a local level of what has to happen globally.’ Heaney’s evocation of ‘families’ 88  Heaney’s legacy formed an important part of environmental campaigns against the new A6 road, years after his death. These include a petition to ‘Stope [sic] Ecocide in Heaney Country’ and a Friends of the Earth campaign. Change.org. ‘Stope [sic] Ecocide in Heaney Country.’ N.d. Web. Accessed on 17.02.22 https://www.change.org/p/save-heaney-­ country-­ecocideinheaneycountry. Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland. ‘Disrespecting “everyday miracles and the distant past”: the Lough Beg wetlands and the A6 road.’ March 2017. 3. The document’s title cites the ‘everyday miracles and the distant past’ that the Nobel Committee found in Heaney’s work when they awarded him the Prize in 1995.

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and ‘future generations’ could be criticised for being human centred, and yet the trope of elders passing on traditional knowledge of agriculture and nature to their children is crucial for Heaney’s writing, from celebrated early poems such as ‘Death of a Naturalist’ to this later essay. Heaney’s idea that local farmers are helping Earth’s ‘immunity system’ derives from his interpretation of Gaia theory, a forerunner of concepts of the Anthropocene that highlight how Earth’s interconnected systems form parts of a complex whole. His conservation activities are an extension of the ‘Gaia factor’ in his poetry. Heaney’s ‘defiance’ of the threats to landscapes he loved has lasted beyond his lifetime. Since Heaney’s death in 2013, his legacy has been used for further campaigns against the proposed motorway in Northern Ireland. A petition to ‘Stop Ecocide in Heaney Country’ aimed to continue the resistance.89 The turn of phrase ‘Heaney Country’ gives his poetry the same importance to a sense of place as ‘Yeats Country’ and ‘Wordsworth Country.’ Indeed, Heaney’s biographer Fintan O’Toole has written of the way Heaney’s poetry is not merely shaped by these places but shapes people’s cultural concept of them (2016). Friends of the Earth quotes extensively from Heaney’s letters opposing the new motorway in a 2017 campaign document. The poet’s legacy provides much of the impetus behind the campaign to preserve the bogland: ‘As the place that nourished the poetry of Séamus [sic] Heaney it is a global treasure.’90 (Unfortunately, despite such Heaneyesque lyric ‘defiance’ of environmental destruction, the motorway was built in the end.) Nevertheless, Heaney’s support for the conservation of bogs and loughs did indeed help to preserve parts of ‘Heaney country’ as ‘global treasures.’ His efforts to protect this ‘precious corner of our planet,’ a local spot interwoven with planetary connections, draws on his vision of the Earth as a single living thing, vulnerable yet vibrantly alive.

89  Change.org. ‘Stope [sic] Ecocide in Heaney Country.’ N.d. Accessed on February 17 2022. https://www.change.org/p/save-heaney-country-ecocideinheaneycountry 90  Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland. ‘Disrespecting “everyday miracles and the distant past”: the Lough Beg wetlands and the A6 road.’ 3 March 2017. Accessed on 22 April 2023. The document’s title cites the ‘everyday miracles and the distant past,’ which the Nobel Committee found in Heaney’s work when they awarded him the Prize in 1995.

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Works Cited Auge, Andrew. ‘Reading Heaney’s Bog Poems in the Anthropocene.’ In Andrew Auge and Eugene O’Brien, eds. Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 16–34. Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. London: Picador, 2000. Baxter, Stephen. Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time. New York: Forge, 2004. Brandes, Rand and Michael J. Durkan. Seamus Heaney: A Bibliography, 1959-2003. London: Faber & Faber, 2008. Buell, Lawrence. ‘Toxic Discourse.’ Critical Inquiry 24.3 (Spring 1998): 639–665. Bury, Dom. Rite of Passage. Bloodaxe: Hexham, 2021. Colebrook, Clare. Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol 1. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2014. Corcoran, Brendan. ‘Heaney’s Proffer: Tollund Man, Catastrophic Climate Change, and the Responsibility to Mourn.’ In Andrew Auge and Eugene O’Brien, eds. Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 111–39. Coughlan, Patricia. “Bog Queens’: The Representation of Women in the poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney. M.  Allen, ed. Seamus Heaney: New Casebooks. London: Palgrave, 1997. Pp. 185–205. Farrier, David. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2019. Farrier, David. ‘‘Like a Stone’: Ecology, Enargeia, and Ethical Time in Alice Oswald’s Memorial.’ Environmental Humanities 4 (2014): 1–18. Garrard, Greg. ‘Heidegger, Heaney and the Problem of Dwelling.’ In Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells, eds. Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and literature. London: Zed, 1998 pp. 167–81. Ghosh, Amitav. ‘Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel.’ The New Republic, 2 March (1992): 29–34. Gifford, Terry. Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. 2nd ed. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2011 [1995]. Glob, P. V. The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved. Trans. R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. Gould, Stephen Jay. Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in natural history. New York: Norton, 1977. Guillevic, Eugène. Etier suivi de Autres. Paris: Gallimard, 2017. Kindle. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke U.P. 2016. Heaney, Seamus. Death of a Naturalist. London: Faber & Faber, 1966. ———. Door into the Dark. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. ———. Wintering Out. London: Faber & Faber, 1972. ———. North. London: Faber & Faber, 1975.

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———. Field Work. London: Faber & Faber, 1979. ———. Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978. London: Faber & Faber, 1980. ———. Electric Light. London: Faber & Faber, 2001. ———. Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001. London: Faber & Faber, 2002. ———. District and Circle. London: Faber & Faber, 2006. ———. Human Chain. London: Faber & Faber, 2010. Heaney, Seamus, interviewee, and Henri Cole, interviewer. ‘The Art of Poetry 75’. The Paris Review 177 (Fall 1997). Heaney, Seamus, interviewee, and George Morgan, interviewer. Cycnos 15.2 (2008) [1998]. Heaney, Seamus. ‘An artist of the flowing world.’ The Independent 12 Oct 2000. https://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/an-­a rtist-­o f-­t he-­f lowing-­ world-­638068.html Jones, David. ‘Hazards of Enzymes and Detergents.’ Your Environment 1.2 (Spring 1970): 54–9. LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford: Oxford UP 2014. Lidström, Susanna. ‘ ‘Images adequate to our predicament’: Ecology, Environment and Ecopoetics’. Environmental Humanities 5 (2014): 35–53. Lidström, Susanna. Nature, Environment and Poetry: Ecocriticism and the poetics of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. Lloyd, David. ‘“Pap for the Dispossessed:” Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity.’ Boundary 13. 2/3 (Winter/Spring 1985): 319–42. Longley, Edna. ‘North: “Inner Emigré” or “Artful Voyeur?”’ In Tony Curtis, ed. The Art of Seamus Heaney. Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1982. Pp. 63–96. Macdonald, Graeme. ‘Oil and World Literature.’ American Book Review 33.3, Mar/April 2012, 7–31. Meredith, Dianne. ‘Landscape or Mindscape? Seamus Heaney’s Bogs.’ Irish Geography 32.2 (1999): 126–134. Montague, John. 1971. “Hymn to the New Omagh Road”. TriQuarterly Review 21 (spring 1971): 273–6. Morrison, Blake. Seamus Heaney. London: Methuen, 1982. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2013. Kindle. O’Brien, Conor Cruise. “A Slow North-East Wind.” The Listener (September 25, 1975): 404–405. O’Brien, Eugene. Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing. Gainesville: Florida UP, 2002. ———. ‘North: The Politics of Plurality’. Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing 2.1–2 (Autumn 1998/Spring 1999): 1–19. ———. “A Stain from the Sky is Descending’: The Poetics of Climate Change in Irish Poetry.” In Andrew Auge and Eugene O’Brien, eds. Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 178–98.

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O’Connell, M. (1990). ‘Origins of lowland Irish blanket bog.’ Ecology and Conservation of Irish Peatlands. Ed. G.  J. Doyle. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. pp 49–71. O’Connor, Maureen, and Benjamin Gearey. 2020. “ ‘Black butter melting and opening underfoot’: the ‘peat harvest’ in Irish literature and culture.” Green Letters 24.4: 381–390. O’Driscoll, Dennis. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. London: Faber & Faber, 2008. Parham, John. Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Parker, Michael. Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer. ‘The “Anthropocene.”’ Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. Patterson, Walter C. ‘Inadvertent Climate Modification: Report of the Study of Man’s Impact on Climate.’ Your Environment 3.1 (Spring 1972): 42–3. Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994. Reddick, Yvonne. Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Renou-Wilson, Florence, Tom Bolger, Craig Bullock, Frank Convery, Jim Curry, Shane Ward, David Wilson and Christoph Müller. 2011. BOGLAND: Sustainable Management of Peatlands in Ireland. Environmental Protection Agency. Renou-Wilson, Florence and Kenneth Byrne. ‘Irish Peatland Forests: Lessons from the Past and Pathways to a Sustainable Future.’ In Restoration of Boreal and Temperate Forests. Ed. John D.  Stanturf. London: CRC for Taylor & Francis, 2016. 2nd edn. Pp. 321–35. Renou-Wilson, Florence. ‘Peatlands.’ The Soils of Ireland. Eds Rachel Creamer and Lilian O’Sullivan. Cham: Springer, 2018. Pp. 141–152. Solnick, Samuel. ‘Fossil Fuel.’ In John Parham, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. Pp. 226–41. Szeman, Imre. ‘Conjectures on world energy literature: Or, what is petroculture?’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53.3 (2017): 277–88. Wheatley, David. ‘The Melt of the Real.’ Poetry Ireland Review 113 (2014): 35–6. Wild Ireland. ‘Wolves.’ N.D.  Web. 5th Feb 2020. https://www.wildireland. org/wolves Xie, Chao. ‘Reading Corporeality in the Climate Change Era: A Comparative Study of Seamus Heaney’s and Hua Hai’s Ecological Poetry.’ Kritika Kultura 38 (2022): 274–89.

CHAPTER 5

Alice Oswald: Voyaging in Anthropocene Waters

Contemporary poets writing about ‘nature’ cannot be naïve to the damage we are inflicting on it. Juliana Spahr finds that the problem with ‘nature poetry’ is that it shows the bird but not the bulldozer (69). Alice Oswald has long been read as a ‘nature-poet’ (Drangsholt, 11), although this is a label that she resists.1 Her early collections led to critics interpreting her as a poet of place, specifically of the West Country. However, this chapter shows that readings of Oswald’s work as site-specific nature-poetry risk downplaying her awareness of severe and widespread environmental damage. To expand Spahr’s bird and bulldozer analogy, Oswald’s poetry shows both the stream and the sewage plant. Oswald is a celebrated contemporary poet, the recipient of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection for her debut The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), the T. S. Eliot Prize for her second book Dart (2002), and the Ted Hughes Award in 2009 for Weeds and Wildflowers, her collaboration with artist Jessica Greenman. For many years, she was published by the elite independent press Faber & Faber; she now publishes with Jonathan Cape, an imprint associated with both literary calibre and wide appeal. She was elected as Oxford’s Professor of Poetry in 2019, a Chair once occupied by Heaney, but which had never been held by a woman 1  Judith Thurman. ‘Alice Oswald’s Homeric Mood.’ New Yorker, 17 Aug 2020. https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/24/alice-oswalds-homeric-mood

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before. This analysis of her poetry of rivers and oceans deploys theories of Anthropocene river-systems, and recent developments in the ‘blue humanities’, to show how these preoccupations shape her work formally and thematically. In the last chapter, we saw how Heaney’s bog-poems envisage the bog as connected to the water cycle, climate systems, and the cycle of Ice Ages. Alice Oswald’s work develops beyond Heaney’s peaty wetlands and menaced glaciers, to create a deeper consideration of water in our age of extensive environmental damage. Her work shifts between two overlapping themes: a rooted relationship with trees and wildlife, and voyages along rivers, out to sea, into the deep oceans, and occasionally even to outer space. Both the site-specific poetry and Oswald’s more expansive work engage with insidious, human-caused environmental damage. Oswald embarks on her poetic voyages with ‘The Three Wise Men of Gotham who Set Out to Catch the Moon in a Net’ in her first book (1996). Dart, her celebrated second volume, followed in 2002, taking readers down a West Country river to the sea. Both woodlands and voyaging spacecraft feature in Woods etc (2005), while Spacecraft Voyager I: New and Selected Poems is the title of the American edition that gathers together work from the first part of her career. Oswald edited The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet in 2005, anthologising poems ranging from folk-songs to Hughes, Heaney, and Homer. By anthologising Homer, she claims him as a predecessor for contemporary ecopoetry. The liminal, shifting estuaries of A Sleepwalk on the Severn emerged from a commission in 2009. Oswald transported her readers to the aftermath of the Trojan War by adapting Homer in Memorial (2011), deploying a stripped-back form that contrasted with her earlier collections. ‘Dunt: A Poem for a Dried-Up River,’ and ‘Vertigo,’ commissioned for a climate change poetry project, appeared in her collection Falling Awake (2016). Nobody, an ecologically aware revision of The Odyssey and The Oresteia, first appeared in a commissioned art book in 2018. Since then, Oswald’s work has appeared in further explicitly environmental projects, including the commissioned poem ‘Moth’ for a series in The Guardian Review that highlights the abrupt decline in insect populations.2 2  Alice Oswald. ‘Moth’ in ‘Into Thin Air: Carol Ann Duffy presents poems about our vanishing insect world.’ 27 Apr 2019. Web. Accessed 25.06.21. https://www.theguardian. com/books/2019/apr/27/into-thin-air-carol-ann-duffy-presents-poems-aboutour-vanishing-insect-world

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Oswald, Criticism, and Ecocriticism: Shifting the Landscape Earlier scholarly analyses of Oswald stressed her poetry’s rootedness as well as its rootiness. The localist readings of her work that emerge from much previous scholarship risk overlooking the fluid way in which Oswald presents place; such fluidity was evident in Dart, and it has developed and broadened as her career has progressed. As each new collection is published, new localities, new formal strategies, and new environmental preoccupations emerge. The  Alice Oswald who appears in many earlier reviews of Dart, and critical interpretations of A Sleepwalk on the Severn, is a writer of locality and rurality. At the time these reviews and scholarly accounts were published, Oswald had been living and writing in the West Country and working as a gardener. Dart was funded by the Poetry Society’s Poetry Places scheme, which prompted readings that focus on Oswald’s supposed rootedness and her connection to an allegedly localist literary heritage. Reviews by journalists set the tone, and literary scholarship was slow to challenge them. For journalist Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Oswald’s poem is ‘embedded so deeply into the bones of the landscape that Oswald emerges as an inheritor of some of Britain’s greatest poetic voices, an heir to Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill’ (3). This is a compliment to Oswald, but the mistake about Heaney’s nationality is an example of the way Oswald has been inscribed into a localist literary narrative about ‘British’ landscape-poetry.3 Oswald’s poem is too fluid to be confined to the ‘bones of the landscape,’ while her intertextual references hardly stop at Britain’s borders. Poet and scholar David Wheatley somewhat expands the literary lineage and localist arguments in a review: ‘Oswald joins Ciaran Carson, Iain Sinclair, Hughes and ultimately Joyce himself as one of the great celebrants of the genius loci, the spirit of place, or what the Irish call dinnseanchas, lovingly elaborated topographical lore’ (n.p.) Wheatley’s evocation of the Irish writers does show an important intertextual point of reference from beyond England, yet the ‘spirit of place’ needs to be re-examined. Place-lore and dinnseanchas are present in Oswald’s River Dart, but so are magnetite and chlorine. Earlier ecocritical readings of Oswald’s poetry, such as Mary Pinard’s work on acoustic ‘echo-poetics’ (18), stressed her affiliation with ‘lyric 3  Heaney resented having his work included in a ‘British’ poetry anthology. Seamus Heaney. An Open Letter. Derry: Field Day, 1983.

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poets of place who long for but are also striving to be of the rhythms, sensibilities, and non-rational utterances of the natural world: Homer, Virgil, Hopkins, Hughes, Finlay, Heaney’ (Pinard, 31). This article did not engage with the many, emerging perspectives on ecopoetics that existed at the time when it was written, and even at that point in Oswald’s career, her presentation of voice and place in Dart is so shifting that it defies the first-­ person mode of the lyric. Dwelling and rootedness persisted in certain critical accounts. Drangsholt raises the hoary theoretical spectre of Heidegger (8), declaring that Oswald has ‘shown great interest in exploring the relationships between self and its surrounding landscape.’ She later nuances this point by commenting on Oswald’s engagement with ‘movement and dis-placement’ (2). Examining Oswald’s 2009 collection, A Sleepwalk on the Severn, critic Tom Bristow declares that ‘Oswald’s home in Devon, the geography of the southwest of England, encourages a deep engagement with place, folk history and oral culture’ (78), although this is somewhat expanded when he later finds that she unites ‘planet and place’ (87). In The Anthropocene Lyric, Bristow does acknowledge that A Sleepwalk on the Severn ‘engages with ‘the sense of being “not I”’ and blurs the boundaries between human and nonhuman’ (106), yet there is much more to say about how Oswald reshapes the lyric in order to achieve this. More expansive readings of Oswald’s work began to appear as critics engaged with subsequent collections, such as Woods etc (2005) and Memorial (2011). In a review of Woods etc (2005), critic Leo Mellor comments on the way this collection marked a shift in her poetry, towards the ‘non-specificity of place’ (TLS 3 June 2005)—unsurprisingly, given that the book ends with a sequence of poems about star gazing and space travel. Memorial (2011), her hauntingly stripped-back adaptation of The Iliad, marked an engagement with new poetic territories and forms. Certain critics then began to reappraise the way place was presented in earlier volumes such as Dart. Kym Martindale offers a searching reconsideration of Oswald’s work in the light of the material humanities: ‘self is the matter beyond identity, and thus her work prompts a reevaluation of boundaries, categories, and materiality itself’ (158). She interprets the complex lyric ‘I’ in Oswald’s early poetry as capable of ‘traversing species’ (168), a reading that re-evaluates the species boundary in a way that resonates with broader scholarship in the environmental humanities. Other critics have also sought to dislodge interpretations of Oswald’s work from a static focus on ‘the bones of the landscape.’ Peter Howarth acknowledges ‘the Dart’s plural and overlapping senses of location’ (2013, loc 4392). Howarth perceives

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that in Oswald’s river-writing, one glimpses ‘the complex circulation of the planet’s water’ (Howarth, 4448), but this brief planetary perspective leaves room for critical expansion. David Farrier’s article was the first to read Oswald’s poetry in the light of Anthropocene theories of ‘deep time,’ both the geological past and the far future (2014). For Farrier, the similes of flora and fauna that Oswald extracts from The Iliad in Memorial (2011) evoke ‘our greater interconnectedness with the more-than-human world into which we are inextricably woven’ (2014, 14). In the elegiac impulse of Memorial, Farrier finds a ‘haunted time’ that considers the passing of ecological diversity and encourages ecological responsibility (16). Farrier examines Memorial through the lens of ‘the Anthropocene’s peculiar temporal torsions’ (3), but this preoccupation with ‘deep time’ was (arguably) more starkly visible in Dart and ‘Dunt: A Poem for a Dried-Up River.’ Farrier analyses how Oswald’s ‘spectral,’ repeated Homeric similes (11) enact ‘violence and rupture’ (12) in the Anthropocene. Climate change is analysed: ‘the subject who contemplates anthropogenic climate change finds their subjectivity split by the massive distribution of human agency in space and time; their own image staring back, in effect, from images of calving icebergs, or the Pacific trash island’ (15). However, since Farrier’s 2014 article appeared, books such as Falling Awake and Nobody have considerably deepened Oswald’s exploration of these issues. The scalar leaps that Oswald’s work enacts need to be analysed, in order to shift research in the field beyond its localist readings of her poetry. This chapter aims to develop new ways of reading Oswald’s poetry of water, shifting places, and fluid narrative forms in the Anthropocene. This chapter builds on theoretical examinations of the ‘liquid Anthropocene’ by Stacy Alaimo, Alexandra Campbell, Mandy Bloomfield, and others, aiming to expand critical readings of Oswald’s poetry by analysing how she engages with rivers and oceans in the Anthropocene. In a watery context, Oswald presents gender and species as fluid and mutable; the water cycle and oceanic processes interfuse local and global, creating a sense of place that is not necessarily fixed, but often fluid. In Dart, gravity appears ‘placeless in all places’ (29) and in A Sleepwalk on the Severn, the estuary is an ‘Uncountry’ (3). Oswald develops this fluid sense of place by deploying shifts in voice and poetic form in Dart, silences and fragmentation in ‘Dunt,’ and mythical narratives that are interfused and interrupted in Nobody. This chapter begins at the source, with Oswald’s river-writing, and moves towards a consideration of her poetry of oceanic voyages.

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A ‘Liquid Anthropocene’ Our planet’s freshwater and ocean systems are suffering from severe human impacts. Melting ice caps, rising seas, plastic in the oceans, disrupted rainfall, rivers running dry: these scourges of the Anthropocene are markedly watery. All that is solid has a habit of melting, dissolving, or entering a state of suspension. If Anthropocene poetry scholarship was often rather stony in its early stages (e.g. Farrier 2014), this chapter looks below the surface at Anthropocene poetry of rivers and seas. Of course, the Anthropocene as a concept encourages us to adopt a view of Earth-­ systems; this means that the lithic cannot be considered separately from the liquid. The liquidity of oil kept late twentieth-century capitalism afloat, while the very tectonic plates under our feet are drifting about on molten magma. Iconic landmarks such as the granite tors in Oswald’s Dart will eventually erode, then melt, and become volatile volcanic rock. This focus on liquidity also has the potential to put pressure on the species boundary. Differences between humans and nonhumans are increasingly dissolvable: features such as fingers and ear-bones have fishy origins (Shubin). Yet Anthropocene scientists have long understood that human impacts on our water-systems have reached dangerous levels. Nitrogen and phosphorus levels have long been dangerously high, while humans are the dominant force shaping the flow of rivers.4 Oceans are especially important in the Anthropocene because they drive climatic processes. In a ‘deep time’ context, they provide a better record of past climates than rocks on land (Zalasiewicz and Williams 2011). Climate change and ocean acidification are already taking their toll on habitats such as coral reefs. The section of this chapter that focuses on Oswald’s Nobody analyses this collection in relation to the Anthropocene’s endangered oceans. Ideas of liquidity have been applied to everything from Keynesian economics to modernity itself. This is leading scholars of the Anthropocene to reconsider such ideas. Back at the turn of the last millennium, Zygmunt Bauman, a theorist of globalisation, coined the term ‘liquid modernity’ to capture a globalised society in constant flux (2). ‘Liquid modernity,’ for Bauman, is the movement after postmodernity. Bauman is aware of ecological issues (11), but he spends no time considering how modernity affects actual liquid environments: rivers, rainfall, springs, or oceans. The 4  Johan Rockström, Will Steffen et al. ‘Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity.’ Ecology and Society 14, 2 (2009): 1–35. 14, 17.

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elements are important to Anthropocene culture: the editors of a short book series on Anthropocene textures for MIT Press proposed ‘grain,’ ‘vapour,’ and the ‘ray’ as three primary Anthropocene textures, although they admit that the predicament we find ourselves in is ‘turbid’ and ‘viscous.’5 Turbidity and viscosity are concepts from fluid dynamics, more usually employed by sedimentologists or oil engineers than cultural critics. What I aim to explore is how Oswald’s poetry suggests a ‘liquid Anthropocene’ that is cognisant of flux and flow: less a solid, entangled mesh than an interfusion of different human and nonhuman agents and processes. Such interfusions and transfusions are informing an array of contemporary ecopoetry. Oswald is just one of many ecologically minded contemporary poets to explore rivers and the deep sea; a few further examples include Jorie Graham’s Sea-Change (2008), Philip Gross’s The Water Table (2009), Jen Hadfield’s Byssus (2014) and Isabel Galleymore’s Significant Other (2019).

Alice Oswald’s Anthropocene Rivers Freshwater environments are highly vulnerable to human impacts. For oceanographer James Syvitski, ‘We have fixed rivers in place where they once ran wild over vast floodplains … They have become engineered continuations of our city sewage systems’ (xii). Pollution seeps into groundwater; agriculture and thirsty consumers are draining once-deep aquifers; rivers dwindle during the summer months as the glaciers that sustain them diminish. Climate change is wreaking further disruption. What Syvitski rather euphemistically terms an ‘intensification of the hydrological cycle’ has the potential to unleash more powerful storms and cause more dramatic floods (xii). In response to these changes, scholarship on Anthropocene rivers is developing apace. Titles such as Rivers of the Anthropocene are notable for their transdisciplinary mixing of perspectives from hydrology and the humanities. Oswald’s river-poetry is alert to the potentially devastating impacts of human activities on rivers, but her work is also cognisant of the way rivers in turn influence humans. Mercurial, mobile, even mischievous, the multivocal river in Dart is presented as a vein in a vaster body of rainwater, 5  MIT Press. ‘Five Minutes with the editors of Textures of the Anthropocene’ [Katrin Kingan, Ashkhan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol and Bernd M. Sherer]. 25 Feb 2015. Web. 23 Jul 2020. https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/five-minutes-editors-textures-anthropocene

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groundwater, and seawater—and at the micro-level, in human bodies. The trans-corporeal presence of water and pollutants in bloodstreams presents the species boundary as porous and fluid, while folklore and mythical metamorphoses provide an historical antecedent for this. Dart intervenes in the way rivers are presented on microscopic and macroscopic scales that resonate with recent theories of Anthropocene scale variance. From the first page of Dart, the author’s deployment of poetic form presents ‘the human’ as fluid and mutable. If theories such as Harway’s ‘Chthulucene’ and Tsing and Morton’s meshes challenge human exceptionalism, Oswald’s deployment of poetic form and voice shows how a sense of enmeshment is put into poetic practice. The book begins, ‘Who’s this moving alive over the moor?’, quickly shifting to a close third-person narrative perspective (‘has he remembered his compass’). Yet the speaking voice shifts to a mutable ‘I’ that ‘won’t let go of man’ and seeps ‘into the drift of [the walker’s] thinking’ (1). The lyric I, here, is deliberately unstable—as Oswald states in the preface to the book, ‘These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings’ (D, preface, n.p.). The poem pushes beyond the lyric and develops Modernist methods of stitching voices together, towards a fluid poetic voice that envisages the river as permeating human bodies and consciousness. Formal features reflect the fluidity of the lyric I and suggest a porous species boundary. Oswald employs imagistic shifts in setting and scale, but also acoustic effects, to create a soundscape where speaking voices and different species seep into each other: What I love is one foot in front of another. South-south west and down the contours. I go slipping between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can’t get out listen, a lark spinning around one note splitting and mending it

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and I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river one step-width water of linked stones trills in the stones glides in the trills eels in the glides in each eel a fingerwidth of sea. (2)

A single sentence bridges two pages, and unlike some other sections of Dart, there are no labels in the margin to identify different speaking voices. The speaking ‘I’ initially appears to be a walker described in the first few stanzas, but the verb ‘slipping’ could equally apply to the river itself. Both the layout of the lines on the page and the flowing together of poetic voices create a sense of ecological enmeshment. A close-up gaze on footfalls and the walker’s map shifts to a landscape view of Black Ridge, with longer lines mirroring the shift in visual perspectives. An acoustic focus on nonhuman voices then interrupts the speaking ‘I’ with the imperative ‘listen’; isolated words of the section about the skylark echo the rise and fall of the lark’s courtship flight. Shape mimics sense as the poem shifts back to the source of the river, a longer line spilling across the page as an unidentified speaking ‘I’ returns (is this the walker, the author, or even the lark?). With the shifts in speaking voice, the poet repeatedly reappraises the species boundary. The onomatopoeia of ‘trills’ again echoes the acoustic presence of nonhumans—the ‘trill’ of water also suggesting the sound of the lark, evoking a soundscape of enmeshed ecological connections. The liquid consonant l (‘linked,’ ‘trills,’ ‘glides,’ ‘eels’) links an interlocked stanza that stresses how watery actions shape lithic and biotic processes—a small, local glimpse of the Earth-systems thinking that the concept of the Anthropocene encourages us to adopt. The scale of this section expands and shifts gradually from abiotic to biotic, from stone to water to eel, culminating in a very brief glimpse of larger scales and more wide-ranging journeys. This is the poetic equivalent of a cinematic ‘slow zoom,’ rather than the rapid jump cuts between planetary and local that characterise films such as Bradshaw’s Anthropocene. Oceanic migrations stitch the local to the planetary, through Oswald’s Heaneyesque image of the ocean in the eel. This is ‘scale critique,’ but Oswald’s focus remains on planetary processes, rather than the disembodied, God’s-eye views of the globe that

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thinkers such as Haraway (1991) and Alaimo (2017) have found to be problematic. Oswald adds important auditory dimensions that give equal weight to nonhuman sounds and human voices. Trans-corporeal and demonstrating a gradual, organic shift in scale, this section of the poem interfuses human and nonhuman presences and sounds, a fluid view of species and connection that suggests an expanded, aquatic idea of ecological kinship. Oswald’s focus on water develops a sense of place that is mutable and fluid. A shared heritage seeps through contested national borders (the name of Oswald’s Dart springs from the same oaky etymological root as Heaney’s Derry, D 11). Fish, birds, and human beings migrate as the poem follows waterways and sea-roads. Eels, ‘bright whips of flow’ (5), appear after their journey from the Sargasso; the salmon migrate from ‘all the way from Iceland, from the Faroes’ (8) and ‘get caught off Greenland in the monofilaments’ (41). Salmon migrations are the subject of a dramatic jump from local and personal to planetary and migratory, enacted through enjambement: you let the current work your fly all the way from Iceland, from the Faroes. (8)

The personal perspective of a ‘fisherman and bailiff’ (7) shifts from the fishing fly to the Atlantic salmon migrations and ocean systems that so preoccupied Hughes (Reddick 2017, 308–09). The word ‘fly’ is resonant, evoking not only fishing but human aviation. Oswald’s stanza break marks a dissonant scalar leap between local and oceanic, at this point more like a cinematic jump cut than a slow zoom. The literary allusions in Dart are highly international: the poem creates intertextual links to Ancient Greece and Rome, evoking shifts in culture, time, and place. British authors have a longstanding interest in Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, but when Oswald retells the myth that the founder of Britain was a seafaring Trojan, she defies readings of her work that have characterised her as purely local and provincial: ‘Trojans, you’ve got to sail/till the sea meets the Dart’ (31). Yachts have names from the local lass Lizzie of Lymington to the Greek voyager Oceanides. This list of the names of boats is a wink to Homer’s catalogue of ships. Oswald shows how waterways link the Dart’s estuary to yet more far-flung destinations: ‘Naini Tal’ and ‘Nereid of Qarr’ are named for Himalayan and Albanian cities respectively (34). A boatbuilder dreams of being ‘out of here, in the Med’

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(36) and a lad from Kevicks sets out in a catamaran, bound for New Zealand (35). The Dart thus links the local to transnational networks of travel and trade. Dart certainly celebrates the river, but the ‘spirit of place’ cannot be pinpointed on a map: it is in constant flux. Instead of praising a ‘spirit of place’ that is fixed and provincial, Oswald’s work resonates with Doreen Massey’s ideas of a ‘progressive sense of place’ or Ursula Heise’s arguments for environmental cosmopolitanism. If Anna Tsing’s inter-­ species ‘entanglements’ were land-based and Donna Haraway’s inter-­ species meshes are usually solid (apart from a few tentacular sea creatures), Dart shows that fluidity and trans-corporeality challenge fixed notions of place, species, ‘the human’—even the supposed boundaries between living and non-living. A speaker sees ‘a whole flock of water migrating’ (46), depicting the very notions of place, biotic, and abiotic as defying fixity. Gender, too, is presented as fluid and mutable—and gender is an important part of Oswald’s intervention in the (historically) masculine domains of environmental science and Classical translation.

Bodies of Water: Gender and Fluidity If the speaking voices in Dart are marked by their fluidity, their gender is also shifting and diverse. Pronouns change and characters transform into other species. This is significant for ecocritical interpretations of Oswald’s poetry, and Anthropocene poetry as a field, as my analysis of Oswald’s presentation of gender aims to work against earlier masculinist scholarly biases. The first ecocritical publications were authored by men, largely focusing on male writers. From Meeker’s early engagement with authors such as Shakespeare (1974) to Bate’s analysis of Wordsworth (1991) and Buell’s engagement with Thoreau (1996), the field was initially male dominated. Some scholarly books on Anthropocene poetry from the UK have, at times, echoed the Anthropocene Working Group’s masculine biases (see Introduction and Chap. 1). Yet by deploying the work of Donna Haraway, Stacy Alaimo, and others, this section shows how Dart engages with questions such as women in science, the embodied and necessarily partial nature of scientific knowledge, and the mutability and fluidity of (biological) sex and (socially constructed) gender. Literary interpretations of Oswald’s work have sometimes been influenced by gendered stereotypes, and Oswald’s own presentation of gender as fluid provides an alternative to fixed notions of gender categories.

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The way some critics read Oswald’s work suggests that their interpretations are influenced by gender bias. Thomas Bristow’s analysis of Oswald’s poetry was among the first to apply Anthropocene theories to Oswald’s work. Yet the Anthropocene is a gendered narrative, and its gendered perspective creeps into Bristow’s arguments: ‘her pursuit of an environmental aesthetic seems intuitive, her poetics bodily. While clearly the spellbinding work of an eminent craft practitioner, her body of work seems modest beside the other two poets in this study; altogether less driven’ (78). Women’s intuition, their supposed modesty, writing from their bodies—this catalogue of gendered stereotypes culminates in Bristow’s assessment that the poet who would become the first woman to occupy the Oxford Chair of Poetry is less ‘driven’ than John Kinsella and John Burnside. Yet Oswald’s deployment of environmental science suggests that she is as rational as she is intuitive or instinctive. Women were long excluded from science (Haraway 1991; Merchant 1980), and gender imbalances remain evident in the membership of the Anthropocene Working Group. Oswald’s work presents not only a reappraisal of men’s nature-poetry, but concepts of gender and sexuality that are as fluid as her descriptions of shifts in species. Her depiction of mutable sexuality in nonhuman entities is a playful and irreverent look at a long tradition of men’s poetry about landscapes and watercourses. Dart reappraises the binary, gendered landscapes that one encounters in the work of some major, canonical Faber poets—the feminine landscapes and waterscapes of David Jones (‘she must marl … and she must glen’ (70)), the early Heaney of ‘Come to the Bower’ and ‘Bog Queen’ (N, 24–27), and Hughes’s feminisation of a river as a ‘beautiful, idle woman’ (CPH, 670). Recent scholarship in both biological science and the environmental humanities reflects the way the concepts of gender and sexuality have been challenged and re-evaluated. Donna Haraway’s influential work on gender, science, and animality has long interrogated the implicit biases that inflect supposedly objective science. She characterises the scientific establishment as ‘a kind of invisible conspiracy of masculinist scientists and philosophers replete with grants and laboratories’ (1991, loc 3737). Those involved in this ‘conspiracy’ put their work forward as a disembodied and objective view from nowhere, while displaying little awareness that this supposed objectivity in fact reflects totalising, dominant, and often masculinist ideologies. The antidote to this is that ‘We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate colour and stereoscopic vision,’ since ‘[a]ll Western cultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the

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ideologies of the relations of what we call mind and body, of distance and responsibility, embedded in the science question in feminism’ (loc 3888). As Stacy Alaimo puts it, ‘Feminist theory and gender studies have demonstrated … that many unmarked, ostensibly ungendered fields, modes, and sites of inquiry have been shaped by the social categories of gender, race, class, and colonialism’ (2014, ‘Feminist science studies and ecocriticism’ 189). For Alaimo, ‘Trans-corporeality, as a theoretical site, is where feminist theory, environmental theories, and science studies intertwine’ (190). In their work on the Anthropocene, both Alaimo and Haraway propose alternative forms of knowledge for the ‘Chthulucene’ that are at once more embodied, more aware of feminist and LGBTQIA+ theories, and cognisant of human beings’ embeddedness in intricate multi-species networks. In her 2016 book, Haraway identifies the masculine concept of ‘Homo sapiens—the Human as species, the Anthropos as the human species, Modern Man’ as a product of the knowledge practices of the ‘imperializing eighteenth century’ onwards (2016, 30). Her work on ‘making kin’ in the ‘Chthulucene’ proposes that we cannot consider our actions as separate from ‘other species assemblages’ on which we depend (2016, 99). If her most recent work unpicks species boundaries and sheds light on the meshes and threads that bind us to other species, she also furthers her project to reappraise the gender biases of the scientific establishment through ‘speculative fabulation, science fiction, science fact, speculative feminism’ (2016, 31). The gender of nature is no longer the stereotypical ‘Mother Nature,’ as Carolyn Merchant and others have shown. What has often been called ‘nature’ is revealed to defy historical, human norms of gender and sexuality. Karen Barad considers it to be ‘a lively mutating organism, a desiring radical openness, an edgy protean differentiating multiplicity, an agential dis/continuity, an enfolded reiteratively materializing promiscuously inventive spatiotemporality’ (29). Mutating, metamorphosing, desiring; shifting voice, gender and scale, Oswald’s River Dart is indeed protean (the shape-shifting sea-god Proteus puts in an appearance on the final page). From Classical translation to chemistry and cartography, Dart experiments with forms of knowledge that were once the exclusive preserve of men. Environmental and geological science clearly inflect the book, and in this respect, it can be read as a feminist response to scientific enquiry. For many biologists, other species exhibit a plethora of sexualities and reproductive possibilities. Even Darwin’s barnacles led intersex lives with

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multiple partners (Sandilands, 307), while some fungi have 36,000 sexes.6 Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance (1999) showed that a large number of animal species participate in same-sex sexual activities. Indeed, many species defy binary models of two sexes, as biologist Joan Roughgarden argues in Evolution’s Rainbow (2004), while for Myra Hird, intersexuality and transsexuality are widespread among nonhumans (Hird, 237). In Oswald’s poetry, the liminal, watery world of the river is one where binary notions of gender can be questioned, revised, and overturned. One speaking voice identified as ‘Jan Coo,’ a folkloric character who appears as the ‘groom of the Dart’ (4), begins by speaking as both ‘he’ and ‘I.’ However, three pages later, the naturalist claims: ‘I’ve seen waternymphs’ (7), while the nymphs of Greek mythology, Glico, Cymene and Semaia, appear in counterpoint to the voice of a male tin-extractor (17). This river’s tutelary gods are plural and mutable, their genders changing or flowing together. The poet re-interprets environmental science, too, to suggest that water has both masculine and feminine attributes. The naturalist finds that water is an intersex and mutable entity. She finds that frogspawn is ‘water’s sperm,’ although her words later suggest same-sex desire that goes beyond the species boundary: ‘I get excited by its wetness’ (5). The poem’s culminating lines stress the generative, fecund power of water, but gender remains changeable and unfixed. In a sea-cave where a (male) seal-watcher observes the seals (47), the sea ‘suckles,’ the cave has a ‘fishy genital smell,’ and the seals have ‘grandmother mouths’, suggesting a feminised landscape and its animals being viewed by a male observer. However, the poem soon turns these gender roles on their head: the sea switches gender to that mythical god Proteus, Homer’s Old Man of the Sea, in the final stanza (48). If Eliot called the sex-changing god Tiresias an ‘Old man with wrinkled female breasts’ (71), Oswald’s mention of Proteus evokes further mutability by suggesting that the species boundary is easily breached. The fluidity of gender, species, and water in Oswald’s poetry resonates with theoretical work that combines feminist and queer theory with ecocriticism. Classifications such as male and female, human and animal, river and woman—even science and myth—are playfully undermined. These categories blend and interfuse in Dart, a celebration of water’s exuberant, entangled ecosystems. Bisexual, gender-fluid, trans-corporeal, and

6  Charles Arthur. ‘Scientists discover why fungi have 36,000 sexes.’ Independent, 15 Sept 1999. Web. 23.11. 20. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scientists-discover-whyfungi-have-36000-sexes-1119181.html

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simultaneously local and planetary, the river is a conduit between human and nonhuman.

Bodies of Water: The Trans-corporeal Oh I’m slow and sick, I’m trying to talk myself round to leaving this place, but there’s roots growing round my mouth, my foot’s in a rusted tin. One night I will.

So speaks Jan Coo, the anthropomorphic ‘groom of the Dart,’ who haunts the river (4). This watery body, part-human, part-water, partlitter, sees Oswald blending folklore and scientific fact. Here, she subverts the concept of species and suggests the permeability of human (or at least humanlike) bodies to contamination. Human characters who enjoy wild swimming and water sports are presented as possessing permeable bodies—the human body appears as ‘wave,’ ‘continuous fin,’ and ‘canoe’ (23). These metaphors and similes of joyful interconnection are later replaced by a more sombre consideration of how human bodies are affected by pollutants and diseases. Haraway’s ‘Sympoiesis’ is all too often replaced by exploitation and contamination. Oswald presents riverwater as thoroughly affected by human actions; pollutants seep into human and animal bodies. In this respect, her work resonates with Alaimo’s concept of trans-­corporeality, and Oswald elaborates on the imaginative, literary, and transdisciplinary possibilities of trans-corporeality. The voice of the ‘water abstractor’ in particular suggests important trans-corporeal perspectives. ‘You don’t know what goes into water. Tiny particles of acids and salts. Cryptosporidion smaller than a fleck of talcom [sic] powder which squashes and elongates and bursts in the warmth of the gut.’ The microscopic gaze at pollutants and microscopic parasites culminates in the sobering reflection, ‘This is what keeps you and me alive.’ A human being, ‘two thirds weight water and still swallowing’ (25), is revealed to be highly trans-corporeal, permeable to the river, and constituted by it. The poem shifts scales between the vast (‘180 tonnes of it’) and the tiny (‘I have bound the debris and [….] removed the finest particles’ (25)). The scientific language deployed

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here shifts scales from the intimate and bodily to the microscopic, and back to a more expansive view of the river-system. A prose-like layout and a conversational tone underscore the realism of some of these passages. The passage about the milk factory can also be read as trans-corporeal, but while Alaimo’s book on trans-corporeality focuses mainly on human bodies, this section of Dart suggests the ways animal bodies are used and consumed by humans: ‘I’m a rationalised set-­up, a superplant. Everything’s stainless and risk can be spun off by centrifugal motion: blood, excrement, faecal matter from the farms’ (29). Blood hints at the exploitation of animal bodies, while their waste is removed to avoid trans-corporeal contamination of human bodies: production and consumption are distanced in the ethically dubious way the ‘Capitalocene’s’ systems treat other animals. Oswald sets up the contrast between the ‘stainless’ milk plant and the next voice: that of a sewage worker. His perspective moves seamlessly from macroscopic to trans-­corporeal and back again, showing the water ‘starting with clouds and flushing down through buildings and bodies into this underground grid of pipes’ (30). The sewage worker complains that ‘all the milk we get from Unigate, fats and proteins and detergents foaming up and the rain and all the public sewers pumping all day, it’s like a prisoner up to his neck in water in a cell with only a hand-pump to keep himself conscious, the whole place is on the point of going under’ (30). This prose-like fragment of the sewage worker’s voice hints at the flooding caused by an even vaster problem: climate change.

From Dart to Dunt: Drought and Climate Change An altered climate will be one lasting legacy of our current civilisation, while buildings that human beings have created may survive in the fossil record as possible Anthropocene deposits. If cultural geographers see places as created by human significance, the Anthropocene raises the possibility that they can be unmade by human exploitation. This preoccupation in Oswald’s work begins in Dart, but it becomes powerfully evident in ‘Dunt: A Poem for a Dried-Up River.’ Alterations to river-systems inspire Oswald to consider vast timeframes, and in her later work, they enable her to revise the canon of river-poetry from England and the Classical world. This thematic focus begins with the channelling, water abstraction, and waste that Oswald evokes in Dart, and it becomes most evident in Falling Awake (2016). In Dart, human

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intervention is presented as holding even the sea at bay. The Dart’s estuary once extended farther upstream, before the introduction of artificial weirs, and Oswald’s description of an individual swimmer suggests this long history of river modification: Far off and orange in the glow of it he drifts all down the Deer Park, into the dished and dangerous stones of old walls before the weirs were built, when the sea came wallowing wide right over these floodfed buttercups. (23)

The very courses of rivers and estuaries are presented as vulnerable to human actions. The poem glances back nine centuries to the Norman origins of the Dartington estate,7 but it also suggests changes that occurred farther back, when the West Country’s river valleys (‘rias’) flooded as sea levels rose during the current interglacial.8 But this mention of an encroaching sea evokes a far larger human-caused menace: climate change. The Dart Estuary, formed first by a natural rise in sea levels but deepened due to climate change, can be read as a microcosmic glimpse of the vast temporal and spatial scales of climate disruption. Scale variance in time, but also place, is conveyed through an elongated sentence that spans several drifting lines. Oswald’s work shows how human alterations to watercourses shape the very Earth beneath our feet. Underground structures—including river culverts and sewers—are likely to survive long after buildings above ground have crumbled (Weisman, loc 1674). They stand a particularly high chance of being preserved in future strata (Zalasiewicz interviewed by Bradshaw, see above). Ironically, what will survive of us are sewers and subways.9 Oswald moves far beyond aestheticised depictions of rivers 7  Dartington Trust. ‘Timeline of events.’ 2020. Web. Accessed 30.11.20. https://www. dartington.org/about/our-history/timeline-of-events/ 8  South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. ‘Dart Estuary.’ 2020. Web. Accessed 31. 11. 20. https://www.southdevonaonb.org.uk/estuaries-management-plan/dart-estuary/. For ria formation, see P. L. Friend, A. F. Velegrakis, P. D. Weatherston and M. B. Collins. ‘Sediment transport pathways in a dredged ria system, southwest England.’ Estuarine Coastal and Shelf Science 67 (2006): 491–502. 9  I owe my parody of Larkin to Robert Macfarlane: ‘What will survive of us is plastic—and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.’ ‘Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet forever.’ Guardian 1 Apr 2016. Web. Accessed 02. 12. 20. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planetfor-ever

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when she mentions the ‘underground grid of pipes’ that carry sewage to the plant and release the clean water back into the river (30): this is the thirst that draws the soul, beginning at these boreholes and radial collectors. Whatever pumps and gravitates and gathers in town reservoirs secretly can you follow it rushing under manholes in the straggle of the streets being gridded and channelled up. (25)

If the sewage worker has hinted at the problem of flooding, the ‘thirst’ suggests the opposite issue: drought. Lists of technical vocabulary— ‘boreholes and radial collectors,’ ‘pumps and gravitates and gathers,’ ‘gridded and channelled’—suggest alteration after alteration, an overwhelming tally of artificial changes to the river. In a poem published later on in Oswald’s career, ‘boreholes and radial collectors’ threaten a river’s very existence. Oswald’s examination of human impacts on river-systems becomes particularly critical in Falling Awake (2016). The collection engages with ‘deep time,’ the water cycle, and human interference in natural processes. Taken as a whole, the book displays a recurrent preoccupation with the water cycle, and with processes that disrupt it. The book begins with ‘the story of the falling rain’ that can ‘cool and fill the pipe-work of this song’ (1), a close look at dew (13), rain that is ‘a suicide from the tower-block of heaven’ (22), clouds that recall geological processes, ‘curled like fossils in the troposphere’ (24), and a source of the River Dart that is a ‘weephole’ where walkers have replaced herons (28). Suicide, fossilisation, weeping: if Oswald’s The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996) celebrated rural life and human interactions with nature, Falling Awake is more markedly concerned with environmental damage. The Anthropocene’s ‘temporal torsions’ are exemplified by the long poem ‘Tithonus,’ a musical, pause-filled account of the dawn witnessed by a character drawn from the ‘deep time’ of Greek mythology (45–81). ‘Dunt’ evokes a watercourse that has not merely been damaged, but which faces annihilation. Oswald described Falling Awake as containing ‘some of the short poems I’ve written over the last ten years. Previous collections have focussed on the characters of living things, this one is more interested in duration and it aims to speak relentlessly, anonymously, almost inadvertently, (as insects do)

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without using the mouth.’10 If Dart mingled plural speaking voices, the seemingly ‘anonymous’ and ‘inadvertent’ poetic voices in ‘Dunt’ have a call-and-response dialogue, one nameless voice coaxing another to speak (‘go on,’ FA 35). The poem’s focal point is a Roman carving of the river’s former tutelary deity. Reviewers have commented on distinctive form of ‘Dunt.’ Writer Leaf Arbuthnot described it as ‘an awkward, angular poem, full of repetition and hesitation, which enacts the attempt to coax fluency from dryness.’ Arbuthnot sees river as holding the potential to ‘burst into extravagant life again,’11 but a close look at the poem’s ending gives the lie to such optimism. Colin Burrow finds that the poem ‘risks a structure that emphasises its own deficiency,’ where ‘the imagination has to give itself a jolt—‘go on’ to return to ‘full flow.’ ’12 However, Burrow is mistaken when he reads poetic deficiency into a poem that mirrors ecological breakdown through formal effects. The poem begins in sculptural, orderly tercets, with regular punctuation: Very small and damaged and quite dry, a Roman water nymph made of bone tries to summon a river out of limestone.

Yet this formal pattern is quickly disrupted by lacunae and irregularity. The first page of the poem sets up an antiphonal effect—the repeated ‘try again’ (31) mimetic of the rivermouth’s increasingly desperate attempts at utterance. Oswald reinvents the droughts and silences of a major canonical predecessor: her lines ‘she seemingly has no voice but a throat-clearing rustle/as of dry grass’ (32) cannot fail to echo ‘We whisper together/Are quiet and meaningless/As wind in dry grass’ from ‘The Hollow Men.’ Eliot’s echoey repetition (‘This is the dead land/This is the cactus land’ and ‘The eyes are not here/There are no eyes here’ (90, 91)) is adapted and undergoes further fragmentation in Oswald’s poem. Eliot can be 10  Alice Oswald, interviewee, and Forward Arts Foundation, interviewer. ‘Alice Oswald in conversation with Forward Arts Foundation.’ 2016. Web. Accessed 03. 12. 20. https:// www.for wardar tsfoundation.org/for ward-prizes-for-poetr y/vahni-capildeo/ forward-arts-foundation-in-conversation-with-alice-oswald/ 11  Leaf Arbuthnot. ‘Poet of rivers.’ Times Literary Supplement, 27 Jan 2017. Web. 3rd Dec 2020. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/poet-of-rivers/ 12  Colin Burrow. ‘On Alice Oswald.’ London Review of Books 38.9 (22 Sept 2016): https:// www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n18/colin-burrow/on-alice-oswald

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reread as ecological (Griffiths), and yet Oswald is self-consciously so: the nymph is ‘very endangered now’ (31). ‘Endangered’ is a word usually associated with species on the Red List. Desiccation and drought are equated with sterility and ecological barrenness—‘little shuffling sound as of a nearly dried-up woman’ (33) sets up echoes of Plath’s description of a barren womb that ‘Rattles its pod’ (CPP, 252). Oswald points out the source of the problem in the demand for water: victim of Swindon puddle midden slum of over-greened foot-churn and pats. (34)

The assonance and internal rhyme of ‘victim,’ ‘Swindon,’ and ‘midden’ pin the blame on urban life, while the ‘over-greened’ mud suggests that the river is also eutrophied from agricultural pollution. The poem returns to fluency with recollections of a time before water abstraction and drought. The liquid consonants l and r convey fluidity, and evoke the motion of playful wildlife: ‘the two otters larricking along.’ Volubility returns to the poem’s (double) speaking voices with the memory of a very different water-system: and they say oh they say in the days of better rainfall it would flood through five valleys there’d be cows and milking stools washed over the garden walls and when it froze you could skate for five miles

yes go on. (35)

Here poem operates in full flow, the verb ‘say’ repeated as utterance returns to the speaking voices. The opened floodgates at the end of the poem are a nod to the exuberant flood that ends Eliot’s ‘What the Thunder Said’ from The Waste Land. Yet a long lacuna brings the reader back to the river’s diminished state—‘fish path with nearly no fish in’ (35) suggesting a kenning for a river (‘fish path’) that is unmade by its impoverished biodiversity. Oswald describes her poems as ‘melting ice shapes’13 when 13  Alice Oswald, interviewee, and Claire Armitstead, interviewer. ‘Alice Oswald: “I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else.’ The Guardian 22 Jul 2016. Web. Accessed 03. 02. 22. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/22/ alice-oswald-interview-falling-awake

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r­ ecitation gives them an ephemeral quality. In the metaphor of ‘ice shapes,’ and in her poems of drought and flood, climate change is a shadowy preoccupation in the background.

‘Vertigo’: Climate Change In 2015, Carol Ann Duffy, then the UK’s Poet Laureate, commissioned twenty poets to respond to climate change. Her intention was to supply an ‘emotional or aesthetic connection’ to climate change that science journalism often lacked.14 The resulting poems appeared in The Guardian newspaper, and the first to be published was by Alice Oswald. The newspaper’s heading for the poem was ‘A climate change poem for today: Vertigo by Alice Oswald.’15 By placing this poem first in the series, Duffy was presenting Oswald not as a nature-poet, but as a leading poet of climate change. Duffy showcased Oswald’s poem before the work of the more seasoned Paul Muldoon, and before that of her own multi-award-­ winning editor, Don Paterson. The headline ‘for today’ provides an alternative to the rhetoric of futurity and deferred responsibility that all too often characterises political discussions of climate change. One might expect such poems to appear in a culture section, but instead, the series appeared in The Guardian’s Environment section, more usually the preserve of scientific or political commentary. Oswald selects rain as her topic for ‘Vertigo,’ and deploys a sparse, expansive form that gradually becomes closer-knit. The poem begins: I shuffle forward and tell you the two minute life of rain Starting right now lips open and lidless-cold all-seeing gaze When something not yet anything changes its mind like me And begins to fall In the small hours And the light is still a flying carpet 14  Carol Ann Duffy. ‘An anthology of poetry on climate change.’ The Guardian, 11 May 2015. Web. Accessed 03. 02. 22. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/ may/11/an-anthology-of-poetry-on-climate-change 15  Alice Oswald. ‘A climate change poem for today: Vertigo by Alice Oswald.’ The Guardian. 11 May 2015. Web. Accessed 3 Feb 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/11/vertigo-by-alice-oswald

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Only a little white between worlds like an eye opening after an operation No turning back each drop is a snap decision A suicide from the tower-block of heaven

This poem would appear to have a single lyric speaker, but her identity is tentative and unstable; ‘something’ indeterminate ‘changes its mind like me,’ unsettling the lyric voice, which becomes a hybrid subjectivity attuned to insects and roots. This trans-corporeal look at the water cycle (permeating the speaker’s ‘bones’ later in the poem and the ‘core’ that also suggests Earth’s core) takes place within a poem that defamiliarises the quotidian experience of observing rain and finds in it the hallmark of human alterations to the planet. The metaphor of rain as ‘A suicide from the tower-­ block of heaven’ anthropomorphises it, resonating with the idea that climate change confounds attempts to categorise ‘nature’ and ‘culture’— the ‘suicide’ suggests fears that human beings will hasten their own extinction, which scholars such as Clare Colebrook have raised. The poem continues with ‘melancholy air,’ an ‘operation,’ and a ‘fall’ with its associations of disconnection from an Edenic state: the affective atmosphere of the poem is one of mourning, trauma, and fear, while the motifs of seeing, looking, and an eye operation suggests both the rain’s agential ability to observe a human speaker and the way climate change alters human perceptions of what was once called ‘nature.’ Oswald places her lines closer and closer together, her poetic process reflecting the thickening of the rain. What this poem finds in the rain is environmental melancholy—in the final line, ‘Grief and his Wife’ appear as personifications that mark this out as an elegy for climatic stability, or for the victims of coming floods.

Nobody: Sailing the Anthropocene Ocean Oswald’s collection Nobody (2018), an adaptation of The Odyssey and The Oresteia, is her most sustained exploration so far of the open sea and the damage inflicted on it. Nobody has a great deal to say about the role of the poet, about how the Classical canon can be re-interpreted, and about how poetry and visual art can create complementary perspectives. (A limited edition of the collection contains watercolours by William Tillyer, and the poem was originally commissioned to accompany an exhibition of his

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work, and then rewritten as a standalone collection.)16 Yet my primary focus here is how Nobody presents threatened oceans, and how Oswald breaks down the form of the long poem to respond to the Anthropocene ocean. Oswald’s experimentation with fragmented narratives suggests temporal and geographical compression. She revisits and breaks up two narrative patterns from her Classical source-texts: the voyage and tragedy. When Oswald’s poetry reaches the open ocean, it resonates with important new work on Anthropocene seas. Scientists, filmmakers, writers, and cultural critics alike are grappling with the challenge of representing the Anthropocene oceans. In popular visual culture, series such as the BBC’s The Blue Planet helped to raise public awareness of problems including plastic pollution in the sea. Influential figures in the environmental sciences, such as Anthropocene Working Group geologists Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, are penning popular science books about the issues our oceans face.17 Ocean acidification is one of the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ proposed as a ‘safe operating space’ for human beings.18 In the humanities, the ‘blue humanities’ are an important, oceanic line of enquiry for recent scholars. The ‘blue humanities’ point out ‘the environmental orientation of oceanic and other aquatic scholarship’ (Alaimo, ‘Introduction: Science Studies and the Blue Humanities’, 429). The deep oceans present challenges for those who wish to represent them, as so few of us actually have access to their depths (429). When popular science publications depict the deep seas as ‘worlds apart’ and their creatures as ‘alien,’ ethical problems arise because ‘they imaginatively remove them from the planet, from the terrain of human concern’ (Alaimo, ‘The Anthropocene at Sea’ 2017, 154). The ‘aquatic Anthropocene,’ as Alaimo calls it (‘Introduction,’ 431), provokes its own particular forms of scalar dissonance. The vast depths of the oceans, their dizzying expanses, and the geological processes that have created them, pose challenges for cultural practitioners who want to represent them. The Anthropocene oceans are paradoxical spaces, ‘harbouring both compressed and expansive temporalities’ (430). Alaimo and others are examining how marine environments, often considered to be distant from 16  Judith Thurman. ‘Alice Oswald’s Homeric Mood.’ New Yorker, 17 Aug 2020. https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/24/alice-oswalds-homeric-mood 17  Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams. Ocean Worlds: The story of seas on Earth and other planets. Oxford: Oxford UP 2014. 18  Rockström, Johan, W. L. Steffen, Kevin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chaplin III. ‘A safe operating space for humanity.’ Nature 461 (24 Sept 2009): 472–475.

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terrestrial places, are represented in Anthropocene culture. She contends: ‘As the environmental humanities grapples with the expansiveness of geological time, marine science suggests an eerie temporal compression’ (Alaimo, ‘The Anthropocene at Sea’, 153). Unknown species are being driven to extinction—an indication of how ‘human knowledge is not adequate to account for, nor certainly to ameliorate, the enormity of the effects of a geological epoch distinguished by anthropogenic consequences’ (154). As Alaimo puts it, ‘the pelagic and abyssal seas—so rarely thought—as zones that compress, transform, unmoor, or render paradoxical the scales of time and distance, the taxonomies, and other conceptual navigation systems’ (159). In literary studies, too, critics are commenting on the expansiveness of oceans and the forms of scalar dissonance authors create to represent them. For literary critic Hester Blum, ‘oceanic studies unmoors our critical perspective from the boundaries of the nation’ and recalibrates ‘the gauges of time and space’ (26). Poetry critics are also taking ecopoetics out to sea. Poetry about the oceans, informed by environmental science, is creating experimental new directions for contemporary poets. Mandy Bloomfield’s work on North American poetry about ocean plastics points out that ocean worlds are ‘natural-cultural assemblages’ that lead us to negotiate ‘varying human and more-than-human scales’ (504). Her view is that experimental poetry makes distinctive interventions in representing the Anthropocene oceans, through ‘juxtaposition, linkage, linguistic porosity, and indeterminacy, as well as its nonnarrative temporalities’ (504). Natural tides and human voyages mean that ‘the mobility associated with the ocean, both in its materiality and in its cultural imaginaries,’ can play a role in trans-corporeal poetry ‘across varying scales’ (513). However, Bloomfield examines the work of Stephen Collis, Evelyn Reilly, and Adam Dickinson, all of them from the United States and Canada. Reilly’s Styrofoam is already the subject of extensive critical commentary in ecocriticism and ecopoetics, and Dickinson’s The Polymers is widely researched in conjunction with Reilly’s work.19 Ecopoetics scholarship has  For work on Reilly’s Styrofoam, see Clark 2019 70, 75, Keller, 2017 Chap. 2, Heather Milne 2018 Chap. 4, Joshua Shuster. ‘Reading the Environs: Towards a Conceptual Ecopoetics.’ In Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne, eds. Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. Iowa City: Iowa UP 2018, pp. 208–27 (220–21), Farrier 2019 77–82, and Vermeulen 37–42. For critical engagements with Dickinson’s The Polymers, see Keller 2017 Chap. 2, Farrier 2019 83, Joshua Shuster. ‘Reading the Environs: Towards a Conceptual Ecopoetics.’ In Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne, eds. Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. Iowa City: Iowa UP 2018, pp. pp. 208–27 (221–27). 19

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formerly engaged with somewhat more poetry from North America than from other regions (witness scholarly books by Knickerbocker, Keller, Milne, Hume, and Osborne), and there is scope to cast the critical net wider. Alexandra Campbell’s bringing together of Scottish and Caribbean poets is one such productive line of enquiry that draws on comparative methods from world literatures. Campbell shows how poets engage with the transnational flow of plastic debris, evoking ‘a growing anxiety regarding precarious environmental futures’ (196). She finds that Scottish poets Jen Hadfield and Kathleen Jamie ‘link together contemporary stories of production, exploitation and pollution that circulate across the global ocean’ (206). Oswald’s work voyages across the surface and examines the depths, considering issues of the oceans’ perceived alterity, their placelessness, and the eerie temporalities of Anthropocene pollution. As her career develops from Dart to A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Nobody, Oswald’s long poems become increasingly fragmented—a formal preoccupation that suggests broken ecological meshes and environmental uncertainty. If Dart often captures characters’ confident knowledge of estuaries and shorelines, in Nobody, we are plunged into the deep uncertainties of the Anthropocene oceans. In Dart, many characters present the estuary and seashore as intimately understood, and navigable with modern equipment. (A naval cadet boasts that ‘I know radar and sonar’ (44).) Even though the River Dart and its complex water cycle puts received notions of ‘place’ under pressure, the collection has a linear structure that takes the reader from source to sea. The cyclical, tidal rhythms and dreamlike uncertainty of A Sleepwalk on the Severn bridges the methods of Dart and Nobody. In Nobody, understanding of the deep sea is steeped in difficulty and ambiguity. Narrative, too, is shattered and disjointed. Oswald conveys this through a broken, episodic mixture of multiple Classical myths and intertexts. The Odyssey and The Oresteia are anchor-points for the book—in the Jonathan Cape edition, Oswald notes that ‘This poem lives in the murkiness between those two stories. Its voice is wind-blown, water-damaged, as if someone set out to sing the Odyssey, but was rowed to a stony island and never discovered the poem’s ending’ (2019, 23). Yet the texts of Aeschylus and Homer are not the full story: Oswald splices their narratives together with fragments of host of other Latin and Greek sources in translation. Many of these relate the stories of characters transforming from humans to animals, birds, or trees: a reworking of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Ceyx and Alcyone, Baucis and Philemon, Icarus’s fall and integration into the sea). If Hughes’s adaptations of the Metamorphoses are

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environmentally aware, posthuman, and unafraid to confront human extinction, Oswald’s interpretations of Classical myths are radically disjointed. The broken narratives suggest a time when faith in stories of human progress is shaken. Characters, pronouns, and mythical storylines float loose from their narrative moorings. If Derek Walcott loosely followed the book-by-book structure of Homer’s original in Omeros (1990), Oswald’s interpretation of her source-­ texts is structurally uncertain. In this, Nobody pushes the boundaries of received notions of narrative and authorship—the metamorphoses in the poem also blurring the boundaries of ‘the human’ as a category. The ‘nobody’ of the title is the name Odysseus assumes to trick the cyclops Polyphemus (Odyssey, 180), but it also resonates with Oswald’s use of changeable, shifting, and uncertain narrative voices. This uncertainty begins with Oswald’s quotation of a passage of The Odyssey, in which an unnamed poet, sent to guard Agamemnon’s wife, appears as a minor character. Left to be eaten by seabirds on a deserted island, this character emerges twice in two, identical epigraphs that begin the 2018 limited edition (Oswald 2018, unnumbered page). The ocean enables Odysseus to undertake his eventful voyage home, but for him—and for the abandoned poet—the waves are fraught with danger. In ancient Greek literature, the sea is ambivalent: ‘It is a source of food and a path of communication, but also a disquieting empty and barren space that evokes death and can even lead to Hades’ (Beaulieu, 2). Oswald captures the ambivalence towards the sea in her source-texts, but she gives her descriptions of the ocean a contemporary gloss by mentioning modern views of deep-sea creatures and the pollutants that threaten them. Homer envisaged the sea as ‘unharvested’ in contrast to the fecund land (Beaulieu, 2). For Alaimo and others, scientific understanding of the sheer richness of life in deep-sea ecosystems is a recent development, quickly followed by the realisation of how threatened these ecosystems are. In Oswald’s collection, anachronistic modern pollutants—polystyrene, aeroplane contrails, polythene, oil— unsettle the narrative temporalities of Classical myth. This experimental use of timeframes reflects an ocean not merely in flux, but suffering profound human-caused damage. In Nobody, we are cast adrift, sent into ocean gyres, clutching at narrative fragments as if at chunks of polluting debris. Narrative breakdown reflects several environmental preoccupations: climate change, uncanny shifts in what it means to be ‘human,’ temporal compression and spatial vastness, and the dire environmental risks associated with the Anthropocene.

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When Oswald breaks up well-known narratives such as the murder of Agamemnon and the fall of Icarus, she creates an uncanny form of temporal distortion that suggests both human and ecological dilemmas. In doing so, she revises received notions of narrative and plot, when traditional, human-centred storylines might not be capable of representing the uncertainties and contractions we face in the Anthropocene. For Clark, ‘Linguistic narrative’ is so human centred that it is inadequate to the vast intellectual challenge of representing the Anthropocene (2015, 187). Clark’s 2015 monograph did not engage with the many experimental ways in which poets are revising narrative, although his 2019 book does so. Indeed, in Nobody, narrative is stripped of much of its structure, with the book breaking and re-stitching plotlines such as tragedy, the quest, and the voyage.20 Bloomfield finds the poetry of Evelyn Reilly to be ‘nonnarrative, even antinarrative,’ suggesting that ‘an ecopoetics involving reversion, revision, and even impasse may well be suited for engaging with temporalities that do not fit with the forward march of capitalist modernity’ (523). If other critics have viewed poetry’s ability to shift between timeframes and contain multiple meanings as appropriate for representing issues such as climate change (Auge and O’Brien, 2), the broken storylines in Nobody do indeed constitute non-narrative ecopoetic experiments. Yet the edition of the collection that contains watercolour art by William Tillyer also fragments poetic art itself. In the 22 Publishing edition that contains the paintings (2018), a series of watercolours begins and ends the collection, with occasional images spliced into the body of the poem. Oswald wrote her poem as a commissioned response to these watercolours, and in contrast to projects such as Weeds and Wildflowers, the artworks and the poems are combined in ways that disrupt and disjoint both media, as often as they draw out their complementary themes. Paradoxically, the 2018 edition of Nobody incorporating Tillyer’s paintings appears to be less responsive to the artworks than the 2019 edition without them. The 2019 text-only edition adds tints of Tillyer’s colour-palette: ‘it’s not myself it’s just dark purple’ (N 2019, loc 156), ‘thronged and pitch-green’ (loc 281). At the beginning of the 2018 edition, a series of Tillyer’s swirling, 20  For the way such narrative templates have been used from Classical to contemporary authors, see Christopher Booker. The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. London: Continuum, 2004. For the way in which narrative templates are used by the Anthropocene Working group, see Yvonne Reddick and Marco Caracciolo. ‘Reading Anthropocene Science: Narrative Templates and the Anthropocene Working Group.’ Forthcoming.

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marine forms in blue and green is followed by an underwater view where a setting sun hangs heavily over the waves on unnumbered pages. In the text, Oswald relates a fragment of the myth of Leucothea, who saves Odysseus from drowning, only for it to be interrupted by a dark, swirling watercolour vortex (2018, 15). Collaborations between poets and visual artists are many,21 but in this instance, Tillyer’s watercolours are positioned as lacunae and visual pauses in an already fragmented long poem. Nobody persistently clashes together scientific and mythical perspectives on the sea, juxtaposing different timeframes: it is deep it is a dead field fenceless a thickness with many folds in it promiscuous and mingling which in its patience always wears away the hard things. (5)

The ‘dead field’ is an adaptation of Homer’s epithet ‘unharvested,’ but it also evokes contemporary, scientific understanding of oceanic ‘dead zones.’ (Fields, harvesting, and the chemicals used to grow modern crops are one of the reasons why these ‘dead zones’ exist.) The ‘folds’ suggest the intricate temperature gradients in the deep sea, which are only understood thanks to modern science. Contemporary images of deep-sea creatures from underwater photographs and nature films are spliced into Greek myths—‘transparent wisps of things with eye-like organs/sink to the seabed in shells of extraordinary beauty’ appear in the same stanza as the marooned Philoctetes (71). On the same page, the murder of Agamemnon is juxtaposed with a scientifically informed yet poetically embellished description of a sea creature: There is a channel where a small sea god swims on translucent wings five miles down in deep unflowered midnight where it snows and heaps up salt this goblin-god with ghost-grace frictionlessly moves or hangs like a pickled heart in the sea-jar nothing I say sinks down that far. (62) 21  See Fay Godwin and Ted Hughes’s Remains of Elmet (1979), Seamus Heaney and Rachel Giese’s Sweeney’s Flight (1992), or Simon Armitage and Niki Medlik’s New Cemetery (2017).

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Oswald collides images of scientific enquiry with the mythical realm of ‘sea-gods,’ suggesting that poetry needs both modes of thinking to comprehend what is happening to the deep oceans. The ‘sea-jar’ and the image of the ‘pickled heart’ evoke a specimen bottle that might hold a deep-sea creature after it is drawn to the surface, while ‘marine snow’ is organic debris that settles at the seabed. The ‘sea-god’ suggests underwater species named for characters from Greek mythology, such as jellyfish (Medusozoa) or amoebas (a freshwater species is called Amoeba proteus, after the shape-­ shifting god of the sea). The mythical collides with the Anthropocene ocean in disorienting ways. For Mandy Bloomfield, contemporary poetry engaging with the sea emphasises how ‘uncertainties and “immensities” inhere not in a transcendental or “mystical” realm … ocean habitats cannot be framed in metaphysical or symbolic terms but must be engaged in material ways’ (517). The 2019 Jonathan Cape edition gives a vast panorama from individual character to cosmos: Tell me muse about this ancient passer-by who found himself adrift in infinite space with all the planets flying in loops around him like listless gods all kinds of light and unlight he witnessed until his eye-metal rusted away and now there is no going back no edge no law. (loc 543)

The scientific ‘God-trick’ of seeing Earth from space (Haraway 1991, loc 3871) is complicated and altered here—the unsettlingly hybrid ‘eye-­metal’ rusting as a result of a dominant, global gaze. The character—is it hubristic Agamemnon or drowned Icarus?—is left unnamed, but this stanza does evoke an ‘edge’ in human perception that resonates with Clark’s concept of the Anthropocene as a threshold in human awareness of environmental damage. The ‘temporal torsions’ in this passage mingle the deep time and vast scales of deep space, the deep time of Classical antiquity, and an uncanny uncertainty about contemporary scientific inquiry. Oswald introduces turbidity into the waters by blending the timeframes of voyaging spacecraft and Greek mythology. ‘[Y]our quick turnover like a wedge of polystyrene’ (5): few interpreters of the Classical canon would be bold enough to describe Homer’s ‘godlike Odysseus’ in this way.22 Here, Oswald clashes together the high  For Homer’s epithet for Odysseus, see The Odyssey Book 6 126.

22

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culture of Homeric poetry with lowly polystyrene, also splicing together different chronologies. She evokes three distinct timeframes. Firstly, the ‘quick turnover’ suggests the language of manufacturing disposable consumer goods (the polystyrene packaging that is quickly made and hastily thrown away). In ‘Capitalocene’ economies, the need for economic ‘turnover’ requires such goods. Yet polystyrene has a lifespan that extends far beyond the lifetime of its use—and its users. Polystyrene is an example of what Timothy Morton calls a ‘hyperobject’—a material entity that is vastly distributed in space and time (2010, 130, see also Morton 2013). ‘Alongside global warming, “hyperobjects” will be our lasting legacy,’ writes Morton. These materials range from ‘humble Styrofoam to terrifying plutonium’ (2010, 130), and they will outlast current social and biological processes. Styrofoam is the title and subject matter of Evelyn Reilly’s 2009 collection. For Mandy Bloomfield, ‘Although the material fact of “Styrofoam deathlessness” invokes a sense of futurity, the unthinkable scale of its immortality also problematizes the temporality of future orientation’ (522). The longue durée of its survival thus defies the usual timeframes of epic poetry. This raises questions about the lifespan of human cultural products, and how the temporal torsions of the Anthropocene lead us to reconsider such lifespans. The Odyssey is nearly three thousand years old and has been recited, read, translated, and adapted during its lifetime. Three temporalities collide: the temporal setting of Homer’s source-text, the present of consumer culture, and the uncanny future life of the polystyrene wedge. Oswald’s poetry explores the ‘eerie temporal compression’ that Alaimo finds in accounts of marine science, highlighting our society’s polluting legacy as an ironic cultural legacy. Indeed, the very nature of ‘the human’ is interrogated and questioned in Nobody. This happens when Oswald evokes metamorphoses but also more unsettling environmental dilemmas where a human presence disappears altogether. The Sirens who threatened to drive Odysseus’s men mad are not only presented as posthuman hybrids (‘quick-winged/with women’s faces’), but Oswald equates their songs with climate-changing pollution: ‘contrails of song’ (4). Human characters persistently transform into nonhumans: when an unnamed ‘you’ stands beneath trees: ‘your feet become cormorants your face is a wafting/medusa your hands make aerial roots’ (35). Baucis, whom a grateful Jupiter turned into a tree, appears on an unnumbered page at the end of the 2018 edition, but this confounding of categories evokes a bafflingly complex mesh of human and nonhuman presences across forests and seas. When Oswald describes Baucis’s face as

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transforming into a ‘medusa’ (both the fabled Gorgon and the scientific name for a jellyfish), she again blends the mythical and the scientific. Yet in the following stanza, human presences are displaced: ‘When trees take over an island and say so all at once/some in pigeon some in pollen with a coniferous hiss’ (37). It is as if the poet marooned on the island at the beginning of Oswald’s book has transformed into other species. The unnamed ‘massless mind’ at the end of this stanza that speaks using the lyric I could be human, nonhuman, or the imagined consciousness of an ecosystem: I wish I was there or there. (37)

Indeed, human presences are not merely transformed and displaced: the poem makes them dissolve completely: there or there he thinks and his mind immediately as if passing its beam through cables flashes through all that water and lands less than a second later on the horizon and someone with a telescope can see his tiny thought-­ form floating on the sea-surface wondering what next. (74–5)

The sentence above spans two double pages, in far smaller greyscale typeface, as if the text itself is dissolving. Tillyer’s watercolours on the following pages suggest black forms in the depths of the sea, sometimes with depictions of sunlight mingling with the sombre waves. The poem ends with a catalogue of characters that have appeared in the fragmented narratives: Helios Ajax Athene Andromache Hermes Poseidon Nobody Nobody

The typeface lightens and appears to dissolve. Human and anthropomorphic characters are first named, then become ‘Nobody,’ then disappear

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altogether. The spectre of profound uncertainty hangs over Nobody, and this dissolution of human presences evokes the direst problems of the Anthropocene. Nobody is haunted by drownings and murders. Oswald’s image of the sea as a ‘dead field’ and her re-invention of the Sirens’ songs as ‘contrails’ resonate with the concept of the Anthropocene as an epoch of violence and risk. The book returns repeatedly to drownings: ‘a man is a nobody underneath a big wave’ (2018, 27), ‘the crowded/ragged dead in the crypts of the sea’ (34). Indeed, greater emphasis is placed on the risk of drowning than on the threat of tragic violence—arguably a surprising focus, given that The Oresteia is one of Oswald’s intertexts. Nobody is responsive to the drownings and transformations that occur in The Odyssey: Ino’s leap into the sea transforms her into the goddess Leucothea, able to take the form of a shearwater and rescue Odysseus from drowning (Beaulieu, 162; Oswald 2018, 27). Yet drowning is not invariably followed by mythical metamorphosis in Oswald’s broken retelling of the myths. The threat of drowning appeared in Dart, resurfaced in A Sleepwalk on the Severn and made its presence felt in Falling Awake. In the Anthropocene, when a writer repeatedly encourages us to fear death by water, a disturbing planetary preoccupation rises from the depths. Climate change will drown coastal buildings and cast refugees adrift. Nobody can be read as recreating Greek mythology for a time when climate change could transform the sea to a ‘dead field’ and dissolve human presences. Proteus, Homer’s Old Man of the Sea, appears in the 2019 edition as a composite being made of contaminated water, pollutants, and dead creatures: Whereupon the water turned in its cloak and shook itself into flames and burnt itself into fur and tore itself into flesh and told everything and instantly shrank into polythene and withered and bloomed and resolved to be less faltering and failed and became a jellyfish a mere weakness of water a morsel of ice a glamour of oil and became a fish-smell and then a rotting seal and then an old mottled man full of mood-swings. (2019, loc 344)

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Mythical transformations are revisited for an unsettling age of contaminating polythene, where withering and blooming are followed by faltering failure. The ‘morsel of ice’ and ‘glamour of oil’ cannot fail to evoke the link between climate change, rising sea levels, and fossil fuels. Oswald is revising her own description of Proteus at the end of Dart, and the portrait of him in Nobody is redolent of widespread environmental breakdown. The dissolution of human presences at the end of the book gives an uncanny glimpse of ‘the world without us.’ Places where humans are absent, and even the threat of our extinction, are increasingly important for journalists, philosophers, and ecocritics.23 The series of watercolours that ends the 2018 edition of Nobody provides a visual cue for the ecological dimensions of Oswald’s poem, which is arguably her most sombre work since Memorial. Tillyer introduces darker colours into his palette, with four images bearing a black stain. One of the last suggests a red sun hanging heavily over waves, the image dominated by a murky smear resembling an oil slick. Fossil fuels, climate change, and the Anthropocene oceans’ eerie compression of temporalities are evoked in a highly unsettling poetic image: my footprints far into the future go on sunkenly walking underneath me. (Oswald 2018, 6)

Our carbon footprints go on ahead of us into the ‘deep time’ of the far future.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. ‘Feminist Science Studies and Ecocriticism: Aesthetics and Entanglement in the Deep Sea.’ In Greg Garrard, ed. The Oxford Companion to Ecocriticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. Pp. 188–204. ———. ‘The Anthropocene at Sea: Temporality, paradox, compression.’ In Heise, Ursula, Jon. 2017. ———. ‘The Anthropocene at Sea: Temporality, paradox, compression.’ In Heise, Ursula, Jon Christensen and Michelle Neimann, eds. The Routledge companion to the environmental humanities. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. 153–61.

23  Alan Weisman. The World Without Us. London: Random House, 2008. Claire Colebrook. Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction. Vol I.  Michigan: Michigan UP, 2014. Greg Garrard, ‘Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy.’ SubStance 127, 41.1 (2012): 56.

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———. ‘Introduction: Science Studies and the Blue Humanities.’ Configurations 27.4 (Fall 2019): 429–31. Barad, Karen. ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity (the Authorized Version)’ Kvinder, Køn og forskning/Women, Gender and Research, 1–2 (2012): 29. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. 2nd edn. Beaulieu, Marie-Claire. The Sea in the Greek Imagination. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2016. Bloomfield, Mandy. ‘Widening Gyre: A Poetics of Ocean Plastics.’ Configurations 27.4 (Fall 2019): 501–23. Blum, Hester. ‘Terraqueous Planet: The Case for Oceanic Studies.’ In Amy J Elias and Christian Moraru, eds. The Planetary Turn: Art, Dialogue, and Geoaesthetics in the 21st Century. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2015. Pp. 25–36. Campbell, Alexandra. ‘Atlantic exchanges: The poetics of dispersal and disposal in Scottish and Caribbean seas.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55.2 (2019): 195–208. Campbell-Johnston, Rachel. ‘Summer reading.’ The Times. 3 Jul 2002, p. 3. Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshhold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Clark, Timothy, The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. Drangsholt, Janne Stigen. ‘Homecomings: Poetic reformulations of dwelling in Jo Shapcott, Alice Oswald, and Lavinia Greenlaw.’ Nordic Journal of English Studies 15.1 (2016): 1–23. Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber & Faber, 1963. Farrier, David. “Like a Stone’: Ecology, Enargeia, and Ethical Time in Alice Oswald’s Memorial.’ Environmental Humanities 4 (2014): 1–18. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Abingdon: Routledge, 1991. Kindle. ———. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016. Hird, Myra. ‘Animal Trans.’ in Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird, eds. Queering the Non/Human. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. 227–48. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Barry B. Powell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Howarth, Peter. “Water’s Soliloquy’: Soundscape and Environment in Alice Oswald’s Dart.’ In Neil Alexander and David Cooper, eds. Poetry and Geography: Space and Place in Post-war Poetry. Liverpool: Liverpool UP 2013, 190–203. Jones, David. The Anathemata. London: Faber & Faber, 2010 [1952]. Jones, Jeremy B. and Emily H.  Stanley, eds. Stream Ecosystems in a Changing Environment. (Amsterdam: Elsevier 2016) pp. 491–524. Kelly, Jason L. ‘Preface’. In Jason M. kelly, Philip V. Scarpino, Helen Berry, James Syvitski, and Michael Meybeck, eds. Rivers of the Anthropocene. Oakland: California UP, 2016. Pp. xv–xxvi.

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Keller, Lynn. Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2017. Lowell Duckert in Voices from the Anthropocene – the lagoon as liminal space, ambiguous. P. 195. Martindale, Kym. ‘“Not yet not yet…” Forms of Defiance, Forms of Excess in the Poetry of Alice Oswald.’ In Ana María Sánchez-Arce, ed. Identity and Form in Contemporary Literature. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. Pp. 158–73. Mellor, Leo. ‘Woods, Etc.’ Times Literary Supplement 3 June 2005, 311. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. 2nd edn. New York: Harper, 1990 [1980]. Milne, Heather. Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics. Iowa: Iowa UP, 2018. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2013. Kindle. Oswald, Alice, author, and William Tillyer, artist. Nobody. London: 21 Publishing, 2018. Pinard, Mary. ‘Voice(s) of the Poet-Gardener: Alice Oswald and the Poetry of Acoustic Encounter.’ Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 10.2 (Spring 2009): 17–32. Reddick, Yvonne. Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Royer, T.  V. ‘Human-Dominated Rivers and River Management in the Anthropocene.’ In Spahr, Juliana. Well Then There Now. Boston: Black Sparrow, 2011. Syvitski, James. ‘Foreword.’ In Jason M. Kelly, Philip V. Scarpino, Helen Berry, James Syvitski, and Michael Meybeck, eds. Rivers of the Anthropocene. Oakland: California UP, 2016. Pp xi–xv. Wheatley, David. ‘This is Proteus, whoever that is.’ 13 Jul 2002. Web. 29 Aug 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jul/13/featuresreviews. guardianreview13 Zalasiewicz, Jan and Mark Williams. ‘The Anthropocene Ocean in Its Deep Time Context.’ In Davor Vidas and Peter Johan Schei, eds. The World Ocean in Globalisation. Leiden: Brill, 2011, pp. 19–35.

CHAPTER 6

Pascale Petit: Entanglement, Animals, and the ‘Anthropocene Extinction’

‘There is going to come a stage when so many of the forests in the word disappear that all we’re going to have left are forests inside glass boxes. And the same with animals in the zoo—I think in the end, the only animals left will be the ones in the zoo. So, I’m trying to hang onto something.’ Here, Pascale Petit was speaking in 1983, during her career as a sculptor (Concord Media 1990). However, her words are prescient of her later engagements with endangered species through poetry. Franco-Welsh writer Petit trained as a visual artist and is an acclaimed poet, the author of eight major collections to date. Her seventh collection, Mama Amazonica, won both the Ondaatje Prize and the inaugural Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry. The Laurel Prize marked a threshold in Petit’s career: the poets and nature writers on the judging panel recognised the centrality of environmental issues to her work, and the significance of what she had contributed to British poetry. Petit is respected in the poetry community—she is a founder of the Poetry School and a former editor of high-­ calibre journal Poetry London. Her collections have been shortlisted four times for Britain’s most prestigious poetic award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and she has chaired the prize’s judging panel. Petit has spoken, though, about the way she initially felt like an outsider to the poetic establishment. This may explain why her poetry has often remained unanalysed by literary critics in academic circles. There has been some scholarly examination of her deployment of the lyric and her presentation of gender, but scholarly

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e­ cocritical and ecopoetics publications have not engaged with her work. This is a missed opportunity, given how crucial endangered species are to Petit’s early writing, and how issues such as extinction and climate change are at the core of her latest collections. In this chapter, I deploy research on Petit’s private archive, never seen before by scholars. This illuminates the way her ecopoetry develops at a draft level. Interviews with the author offer further insights into the creative process and the environmental issues that she explores in different poems.

Petit’s Ecopoetry Scholarship to date has been largely limited to Petit’s relationship with confessional poetry and her presentation of gender. Certain readings have viewed her work as mythical, only to claim that her lyric poetry is (simultaneously and unmediatedly) autobiographical. Yet there were strong ecological themes in Petit’s earliest collections, and such ecological preoccupations date back to the sculptures she discussed in the film quoted above; these have only become more prominent in her collections from 2017 and 2020. If Petit’s poetry is analysed in the light of ecocritical and Anthropocene theories, the possibility of very different readings emerges. When Petit speaks for, or as, animals, who (or what) is the lyric ‘I’? When her poems suggest that animals and even entire rainforests can experience trauma, how does this reshape critical readings of her poetry as ‘confessional’? Emotion and gender violence are the main focus of existing critical readings of Petit’s work. Critic and author Fiona Sampson places Petit in a poetic grouping that she terms ‘post-surrealism and deep play’ (loc 3301). Sampson emphasises Petit’s (undeniably important) evocation of powerful emotions. She groups Petit with poets who ‘rehearse […] emotional experiences’ (Sampson, loc. 878) and writes that Petit’s poetic context, a long tradition of confessional writing, is driven by ‘emotional momentum’ (3387–8). While the affective dimensions of Petit’s work are indeed crucial, such readings risk downplaying its political themes and its aesthetic strategies—not to mention its environmental preoccupations. Sampson’s analysis more productively considers Petit’s use of ‘fantastical, and fantastically juxtaposed, imagery’ (3361) and titles which use ‘images from the natural world’ (3441). However, there are moments when the poetry is read as rather straightforwardly autobiographical, even when Petit is conjuring up the voices of others, such as Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (3439).

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Poet and scholar Zoë Brigley’s analysis of Petit’s work, in contrast, stresses Petit’s deployment of poetic personae when tackling highly charged poetic material about sexual violence. For Brigley, Petit challenges stereotypical critical judgements that see women’s confessional poetry as revealing ‘the awfulness of femininity’ (Rees-Jones, ctd in Brigley, 21). According to Brigley’s reading, Petit is ‘a consummate wearer of masks’ (2008 27), who uses this tactic to give voice to ‘a defiant female self’ (25). She writes that Petit does so to ‘reformulate the politics of sexual violence, radically reconceptualizing the traditional meaning of victimhood, the relationship between victims and perpetrators, and the stubbornly gendered notions of activity and passivity’ (22). Brigley’s doctoral thesis examined Petit’s writing about connections with nature in depth. Brigley recognises that Petit creates ‘a blurring of the human and nature,’ particularly of women and other living things (2007, 153). She explores the complexities of Petit’s use of Amazonian imagery in her early collections; while some might view this as cultural appropriation, Petit uses the mythology of Amazonian peoples to highlight the deficiencies and patriarchal barbarity of western culture (2007, 168). Poet and ecocritic Karen McCarthy Woolf, whom Petit mentored, is quick to perceive the ecological strains in Mama Amazonica. When discussing the links between personal and ecological grief with fellow poet Dom Bury, McCarthy Woolf said: ‘Pascale Petit’s Mama Amazonica is a good example [of poetry that is simultaneously personal and ecological]: the abuse suffered by her mentally ill mother is situated against the same abuse that a corrupt humanity is inflicting on the Amazon.’1 In Petit’s collections Mama Amazonica (2017) and Tiger Girl (2020), feminist and ecopoetic themes are closely intertwined. Petit links both themes to a sense of environmental cosmopolitanism. In articles and interviews, Petit has discussed the way she approaches such (often challenging) material. The authors with whom she affiliates illuminate her environmental consciousness and her interest in poetic traditions from outside Britain. In a 2013 interview, Petit said that she was long considered an ‘outsider’ to the British literary and artistic establishment.2 She had commented in an earlier interview that ‘the fact that I’m not British’ encouraged her to 1  McCarthy Woolf, Karen, and Dom Bury. ‘Grievous Bodily Harm—Karen McCarthy Woolf and Dominic Bury talk climate change, grief and decolonising ecopoetics.’ Magma 72: The Climate Change Issue (Autumn 2018): 20–23 (p. 21). 2  University of Aberystwyth, ‘Poet Pascale Petit in Conversation with Devolved Voices.’ 11 July 2013. Web. Accessed 26.03.21. https://wordpress.aber.ac.uk/devolved-voices/ media/interview-pascale-petit-2/

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look for poetic ‘models’ from ‘America, Europe, Australia’ (ctd in Brigley 2008, 22). These poetic ‘models’ include American poet Sharon Olds, whose ‘apparently personal’3 poetry is often linked in articles and reviews to the confessional writing of Plath and Sexton (Petit 2005). (Note Olds’s caveat: ‘apparently personal.’) It is Petit’s view that such work is not confessional, but universal: ‘As long as there is brutality in society this personal is universal’ (2005). When Petit says that she looks to Australian poetry for affiliation,4 an important poetic ‘model’ is her mentor Les Murray. Murray praised Petit’s ‘powerful mythic imagination’ in the Times Literary Supplement (quoted on the back cover of Fauverie), while Murray’s book Translations from the Natural World (1993) provides an important ecopoetic source of inspiration. Petit’s poetry can be described as developing intertextual links with two very different lyric modes: Sharon Old’s lyric ‘I,’ which speaks of ‘apparently personal’ issues that are prevalent in wider society, and Murray’s lyric ‘I’ that attempts to voice animals’ perspectives. Petit describes her approach in Mama Amazonica as marrying the themes of trauma and nature: ‘All life involves trauma, to varying degrees, and poetry can make sense of that, can transform it. I don’t find poems that are just about the trauma interesting, if there is no transformation. At heart, I suspect I’m more interested in the awe and wonder of nature, and bring human dramas into the natural world so as to make beings like trees, rivers and animals compelling’ (Petit and Jobin, n.p.).

3   Sharon Olds, interviewee, and Marianne Macdonald, interviewer. ‘Olds’ worlds.’ Guardian 6 Jul 2008. Accessed 19.03.2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/ jul/26/poetry 4  Petit creates an intertextual homage to Murray in her poem ‘Square de la Place Dupleix’ (MA, 56), a ‘golden shovel’ that takes the final word of each line from Murray’s poem ‘Cotton Flannelette’ (MA, 111). Concepts of ‘affiliation’ and ‘intertextuality’ are deployed here to avoid the hierarchical implications of a term such as ‘influence.’ The term ‘affiliation’ is appropriate for its quasi-familial implications, which are apt when considering Petit’s relationship with her mentor Murray—see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land 1: The War of the Words, 3 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), I, (1988), 160–61. With critics such as Susan Bassnett and others, I use ‘intertextuality’ to convey the idea that ‘texts exist in an endlessly interwoven relationship with one another’ (138). This offers appropriately rhizomatic and interconnected possibilities for this book’s ecocritical enquiry into interrelated authors and connected literatures, and how they present ecological interconnection. See Susan Bassnett, ‘Influence and Intertextuality: A Reappraisal.’ Forum for Modern Language Studies 43.2 (2007): 134–36.

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Ecopoetry and Animal Voices Writing about, and as, animals is a strategy that recent Anglophone poets have employed with varying degrees of seriousness and humour. In ecocriticism and the study of nature writing more broadly, scholars have debated why writers address nonhumans as ‘you’ or, alternatively, why they attempt to voice nonhumans’ perspectives as ‘I.’ They have discussed the tensions between the usefulness of the first person ‘I’ as an engaging narrative mode, and the issues with anthropocentrism, appropriation, solipsism, and literary privilege that it may bring (Galleymore, 66–70). When a writer addresses an animal as ‘you,’ is this an act of empathic connection or anthropomorphic appropriation? Are there productive ways of deploying the lyric ‘I’ that enable poets—and their readers—to imagine animal perspectives? Writers have long grappled with these questions. Addressing Amazonian entities as ‘you’ is the tactic that Petit employs in ‘The Birth of Jaguar Girl’ and ‘My Amazonian Birth’ (MA, 38–43), but the addressee of each of these poems is presented as having complex human and nonhuman attributes. For Isabel Galleymore, ‘[t]o address an animal or landscape as “you,” or begin to apprehend its perspective, demands a radically altered understanding of the “sensorial imagination,”’ which can ‘generate awareness of environmental issues at different scales’ (90). Further poetic effects are possible when writers try to write as nonhumans—deploying the pronoun ‘I.’ Les Murray’s method of ‘translating’ the natural world suggests linguistic mediation rather than authenticity, and Murray’s ‘translations’ are an important model for Petit and a whole range of contemporary ecopoets, including writer and ecologist David Morley.5 For Murray, ‘living things do all talk, I say, but they don’t talk human language, or always speak with their mouth’ (Murray ctd in  Galleymore 96). Here, Murray considers living organisms as active, agential makers of meaning—a sense of kinship that anticipates Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene.’ His words also resonate with the field of ecosemiotics, which studies how sign-making flourishes in nonhumans, from individual organisms to whole ecosystems (Maran 2020). Reading Les Murray’s poems, Isabel Galleymore finds that ‘I do not share mimetically in animal lives: I am not a fish, nor an eagle, but rather, I become intimately aware of the difference between their 5  See, for example, Morley’s ‘Apostle Birds,’ which is dedicated to the memory of Les Murray. David Morley, FURY. Manchester: Carcanet, 2020. 43–4.

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reality and my own. I share not physically, but imaginatively in their lives, and I do so non-mimetically’ (98). Yet ethical complications may persist when a poet attempts to give voice to a creature. Petit’s intertextual dialogue with Ted Hughes points to just such complications. On her Poetry Archive page, Petit quotes Hughes’s view, ‘This is hunting and the poem is a new species of creature, a new specimen of the life outside your own.’6 Hughes claimed that he began writing poems after he stopped capturing wildlife, as he began looking at animals ‘from their own point of view’ (WP, 11). (In fact, he did not stop shooting and fishing completely.)7 The tensions between connecting with animals, and exploiting them, are examined by poet and ecopoetics editor Jonathan Skinner. For Skinner, one variety of ecopoetics is ‘poetry that explores the human capacity for becoming animal, as well as humanity’s ethically challenged relation to other animals’ (‘What Is Ecopoetics?’ 2011, n.p.). However, ‘becoming animal’ continues to raise concerns, for Skinner. In an article in the same series, Skinner raises the question that it is ‘possibly the worst form of anthropomorphism, to expect human ideals, ethics and problems to map onto the other-than-human world’ (Skinner, ‘Dark Ecology: In the Wolf-Songbird Complex,’ 14 September 2011). In their sketch of an ‘ecological poetics,’ Forrest Gander and John Kinsella consider that a first-person (human) perspective is inescapable at some level: ‘the “I” is always hidden away there by varying degrees of separation’ (viii). Yet for Isabel Galleymore, anthropomorphism can be done ‘responsibly’ by writers, in order to highlight one’s differences from nonhumans as much as one’s similarities with them (94). Moreover, writing ‘as’ a nonhuman acknowledges the agency of other beings (99). Galleymore concludes, ‘[T]o intimately imagine the experience of an animal whose organs of perception are so challengingly different to ours is to begin to acknowledge and appreciate the sheer otherness of that animal’s perspective’ (109). To Galleymore’s view of an ethically productive anthropomorphism, I would add that authors may choose to point to ecological connections or environmental damage when they attempt to write ‘as’ other species. The lyric ‘I’ may appear as human, animal, or an ambiguous, inter-species construct. Consider the way UK Poet Laureate and Laurel Prize founder, Simon Armitage, deploys the lyric ‘I’ for different effects in different 6  The Poetry Archive. ‘Pascale Petit.’ 2020. Web. Accessed 24.03.21. https://poetryarchive.org/poet/pascale-petit/ 7  For Hughes’s shooting and fishing, see Reddick 2017, 289–312.

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environmental poems. The lyric ‘I’ in Simon Armitage’s ‘I Kicked a Mushroom’ (2017, 391) is quite obviously a different character from the weirdly hybrid voice in his earlier poem ‘The Christening.’ ‘I Kicked a Mushroom’ has a narrator who appears to be human: he wears boots and owns gardening tools (Armitage 2017, 391). Yet the speaker of ‘The Christening’ declares that ‘I am a sperm whale’ and that he is attracted to Green Party policies (Armitage 2010, 3). In ‘I Kicked a Mushroom,’ the humour of the piece lies in the speaker’s childish act of destruction and the guilt this causes; in ‘The Christening,’ it comes from the speaker’s absurd hybridity. In Petit’s work, anthropomorphism and hybridity are deployed to ponder ecological and psychological dilemmas, rather than for comic effect. Yet ‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘he,’ and ‘she’ refer to a multiplicity of characters and personae in her work, and they range between human and nonhuman entities. Petit has commented that ‘Tiger Girl reveals the cruelty of human beings in their treatment of non-human life, and each other’ (Petit and Popa, n.p.). The parallels that she draws between the suffering of humans and nonhumans suggest the enmeshed entanglements of Donna Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene,’ a concept which in turn develops from a history of discussions of hybridity that have proved influential for the environmental humanities. These include Haraway’s own ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985) and Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1991). Giving voice to a bird or a rainforest can create a hybrid literary construct, somewhere between human and nonhuman; this may be used to highlight ‘Chthulucene’ connections or Anthropocene exploitation. These entanglements, in Petit’s work, are international and eclectic. Petit describes herself as French-Welsh,8 and her artistic and literary links are distinctly cosmopolitan. She has commented on having ‘uncertain roots, or no roots,’ having been brought up between mid-Wales and Paris. She aims to write ‘for an international readership.’9 The localities she evokes have changed and broadened as her career has developed. This can be seen in the places, ecosystems, and animals that Petit evokes at different points. The creative process for her books The Zoo Father (2001) and Fauverie (2014) took place in Paris, often in the Jardin des Plantes zoo 8  University of Aberystwyth, ‘Poet Pascale Petit in Conversation with Devolved Voices.’ 11 July 2013. Web. Accessed 26.03.21. https://wordpress.aber.ac.uk/devolved-voices/ media/interview-pascale-petit-2/ 9  University of Aberystwyth, ‘Poet Pascale Petit in Conversation with Devolved Voices.’ 11 July 2013. Web. Accessed 26.03.21. https://wordpress.aber.ac.uk/devolved-voices/ media/interview-pascale-petit-2/

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(Petit 2015b), although both collections have wider geographical links. The Huntress (2005) ranges between the ‘deep time’ of French cave-systems and the haunting flora of Amazonia, moving from exorcism (‘The Witch Bottle,’ 2005, 28) towards redemptive connections with other species through art (‘Carving the Dead Elm of Le Caylar,’ 57–8). The Treekeeper’s Tale (2008) evokes localities from California to Siberia and the Himalaya, and ends with translations of Chinese poetry. Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is the subject of Petit’s acclaimed 2010 collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo. Petit discusses the process of writing Fauverie (2014), and its relationship to place, in a feature for The Poetry Review. The Poetry Review ran a series of occasional articles called ‘Omphalos,’ expanding and diversifying Heaney’s term for a writer’s originary place (Heaney 2002, 3). The ‘omphalos’ that Petit wrote about was home to animals in captivity: ‘When I say the word omphalos I find myself in the Fauverie at the Jardin des Plantes zoo.’ The same piece mentions Angel Falls in the Venezuelan Amazon, a locality of which Petit says: ‘That ethereal, hostile place felt like home.’10 Drawing on Amazonia and Paris, ranging between Wales, Mexico, and India, Petit’s work is linked to an international network of places, recalling Heise’s concept of ‘eco-­cosmopolitanism.’ She evokes such ‘eco-cosmopolitan’ links between places through scale variance.

Place, Planet, Anthropocene, and ‘Chthulucene’: Mama Amazonica Petit’s collection Mama Amazonica (2017) received the Royal Society for Literature’s 2018 Ondaatje Prize for ‘evoking the spirit of a place.’11 At that time, it was the first poetry collection to win the award in its fifteen-­ year history. Yet Petit’s poetry shifts fluidly between places, countries, continents, and holistic depictions of the planet. In an interview, she explained that ‘I have a fascination with the planet as a whole, and various wilderness

10  Pascale Petit. The Poetry Review 105.1 (Spring 2015). Web. Accessed 01.02.2022. http://poetrysociety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/1051-Petit-Omphalos.pdf 11  The Royal Society of Literature. ‘Pascale Petit wins the £10,000 RSL Ondaatje Prize for Mama Amazonica.’ 2018. Web. Accessed on 24.03.21. https://rsliterature.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/RSL-Ondaatje-Winner-Press-Release-2018.pdf

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areas within it.’12 Mama Amazonica has its roots in Petit’s research trips to the Amazon rainforest, but it moves between the Peruvian Amazon and Paris. Its central figure is Petit’s mother, whose mental illness is used as a poetic conceit for what Edouard Glissant terms ‘the Earth’s illnesses’ (1997, 125). In the Amazon rainforest, Petit encountered ‘nature in the raw’ and the ‘intensity of life,’ and she sees this as instrumental in helping her to find her poetic voice.13 Petit’s work chimes with the recent flourishing of publications on ecological entanglement in the Anthropocene. These range from Morton’s ‘mesh’ to Haraway’s ‘making kin’ with other species in the ‘Chthulucene,’ Tsing’s ‘entanglement’ in capitalist ruins, and recent publications on the rooty networks that sustain forests (see Chap. 2). Here, Haraway’s concept of the ‘Chthulucene’ provides a fruitful theoretical lens to examine Petit’s presentation of the intricate, international, and often fraught entanglements between humans and nonhumans. Haraway imagines powerful earth-goddesses, potent nature-gods, and enmeshed, ‘tentacular’ entities to shape alternative concept to an invariably masculinist, human-focused Anthropocene. The ‘diverse earthwide tentacular powers and forces’ whom Haraway invokes include ‘Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa (burst from water-full Papa), Terra, Haniyasu-hime, Spider Woman,’ and ‘Pachamama’ (2016, 101). Pachamama is a nature-­goddess associated with Andean cultures, and she is worshipped in Peru (Tola, 27), where Petit researched Mama Amazonica. Some bodies in Bolivia and Ecuador recognise Pachamama, and hence the earth, as a bearer of legal rights (Humphreys). However, Petit’s work does complicate some of the binary gender assumptions that make modern interpretations of Pachamama problematic (Tola 2018). Male animals from jaguars to caimans are a strong presence in the collection, while Petit’s Madre de Dios rainforest is a far cry from the stereotypically passive, fecund, benevolent ‘mother nature’ that feminists and environmentalists alike would object to. ‘Making kin,’ as Haraway puts it (2015), is a messy and multifaceted process, especially when one’s ‘Mama Amazonica’ is an entire rainforest. Haraway writes that the ‘tentacular’ entities (2016, 30) and ‘multispecies 12  University of Aberystwyth, ‘Poet Pascale Petit in Conversation with Devolved Voices.’ 11 July 2013. Web. Accessed 26.03.21. https://wordpress.aber.ac.uk/devolved-voices/ media/interview-pascale-petit-2/ 13  University of Aberystwyth, ‘Poet Pascale Petit in Conversation with Devolved Voices.’ 11 July 2013. Web. Accessed 26.03.21. https://wordpress.aber.ac.uk/devolved-voices/ media/interview-pascale-petit-2/

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muddles’ (31) of the Chthulucene can be perceived in organisms with hands from humans to raccoons, and they also extend in digital domains. Crucially for Petit’s work, these ‘tentacular’ entities also include ‘neural extravaganzas’ (32). Damage and disruption to such ‘neural’ networks is one of Petit’s preoccupations. An important intervention that Petit makes in environmental poetry is to examine how the mind is affected when organic connections are uprooted or severed. The mind and consciousness, in Petit’s work, are not exclusively human; she presents mental illness as affecting a wide range of living entities, from animals to the Amazon. Her poetry explores the idea that trees, plants, and even entire forests think and communicate—and indeed the idea of such widespread interconnection resonates with the work of scholars such as Maran (2020). Entanglement and the arboreal and fungal networks in forests and tree plantations have been brought to a popular audience in publications from anthropologist Tsing’s aforementioned The Mushroom at the End of the World to forester Peter Wohlleben’s bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees (2016), nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Secrets of the Wood Wide Web’ (2016) and Underland (2019), and environmental scientist Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (2020). By writing about the metamorphoses of humans into plants, animals, and ecosystems, Petit explores what happens when humans intervene in such entangled networks. By focusing closely on both the kin we make and the ecological meshes we break, Petit expands the methods that Les Murray had deployed in Translations from the Natural World (1993). Murray plays with the idea that living organisms have symbiotic and often collective identities. He does this through his use of pronouns: the ‘we’ of grasses in ‘The Masses’ (loc 555), the pluralised ‘I’ of ‘Shoal’ (381), the ‘Mememe’ of a flock of firetail finches (610), the ‘I and I’ that changes to the ‘we’ of cell DNA (655). For Murray, nonhuman organisms are highly aware of their dependence on wider networks of other living things; this may result in symbiosis, but predation and parasitism also play a part in the environments that Murray presents. He considers unequal, competitive relationships between plants by imagining the ‘voice’ of a parasitic ‘Strangler Fig,’ which engulfs a ‘wasp-leafed stinging-tree’ (loc 319). However, the ‘Cockspur Bush’ speaks with a distinctly symbiotic voice: ‘Finched, ant-run, flowered, I am given the years/in now fewer berries, now more of sling/out over ­directions of luscious dung’ (loc 357). Murray’s poems play with the idea that animals see and understand their surroundings by ‘animalising’ them: an echidna, which rears its young in a pouch, calls its burrow the ‘earth

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pouch’ (512). Petit’s approach in Mama Amazonica is subtly different, as she envisages transformations from human to nonhuman or to a liminal state in between. This enables her to develop the hybrid characters to evoke a troubled mother and the Madre de Dios rainforest. Amazonia has featured prominently in much of the work by Petit that I have mentioned above. It functions as myth and symbol, rich in animal and human characters. Petit’s thematic engagement with rainforests dates back to before she had even visited the Amazon. During her previous career as a sculptor, Petit created miniature glasshouses populated with ‘iridescent beetles, morpho butterflies, and stuffed hummingbirds’ (2015a, 14). Petit’s collections up to 2014 deploy Amazonian flora and fauna to explore human cruelty to women, children, and other species. The method in Mama Amazonica is subtly different: Petit has said that writing about her mother as the Amazon ‘opened the possibility of what Les Murray called “sprawl,” allowing me to write about endangered animals and the damaged mother-planet too, and enlarge the theme’ (2015a, 14). Mama Amazonica moves towards a consideration of the entire ecosystem, its suffering, and its survival. Indeed, the invasion of the Americas by Europeans and the transportation of flora and fauna around the globe comprise Lewis and Maslin’s threshold for the inception of the Anthropocene. (If the poets analysed in this volume often present ‘eco-­ cosmopolitanism’ as positive, Lewis and Maslin’s proposed threshold points to exploitative, forced relocation. This issue is explored in Petit’s poetry about international wildlife smuggling, and Miller and McCarthy Woolf’s ecologically aware poetry about connecting with nature in diaspora.) The relocation of jaguars to Paris or waterlilies to London enables Petit to explore the knotty ethical problems of such transportation. The global trade in endangered wildlife—an issue that plagues the ‘Capitalocene’—inspires poems such as ‘Bottled Macaw’ (72). Petit’s work also resonates with another concern for environmental scientists: the extinction event that some scientists have viewed as a threshold for the Anthropocene. Petit wrote Mama Amazonica in ‘sequences, built up of small imagistic bursts of energy’ (Petit and Jobin), and this is reflected in the way the book is structured. Poems that reconfigure abuse within the home as predation are grouped together near the beginning, while a sequence of poems about animals separated from their usual habitats—‘Zarafa the First Giraffe in France,’ the ‘Great Grey Owl’ in the Jardin des Plantes, the pet ‘Ocelot’ kept by Salvador Dalí—follow sequences set in a psychiatric hospital. Harmful side effects of the ‘Capitalocene’—the smuggling of ‘a

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chick stuffed in a plastic bottle’ and ‘baby boas coiled in CD cases’ (72)— are grouped together in the book’s second half. Tropes from the beginning of the book recur towards the end: ‘Mama Amazonica’ is echoed by ‘Waterlily-Jaguar,’ ‘Rainforest in the Sleep Room’ by ‘Rebirth of the Rainforest,’ creating a mirrored structure. The purpose of this is to narrate two storylines: the mother’s journey from birth to death, and the parallel yet contrasting narrative of the rainforest’s survival in spite of extinction and trauma. The movement of the collection as a whole balances the processes of life and death, suggesting that Petit’s poetry of the Anthropocene is as preoccupied with entangled life as with its destruction. Here, I examine how environmental entanglement plays out thematically, formally, and structurally in Petit’s collection. Key draft poems and research notes from Petit’s private archive illuminate the writing process that led to the finished collection. Petit and I selected these drafts for their particular significance to Mama Amazonica, and my interview with her gives further insights into the process of researching and reworking the poems. It was a poem about the giant Amazonian waterlily, Victoria amazonica, that first helped Petit to write about the endangered yet vibrant ecosystems in Mama Amazonica. The piece that opens Petit’s seventh collection had its inception twenty years before Mama Amazonica was published. The research notes in which it begins are located with Petit’s drafts of her 2001 collection The Zoo Father. Petit’s research notes illuminate the research on Amazonian botany that she did to develop the poem. Much as Hughes made careful notes from sources ranging from popular environmental magazines to scientific journals, Petit’s sources for her information on rainforest flora and fauna range from television programmes to science articles: The first poem I wrote for that book was the title poem ‘Mama Amazonica’, developed from research notes I’d made back in 1997, in the notebook that contains drafts for The Zoo Father. I’d seen a TV programme and read articles about the giant waterlily Victoria amazonica. (This was before Google!) I’d written some notes about the way the beetles that pollinate the flowers are trapped in the blooms overnight. I’d wanted to write about the waterlily and the beetles ever since. (Petit and Reddick)

Her research notes are as follows14: 14  Pascale Petit. Beige-covered ringbound lined A4 notebook containing manuscript drafts of The Zoo Father, dated 1997 by the author, page 2r, beginning ‘the first sign.’ All page numbers are mine and all photographs are by Petit.

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The research notes are factual in tone, and they pave the way for Petit’s deployment of botanical vocabulary in the published collection, in poems such as ‘Titan Arum’ (MA, 80). Like many of Hughes’s research notes, Petit’s contain line breaks—they are partly versified. These notes are poetry in the making, even at this early stage; they are the seeds of the powerful title sequence of Mama Amazonica.

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The first draft of the poem ‘Mama Amazonica’ dates from the 11th of August 2014, three years before the collection was published15:

15  Pascale Petit. Light brown-covered A4 lined notebook containing manuscript drafts of Mama Amazonica, dated 22 Aug 2014 by author, 14r.

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This first draft departs from the tone of the 1997 research notes by introducing human and animal characters. Petit addresses the reader directly, inviting them to focus on an intimate, close-up view of the mother as a vulnerable baby. Petit changes the locality from the impersonal ‘the Amazon’ to the more intimate ‘her Amazon,’ a locale that is as much an Amazon of the mind as a geographical place. Yet the tag and the ‘glasshouse’ suggest that this poem merges two localities that are important to Petit’s poetry: the Peruvian Amazon and the glasshouses at Kew Gardens, one of which houses a famous specimen of Victoria amazonica. Kew Gardens has featured in The Huntress and will appear again in ‘Kew Gardens’ in Tiger Girl (100). The glasshouse suggests a protective incubator for the infant, which Petit has mentioned in an article (Petit 2015a, 15), but also a botanical conservation project (albeit one with colonial origins— the naming of Victoria amazonica points to Victorian imperialism). Petit fuses Amazonia and Kew Gardens—howler monkeys and a jaguar prowling a riverbank are juxtaposed with a factual ‘caption’ giving information about the waterlily. The global transportation of species is Lewis and Maslin’s favoured threshold for the inception of the Anthropocene, and the draft poem suggests a complex process of relocation; the transportation of Amazonian species to London mirrors the future dislocation that the mother will experience in the psychiatric hospital. A factual tone predominates in the ‘caption’ of the final two lines, with the ‘well-balanced adult’ suggesting the language of ecological and psychological balance. The published poem, a long sequence spanning three pages, begins: Picture my mother as a baby, afloat on a waterlily leaf, a nametag round her wrist— Victoria amazonica. There are rapids ahead the doctors call ‘mania’. For now, all is quiet— she’s on a deep sleep cure,

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a sloth clings to the cecropia tree a jaguar sniffs the bank. My mother on her green raft, its web of ribs, its underside of spines. I’ll sing her a lullaby, tell her how her quilted crib has been known to support a carefully balanced adult. My newborn mama washed clean by the drugs, a caiman basking beside her. (MA, 11)

Petit has removed the references to glasshouses, but keeps the name tag: this suggests botanical classification, the medical labelling of babies, and the diagnostic labelling of patients. Her feminist consideration of the historically male-dominated, colonial history of medical and botanical science explores the ethical implications of such labels. The factual information that a Victoria amazonica leaf can support ‘a carefully balanced adult’ revises the ‘well-balanced’ adult of the draft, evoking the intricate balance of a psychiatric drug regime and the precarious ecological balance of a rainforest. (A ‘carefully’ balanced person or ecosystem is more delicate than a ‘well-balanced’ one—Petit’s modification of the adverb creates a greater sense of precarity.) Linking half-rhymes—‘web,’ ‘ribs,’ ‘crib’— suggest an entangled ecosystem, but one where ‘balance’ is uncertain. As much as an ‘eco-cosmopolitan’ link between localities, this juxtaposition suggests an enmeshed layering of localities and timeframes: mother as baby, mother as plant, mother as patient. The second section of the poem suggests the intricate meshes of the ‘Chthulucene’ by evoking inter-species transformation: Now my mother is turning into the flower […] See her change from nightclub singer to giant bloom. (12)

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Petit’s poem uses metamorphosis and hybridity as thematic strategies: the mother’s rapid transformation from baby to flowering nightclub singer to psychiatric patient beset by beetles inherits a tradition as old as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but with the crucial difference that this inter-species shape-­ shifting considers mental illness. Petit uses insects as metaphors for a troubled mind: She’s drawing the night-flying scarabs into the crucible of her mind. (13)

The ‘scarab of a man’ later becomes a metaphor for an abusive husband (13), and such imagery enables the reader to consider not only gender violence, but violence inflicted on the Earth. Petit’s visual imagery reinvents a long canon of flower-imagery that describes women: the ‘white lily’ of the unpollinated flower, the ‘deep carmine’ of the bloom once it has been pollinated by beetles (13). Here, she reworks the erotic flower symbolism of Tennyson’s near-ghazal ‘Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal’ (‘Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white [….]/Now folds the lily all her sweetness up/And slips into the bosom of the lake’ (197)). Petit not only draws on botanically accurate research on waterlily pollination (‘that extraordinary plant’s sex life’ (Petit 2015a, 14)): she subverts and reinvents a canonical male author’s work, to highlight unequal gender and power relations (15). Petit does not replicate gendered stereotypes of woman as nature and man as technocratic oppressor; the masculine presences in this poem are beetles, rather than, say, colonial plant hunters. Yet an important part of her project is to reformulate narratives of gender violence and environmental violence. Later in the collection, inter-species alliances will prove vital to showing how women, ecosystems, and Earth-­ systems refuse to conform to patriarchal stereotypes of their passivity. The following poem, ‘Jaguar Girl,’ deploys metaphor to transform the mother-figure into the Madre de Dios rainforest: She’s a rainforest in a straitjacket. [….] Her ears prick to the growl of roots under concrete, the purr of plants growing.

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My Animal Mother, shaman’s bitch, a highway bulldozed through her brain, shapeshifter into a trembling rabbit whenever I’m scared of her. She who has had electric eels pressed to her scalp can vanish into backwoods where no one can reach her. (MA, 14–15)

The ‘rainforest/in a straitjacket’ synecdoche suggests that an entire ecosystem might be able to suffer distress and trauma. Here, Petit’s evocation of the entangled processes of the Chthulucene resonates with Haraway’s challenge to ‘human exceptionalism and bounded individualism’ (2016, 30). Petit uses a method similar to Murray’s imagining of other species’ ability to ‘talk,’ by deploying verbs associated with wild animals to suggest plant communication: the ‘growl’ of roots and the ‘purr’ of growth. Thus, she challenges anthropocentric thinking on two fronts. Firstly, Petit’s verbs attempt to evoke the point of view of an animal, a method borrowed from Murray; a jaguar would of course think of plant sounds in terms of its own vocalisations. Secondly, Petit raises the possibility that trees and plants communicate, an idea that foresters and fungi scholars alike are now considering seriously. Yet the ‘highway’ through the Amazon’s brain evokes broken links and disrupted communication. Petit draws further, intricate parallels between psychiatric treatment and environmental destruction in ‘Rainforest in the Sleep Room.’ The rupture of ecological connections is presented as a form of trauma, which she envisages as impacting humans and animals alike. ‘Geotrauma’ is an important concept for scholarship of the Anthropocene, etymologically taken from the Greek words for ‘earth’ and ‘wound.’ ‘Geotrauma’ is defined by Nicole Merola as ‘the violent inscriptive processes common to biological, cosmological, chemical, geologic, and industrial activities and the traces left by such inscriptive acts’ (123). The bulldozed ‘highway’ in ‘Jaguar Girl’ is evidence of just such a violent process. For Merola, the impact of ‘geotrauma,’ on humans at least, is environmental melancholy.

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She views this as a continued and incomplete grieving process, ‘the primary affect governing the Anthropocene’ (124). Yet surely, ‘geotrauma’ would also take its toll on nonhumans’ well-being, even if an ape or jaguar would respond to having its forest home destroyed in a very different way from a human. Metaphor enables Petit to create an imaginative, empathic connection with a menaced rainforest: 1 The highway goes through the Amazon’s brain like an ice pick through an eye-socket. First we clear her synapses then she forgets her animals. 2 Our bulldozers drive through the rainbow boa of her cortex like a scalpel— those sleeping coils still dreaming up new species, 3 hallucinations we’ve blitzed with ECT. The bilateral current purrs through her frontal lobes like a forest of songbirds electrocuted by rain. 4 Afterwards, her thoughts are nestless, except for a few chicks up in the last ironwoods, patrolled by armed guards. Scientists climb ropes to monitor her stats, bring motherless macaws

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down to incubators, measuring their wings, weighing naked souls, 5 as if she’s a patient in the Sleep Room who won’t wake— her dreams treelines traced by the EEG pen. 6 The only animals left are grainy films on camera traps 7 and a recording of the last musician-wren whose still small voice is like the beginning of the world. (17–18)

Other authors have presented imperilled environments as damaged (often female) bodies—the broken limbs of Alice Oswald’s river-nymph (2016, 31) are a case in point. Yet Petit’s linkage of the mother-character’s psychological trauma to ‘geotrauma’ expands and reinvents this poetic trope. The field of ‘ecopsychology’ has suggested that environmental damage, and a sense of disconnection from nature, can contribute to (human) mental illness. For Andy Fisher, environmental degradation even constitutes ‘traumatisation.’ A way of tackling both environmental and psychological problems is ‘psychological reconciliation with the living earth’ (xiii). Petit’s work explores the idea that other living entities, too, might need to have their trauma treated or transformed. The poem presents different forms of scientific and technological knowledge with ­ambivalence— ecologists who attempt to weigh the ‘souls’ of chicks take part in conservation efforts, but might nevertheless miss the cultural and religious significance of rainforest animals, which Petit  evokes through her use of the word ‘souls.’ The electric shock treatment and ‘scalpel’ suggest that psychiatric interventions and deforestation form part of a flawed narrative of scientific ‘progress,’ which risks damaging vulnerable humans and

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nonhumans alike. Petit further explores the connection between geological extraction and ‘geotrauma’ in the later poems ‘Mania’ and ‘Depression,’ which imagine the impacts of petroleum extraction and oil spills on the forest’s collective ‘mind.’ Yet if Petit’s book ventures into the darker corners of the psyche, the poems develop a narrative that culminates in survival and new beginnings. ‘My Amazonian Birth’ creates an intricate sense of ecological enmeshment and hybridity, putting out tentative tendrils that develop a sense of connection to place. The daughter-character asks, ‘where shall we root?’ (40). The ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ that Donna Haraway evokes in relation to the tentacular Chthulucene (2016, 31) enable a sense of linkage to the environment that can occur even when dislocation and diaspora are involuntary. (These ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ are yet more central to the poets of the Black Diaspora, whose work is examined in Chaps. 7 and 8.) There are some biographical origins to this evocation of rootlessness, and yet Petit’s expansion of these biographical themes is distinctly ecological. Petit’s childhood was spent between Paris and mid-Wales, often in ‘homes and institutions’ (Petit 2015a, 14), but the poem transforms the trauma of dislocation by deploying ecological and familial metaphors: the mother as ‘mother-tree’ (41), a term from forestry science that suggests close-knit arboreal and maternal relationships.16 The ‘you’ addressed here is a hybrid ecological entity, part human daughter, part tree: ‘Your face where the macaws nested/and the harpy eaglet hatched’ (Petit 2017, 41). The ‘neural extravaganzas’ that Haraway evokes resonate with Petit’s likening of a fragile human mind to delicate ecological connections between tree and earth, orchid and tree, tree and human brain: Your bud-ears hear the crash as she reaches ICU so laden with orchids she topples to the floor. There she lies, her roots upended like jangled nerves they’ll diagnose as anxiety that slides into psychosis.

16  A ‘mother-tree’ nurtures a network of other forest trees, according to the scientific work of forest ecologist Suzanne Simard and others. See Suzanne Simard. Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest. London: Penguin, 2021.

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Butterflies jink over her trunk even as her flesh rots and blossoms with fungi— your broken mama laid out like a long-table for the rest of your life to feast on. (43)

A compassionate view of the mother as ‘mother-tree,’ which sustains life even after her death, suggests that the rainforest’s entangled ecosystems are profoundly symbiotic: a narrative of collaboration that suggests an alternative to discourses of the Anthropocene that emphasises the ascent of ‘species Man.’ Petit’s poem resonates with Morton’s view of ecological meshes, which are both living and non-living: ‘All life forms are the mesh, and so are all dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and non-living beings’ (Morton 2010, 29). However, the ethically troubling side of ecological interconnection is that human interference can unbalance or break links in the ‘mesh.’ The ‘mesh’ can be perceived by looking at its individual parts and then observing multi-scalar links that make up the whole. Petit’s method of scale variance enables this in her poem ‘Madre de Dios’: Madre de Dios I peer down through the plane porthole at the river-coils. How quickly the clouds part, and the glass morphs into a microscope through my zoom lens, I see a cocoi heron pluck a caiman hatchling on a bend of the Madre de Dios. (58)

The stepped form of the eleven-line stanzas mirrors the speaker’s descent from a great height, but Petit’s imagery subverts totalising views of the Earth from space in Anthropocene art that Alaimo and others have problematised (Alaimo 2017). Petit’s deployment of visual imagery—the ‘plane porthole,’ the ‘glass’ that is metaphorically transformed into a ‘microscope’ and the ‘zoom lens’ of wildlife photography—shifts scales from an aerial panorama to the coils of the river and finally to a close-up, individual vignette of the heron catching the young caiman. Such scale

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variance enables one to see the complex ecological connections between species, although the climate-changing technology of plane travel introduces an element of Anthropocene threat. The poem later moves towards a yet more intimate scale, focusing  on a particular scarlet macaw chick, then individual birds, and then ‘zooming out’ to the rainforest as a whole:     a scarlet macaw chick        squawks for food from its parents but is ignored. How the primaries     of beauty and horror        pack every square inch like the scales of a rainbow boa,      how I’m flying towards this at six hundred miles per hour. (58)

Petit’s turn of phrase ‘primaries/of beauty and horror’ enfolds multiple scales of ecological connection in the space of five words. ‘Primaries’ are simultaneously the macaw chick’s primary feathers (an intimate, organic close-up), and a long history of human, often European, responses to the primordial ‘beauty and horror’ of the rainforest as a whole. (The horror is Conradian, a European response to an unfamiliar environment that inherits aspects of colonial views of rainforests (see also Kei Miller’s response to Heart of Darkness in Chap. 7)). Petit’s tactic of homing in on vibrant living organisms contrasts with earlier poets’ deployment of aerial views: Hughes’s aerial glimpse of Greenland (Chap. 3) and Heaney’s view of the Höfn glacier from the air (Chap. 4). If Hughes’s poem focuses on animal suffering and human grief, and Heaney’s considers the awe-inspiring forces of ‘deep time’ and climate change, Petit shifts between species, river, and region, emphasising multiple scales of complex interconnection. Petit’s simile of a ‘rainbow boa’ for the entire forest, and the river as serpentine ‘coils,’ suggests a vibrant profusion of biodiversity—although a more close-up glance reveals ‘slaughtered snakes.’ The metaphorical conceit of the serpent thus conceals an important duality, evoking both the forest’s mythical, entangled life and the vulnerability of its individual animals. The second part of the poem focuses on the mother-figure’s battle for survival as she faces an abusive ‘cockroach’ of a husband, although she emerges defiant, supported by other species (59). Petit’s poetic vision of Anthropocene rainforests is thus organic, multi-scalar, and enmeshed. The Anthropocene is highly personal and individual, in Petit’s poetry, as it impacts upon the human and nonhuman characters she creates.

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The superabundance of Amazonian life is evoked in ‘Kapok,’ which refers to the tree as ‘she,’ but depicts it more as a mother-tree than as a human mother: Kapok It’s only when the queen of the forest has fallen that we see how many crutches she needed to keep upright— her mesh of roots pulled up the topsoil and it’s shallow as felt. Where was she going in her walking frame? These buttresses and vines she leant against didn’t help her move forward and why should she? Here she had her portion of sun; there was the darkness of others. No, she moved upwards, turning her stiff body into a ladder to climb towards the leaves of light in their spiral groves, her face so furrowed no one noticed it. What burdens she bore to keep her back upright: the harpies in their heavy nest pressed on her shoulder, capuchins inside her armpits. Tamanduas, toucans, trogons— all clung to her. And her skin had growths— a termite’s nest, a beehive. Tree porcupines dozed in her clefts, a jaguar slept on her lowest limb, and lower still a bushmaster curled between her toes. The treefrogs in their bromeliad ponds multiplied every year, and always, processions of army ants plagued her. But it wasn’t these lodgers that felled her— it was the hanging gardens of orchids draped on her balconies, like worshippers in a cathedral kneeling in pews, throngs of them drinking the rain that filtered softly through her storeys, like sacramental wine, their faces lifted to divine moths. (92)

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The ‘crutches’ and ‘walking frame’ of the hospital wards associated with Petit’s mother’s treatment are present here, but Petit quickly moves on to imagery that celebrates luxuriant Amazonian life. The idea that she ‘bore’ the ‘nest’ of harpy eagles chimes with the collection’s preoccupation with birth, hatching, and rebirth. The ‘hanging gardens’ suggest the hanging gardens of Babylon, a wonder of the ancient world, while ecclesiastical images (‘cathedral,’ ‘sacramental,’ ‘divine’) evoke the Madre de Dios rainforest’s religious name and suggest that the ecosystem is sacred. The poem resonates with Galleymore’s view that anthropomorphism can be written responsibly, to highlight both similarities and differences: the kapok is presented using the imagery of Christian ritual, but there are more differences than similarities between the tree and the mentally ill mother-figure in Mama Amazonica. The form of this poem also sets it apart from the rest of the collection: the unbroken column of text suggests a lofty treetrunk. The unity of the poem on the page, lacking the stanza breaks that Petit usually favours, evokes a holistic view of the forest ecosystem. Petit’s ‘mesh of roots’ recalls Haraway and Morton’s focus on ecological meshes, from tiny orchids and moths to the jaguar asleep on the lowest limb. Jaguars appear in multiple poems in Mama Amazonica, and they are a cardinal image that runs through much of Petit’s oeuvre. These powerful creatures have a dual role in Petit’s work: they function metaphorically as mythical symbols, and ecologically as keystone species that are a crucial part of Amazonian ecosystems. Petit associates jaguars with shamanic transformation (‘Jaguar Girl’), blurring the boundaries between humans and nonhumans—a mythical version of Skinner’s ‘becoming-animal’ and Haraway’s ‘making kin.’ However, Petit’s jaguar-poetry also develops in a more realist vein that draws on life-writing and the literature of conservation: ‘Ah Puch’ details the poignant relationship between conservationist Alan Rabinowitz and the jaguar he named for a Mayan god (93–4). ‘The Jaguar,’ the last poem in Mama Amazonica, took over a month of work before Petit considered it complete. Petit developed the poem after researching the work of several canonical predecessors, and the redrafting process included creating a cento from their poems: ‘The Jaguar’, the last poem in Mama Amazonica, took five weeks of solid work to get right. It developed from a draft poem called ‘Jaguar Cento’, which is made up of quotations taken from writers including Ted Hughes. A later redraft is called ‘Otorongo,’ from an Amazonian word for a gold jaguar. However, I changed the title for the sake of the reader. The epigraph of the poem is by Pablo Neruda, and it means ‘Like a river of buried jaguars.’ I wanted to respond to the rich and expansive vision in his masterpiece

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‘The Heights of Machu Picchu’, where that line occurs. I’d also had recurring dreams of swimming through clothes instead of water, and that dream hovers behind this poem. (Petit and Reddick)

In its initial stages, the early draft ‘Jaguar Cento’ begins the association between jaguar and river that will make it into the published poem: ‘a river of yellow lightning/in the splinters of the thunderbolt,/a river of buried jaguars,’ a network of images linking storms and river-systems to jaguars, woven around Neruda’s line: What remains burning is that moment of staring cold, as if my bones had been emptied of their marrow, my head a stone tree leafed with growing flame. I could call it tear tree, shudder tree. Squeeze my hand if you understand.17

The cento is a composite form, stitched together from quotations of other poets’ work (Baldick, 55). In a poetry collection that focuses on entanglement and the enmeshed systems that make up the rainforest, the cento is an apt poetic form for exploring multi-species assemblages. There is also no danger of the lyric ‘I’ in this poem becoming solipsistic. Much as Les Murray plays with pronouns in his Translations from the Natural World, the ‘I’ here remains proteiform, and indeed the ‘stone tree’ of the speaker’s head evokes a metaphorical metamorphosis from human to nonhuman. Yet ‘Jaguar Cento’ ends by returning to the hospital bedside: ‘Squeeze my hand if you understand’ suggests an attempt to connect with an ailing loved one. However, later drafts of the poem devote more space to the forest and to the Tambopata River. An intermediate draft, titled ‘Otorongo,’ sees the beginning of imagery that is present in the published poem18,19:

17  Pascale Petit’s archive. A4 printed typescript of ‘Jaguar Cento’ from drafts of Mama Amazonica. 18  Pascale Petit’s archive. ‘Otorongo’ A4 printed typescript with manuscript amendments, from the drafts of Mama Amazonica, r. 19  Pascale Petit’s archive. ‘Otorongo’ A4 printed typescript with manuscript amendments, from the drafts of Mama Amazonica, v.

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Artistic imagery of dawn gathering ‘paints’ and ‘palette’ also feature in this draft, which ends with a description of the speaker painting during her childhood, with a tabby cat for company. The parts of the draft that are

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written in manuscript describe ‘the gate of his teeth,’ an image that Petit will further develop in the published version. The colours of jaguar and landscape remain in the published poem, but Petit replaces the painterly imagery and the childhood vignettes in ‘Otorongo’ with a primordial scene in the published poem: The Jaguar     Como un río de tigres enterrados     PABLO NERUDA, Alturas de Macchu Picchu He lay on driftwood, the river below him as if he had cast it off— the apricot river rosetted with the pads of waterlilies, its nap lifted by a dawn breeze. His whiskers were old as horsetails, his lashes ferns bordering the swamps of his eyes. (107)

Neruda’s image of the ‘river of buried jaguars’ provides both the epigraph and the opening visual association between jaguar and river, while the trope of burial is woven through the poem, resonating with the way ‘All life forms are the mesh, and so are all dead ones, as are their habitats’ (Morton 2010, 29). Throughout, ‘light and shade, no and yes’ (107) evoke the interlocked forces of death and life—a poetic perspective on the complex biological systems such as the carbon and nutrient cycles, on which the rainforest depends. The poem develops an organic, Earth-­ systems perspective on the Anthropocene. Petit keeps the colour (and fruit) ‘apricot’ from the draft poem ‘Otorongo,’ an organic image for the river’s hue that suggests the deeply entangled relationship between the jaguar, his territory, and the river-system. Lexically, Petit heightens this sense of enmeshment through the vocabulary she uses, linking the rosettes of the jaguar’s fur to waterlilies, using the ‘pads’ of waterlilies to evoke the jaguar’s paw-pads, and the ‘nap’ of the river suggesting the jaguar’s fur (and connoting his relaxed posture). An indented tercet marks Petit’s shift between the jaguar-like river and the image of the jaguar as primordial river-source, the whiskers ‘old as horsetails’ evoking the Palaeozoic origins

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of these plants, the ‘ferns’ and ‘swamps’ suggesting not only the lush vegetation of the Amazon, but the ancient Carboniferous. Here, the shift that takes place is not only visual (river to jaguar) but temporal (contemporary wildlife-watching to the ‘deep time’ of evolution). A powerful sense of an enmeshed ecosystem emerges from the first three stanzas of this poem; if Alaimo has problematised the Anthropocene for focusing excessively on stony, lifeless geological narratives, Petit’s move from a richly organic ‘deep time’ to the present suggests an alternative view of the Anthropocene that embraces a more vital, enmeshed sense of interdependent life. The poem then shifts to the human observer (‘I crouched in my boat’ (107)), but Petit’s engagement with ‘deep time’ continues: And everywhere there were eyes, rainclouds of eyes, terror-struck, as if the first human opened hers and saw mist rising from her mother’s flanks. (107)

The shift back into evolutionary time depicts human presences as part of an entangled, primordial forest, linking to Petit’s description of the speaker’s ‘baby self’ seeing the jaguar. whose irises are hoar forests, whose teeth are the pain-price,     whose roar is the earth     opening its gates. (107)

These lines are indented to set them apart from the rest of the poem; they deploy visionary imagery, suggesting both distant environments (‘hoar forests’) and the ‘pain-price’ of an encounter with a big predator that ends with the shaman’s spiritual ‘death.’20 Yet the Anthropocene’s geological imagination is also behind the image of the earth ‘opening its gates.’ This 20  Hughes is one important figure in British poetry who was inspired by shamanism. Some of Petit’s imagery suggests the connection between a shamanic figure and an animal spirit, and this process is one that Hughes explores in poems from Crow and elsewhere and which he explains in his prose. He writes that ‘a spirit, usually some animal, arrives’ in order to provide the shaman with a ‘liaison with the spirit world’ (WP, 56). The ordeal that the shaman endures ‘is a magical death’ with ‘devouring, burning, stripping to the bones’ (57).

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stanza deploys the rhetorical device of the tricolon crescendo, each of these lines building towards the subterranean force of the jaguar’s roar, evoking a dynamic and restless earth. In this part of the poem, shamanic imagery is united with the Anthropocene’s preoccupation with ‘haunted time’ and the chthonic, organic forces of the ‘Chthulucene.’ Petit’s perspective on the Anthropocene is thus at once mythical, ecological, and geological. In the penultimate stanza, Petit takes the narrative of the poem away from the mother-figure and downriver, ‘the boat of my skin’ helping her to navigate ‘the passage/through and away from Mama’ (108), a transformative, riverine rebirth that opens out new creative possibilities. The poet deploys further imagery to contrast ‘beauty and horror,’ life and death, recur as the speaker continues a voyage that evokes a shamanic transformation: Like a river of buried jaguars, the day said, a river you have to dive into and swim the length of, squeezing between the corpses. (108)

Neruda’s river of buried jaguars takes on urgent, environmental connotations in Petit’s revision of the image: immersion in the river of corpses suggests a visceral encounter with the full extent of the damage humans have inflicted on the Madre de Dios region. Yet this culminating stanza of Petit’s book is not merely a lament for slaughtered big cats: it is also a narrative of metamorphosis. The poem narrates a journey from death to rebirth that creates a mythical, poetic vision of a human narrator transformed through contact and kinship with other species. Even the day is personified as a speaking agent: this suggests ecosemiotic communication between humans and nonhumans and the environmentally responsible anthropomorphism that Galleymore views as important in ecopoetry. The last poem in a collection often functions as a gateway to the poet’s next book. ‘The Jaguar,’ with its movement away from the Amazonian mother-figure and its deep meditation on the ecological and cultural importance of big cats, paves the way for Tiger Girl. A forest of fiery tigers is the subject of Petit’s next collection. After all, Neruda’s word for jaguars is ‘tigres.’

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Anthropocene Animals: Tiger Girl Tiger Girl marks ‘a shift from the Amazonian rainforests of [Petit’s] previous work’ (publisher’s synopsis, Petit 2020, 1), but it is also an important step-change in her career because it is her most sustained poetic engagement with threats to wildlife. Mama Amazonica and Tiger Girl share a common preoccupation with environmental violence and gender violence. However, Petit sees Tiger Girl as responding to a more troubled political context: Both books juxtapose a family in crisis with the natural world in crisis, and link abuse of women and children with abuse of animals and forests. But I don’t set out to do this, it’s what the poems reveal. If I take the central poem of Tiger Girl, which is for me ‘In the Forest’, and compare it to the central poem of Mama Amazonica, which for me is ‘My Amazonian Birth’, Mama Amazonica is more hopeful of a human’s rebirth in the pristine rainforest, even if that rainforest is sick and broken. What happened between the writing of the two books was Trump’s increasingly anti-eco politics and the rise to power of Bolsonaro in Brazil, followed by the election of Boris Johnson in the UK and a general global rise of fascism and contempt for the natural world. (Petit and Popa)

In response to this climate of ‘anti-eco politics,’ Tiger Girl considers issues surrounding conservation, economic inequality, animal suffering, and climate change. Petit has commented that ‘Tiger Girl explores my grandmother’s Indian heritage, but two-thirds of the book is about wildlife, poaching, and other threats to Indian wildlife’ (Petit and Reddick). Information that Petit has provided in interviews illuminates how she draws on techniques from life-writing, such as family history and nature writing, to develop the collection’s focus on Indian wildlife. The association between tigers and Petit’s grandmother springs from a family story that Petit’s grandmother ‘had come into contact with a tiger when she was a baby in a tent in the jungle, and this encounter is central to my book’ (Petit and Reddick). Connections between humans, flora, and fauna evoke entangled ways of ‘making kin’ that resonate with Haraway’s call for multi-species survival. The poems ramify to consider a host of different Anthropocene issues: the exploitation of rare wildlife, the menace of extinction, the fires of climate change, and also life-giving multi-species connections. Through exploring her grandmother’s Indian heritage, Petit develops a varying scalar perspective that shifts between personal and

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ecological, local and global. This section considers each of these thematic devices in turn, in the order in which they appear in the book. Yet entangled connections and Anthropocene dilemmas run throughout the collection, and the poems resonate with each other in ways that suggest an intricate mesh of environmental agents and ecological threats. The very first poem in the collection links climate, colonialism, and what Bonneuil calls the Anthropocene’s ‘geologic turn.’ In ‘Her Gypsy Clothes,’ the Rajasthani clothes that the grandmother kept in her coal-­ house speak of both ‘her birth in Rajasthan to her father’s maid’ and also the complex cultural associations of fossil fuels. Petit links coal to accreting, sedimentary layers of memory: ‘I think of the coal grease black dust/ and memories that burn slow as anthracite’ (6). The caesurae that Petit places in the middle of these lines suggest gaps in family memory that are gradually filled, but this is a poem of geo-history as well as family history. Coal calls up multiple lithic, cultural, and environmental associations. This energy source encapsulates a dual heritage that suggests wider issues of colonial and capitalist fossil fuel exploitation. Yusoff and others have linked the exploitation of ‘black and brown bodies’ (Yusoff, 4) to the Anthropocene’s racialised geology, and indeed coal extracted in India was a source of power for the British Industrial Revolution. Yet coal is also intimately associated with Welsh mining and Welsh poetry—another facet of Petit’s heritage. (Former National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, celebrates the resistance of ‘workers in iron and coal’ (loc 1541).) Petit celebrates the vibrant, fiery colours of the grandmother’s Rajasthani clothes: ‘to own the country of her birth/a woman might have to wear a fire’ (6). Yet Petit’s juxtaposition of fuel and fire foreshadows the book’s later preoccupation with the fires of climate change.

For a Coming Extinction Petit’s book will return to climate change and the part it plays in extinction, but the exploitation of endangered wildlife for profit is an equally pressing concern in the collection. Once Petit’s first poem has contextualised the story of her grandmother’s Indian heritage, she begins a detailed poetic exploration of the ‘Anthropocene extinction.’ Petit examines the emotional and ecological impacts of this through hard-hitting images that recur throughout the book’s structure to bind the collection together: a blinded owl, a tiger struggling in a snare. The book offers an unflinching look at exceptional cruelty that is symptomatic of wider problems

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associated with the Anthropocene. These include the fragmentation of habitats that brings animals into conflict with people; the burgeoning population after the ‘Great Acceleration’; and economic inequality in the ‘Capitalocene,’ which forces the poorest in the Global South to sell their precious wildlife. The second poem in the collection, ‘The Umbrella Stand,’ introduces this theme, and it borrows the grandmother’s voice to criticise the commodification of animals during colonial times. An elephant’s-foot umbrella stand is the central image in a narrative that considers wider issues of exploitation and extinction. During her childhood, the speaker’s father (based on Petit’s great-grandfather) tells his daughter that the foot belonged to the she-elephant that he rode to hunt tigers. Petit’s celebration of powerful female animals suggests an alternative to the patriarchal ‘Manthropocene’ (the elephant is a ‘matriarch,’ and it is no coincidence that the hunted tigress is termed a ‘man-eater’). The poem comments on the process of reducing Indian animals to colonial trophies, a product of the imperialist ‘Capitalocene.’ A profound sense of connection between human speaker and elephant persists in spite of death: the speaker recalls that she would dream of being ‘rocked by the sway of a stately walk./I felt every stone and flattened bush, a trunk/lowered to caress me’ (8). Sensitivity to the entire, interconnected environment— ‘every stone and flattened bush’—comes through a haunting encounter with the elephant’s remains. Yet the affective impact of the poem encourages the reader to consider just how many links in the precious web of life are broken, when an elephant herd loses its matriarch. Petit implies that the economic system that began with the Raj has given way to contemporary inequalities that cause poaching and wildlife crime. A series of poems placed early in the collection links ‘Capitalocene’ exploitation to Anthropocene extinction. Yet Petit’s poems are sensitive to issues of alterity and inequality; the lyric ‘I’ often speaks as an outsider who tries not to pass judgement on the scenes she witnesses. This is most apparent in ‘In the Forest,’ which Petit describes above as the central poem in Tiger Girl. The poem is a harrowing and sustained account of what happens when people are forced to trap and kill animals out of economic necessity. Here, the poet considers how literary art can speak of the Anthropocene’s unseen victims and its unspeakable acts of exploitation. ‘In the Forest’ looks in detail at seeing and turning a blind eye, at the hardship that drives wildlife crime, and at inequality between Global North and Global South:

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In the forest I saw a man sewing an owl’s eyes shut the owl was on a leash and the man pulled it to make it flutter and attract songbirds to mob his decoy. He told me how much he could earn from warblers in cages. I wondered which was worse— the blind owl or thrushes glued to sticks. The deeper I went the more I saw. What is worse asked the sky— a girl with sewn lips or glued eyes? The deeper I walked the harder I looked although it was night and there were no stars. 4,000 rupees for a barn owl to be sacrificed for Diwali to light up the dark with dark. (TG, 10)

The pared-down language that opens the poem amplifies its impact: Petit’s deployment of a close-up image of the owl having its eyelids stitched is starkly emotive. The poem shifts scale to consider such individual examples of wildlife crime within a global economic and ecological context. Extending over five pages, the poem grows in metaphorical complexity as Petit piles up details of wildlife crime and the inequality that fuels it: the ‘striped gold’ of tiger cubs becomes ‘jungle currency’ and coins are likened to the eyes of tiger cubs. The speaker tells the poacher her eyes are stitched and her lips are sealed, and that ‘I’m not from here/I do not judge,’ but the poem still presents the speaker as somewhat complicit. A nightmarish scenario where the cubs’ eyes are reanimated—‘the eyes

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mewled in my hands’—suggests that the very economic system that supports both western and Indian capitalism is tainted with animal blood. A close-up glimpse of animal eyes is expanded in scale to a vaster optic: the moon’s ‘eye was sewn shut’ and ‘the sun couldn’t look at what I had seen’ (11). This scalar dissonance suggests the great magnitude of the ecological devastation wrought by global capitalism. The trade in the body parts of livestock appeared in the meat market in Petit’s earlier collection Fauverie, but here, Petit’s evocation of the trade in endangered animals explores how international market forces drive this. A trader slicing ‘new stripes’ into a tiger for 10,000 rupees (12) and vendors yelling ‘ten crore for a white tiger’ (14) expose the worst side of anthropocentrism and the ‘Capitalocene.’ Yet the poem ends by moving towards understanding the economic inequality that leads to poaching. A man who ensnares and kills a tiger ‘sold the pelt/because his family was hungry’ (15). In an interview with author Maya C. Popa, Petit discussed the origins of the poem. ‘I’ve heard and read accounts by poachers who became forest guards, who went on to protect the tigers they once poached. Their guard-work is informed by their poaching experience; they know when and where incursions into the forest will occur. But what struck me was the indifference one guard divulged in his former life as a poacher. My account of his poaching methods is recorded in my long poem “In the Forest”. He needed the money for food’ (Petit and Popa). When Petit ends the poem with the speaker declaring that ‘I sewed my eyes shut//and with resin from the tree of love/I glued my lips’ (15), she suggests a compassionate understanding of cultural differences and economic need. Yet although the speaker’s lips are sealed, the poem itself does not remain silent. Globalisation, inequality, and the commodification of ‘nature’ are the targets of the poem’s ethical critique, and the act of bearing witness to them exposes multiple ethical dilemmas. The capitalist world-system means that westerners benefit from both nature reserves and ‘sacrifice zones,’ in less wealthy countries; in India, they have been doing so since colonial times. Attempting to judge the poachers would expose the speaker to charges of hypocrisy; yet remaining silent might mean a tacit acceptance of animal exploitation. The poem raises knotty issues of ‘Capitalocene’ inequality, western attitudes towards others’ wildlife, and the ethical issues associated with bearing witness; it raises complex questions about the causes of the ‘Anthropocene extinction’ without offering any facile answers.

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‘For a Coming Extinction’ takes its cue from W. S. Merwin’s poem of the same title, although Petit develops a markedly different tone. Merwin’s poem deploys its stark irony in stripped-down lines: Gray whale Now that we are sending you to The End That great god Tell him That we who follow you invented forgiveness And forgive nothing

Merwin’s poem takes aim at anthropocentric religion and narratives of human exceptionalism. His poem ends with a vision of the afterlives of extinct or soon-to-be-extinct creatures from gorilla to great auk, and a sardonic plea for their spirits to tell God ‘That it is we who are important.’21 (The first-person plural pronoun criticises human—and mostly western— exceptionalism; ‘we’ are Christian inhabitants of the wealthy Global North.) Yet if Merwin’s sparse diction is as barren as an empty ocean, Petit’s richly figurative language has the exuberance of a rainforest. She deploys metaphor, the epic catalogue, and religious vocabulary to emphasise just how much Earth is set to lose if it loses tigers: For a Coming Extinction (after W.S. Merwin) You whom we have named Charger, Challenger, Great King, and Noor the Shining One, now that you are at the brink of extinction, I am writing to those of you who have reached the black groves of the sky, where you glide beneath branches of galaxies, your fur damasked with constellations, tell him who sits at the centre of the mystery, that we did all we could.

21  W. S. Merwin. ‘For a Coming Extinction.’ POETRY. https://www.poetryfoundation. org/poems/57936/for-a-coming-extinction-56d23be1c33a8

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Petit’s poem deploys vibrant ecological metaphors for the afterlife (‘groves of the sky,’ ‘branches of galaxies’). This richly ornamented language stresses that the extinction of tigers would not be merely an ecological loss, but an affront to art, culture, and even religion. While Merwin’s poem sees the ‘Anthropocene extinction’ as largely unresisted and ‘us’ as deeply complicit, Petit’s borrows the voices of conservationists who are hardly so resigned: ‘we did all we could.’ Her poem apostrophises tiger subspecies from across Asia, both extinct and soon-to-be-extinct: You tigers of Amur and Sumatra, of Turkey and Iran, Java and Borneo, and you—Royal Bengals, who lingered last. Tell the one who would judge that we are innocent of your slaughter. (TG, 96)

Petit suggests the former geographical vastness of the tiger’s range, and an expansive panorama of the night sky not only shows the enormity of this loss, but causes the reader to look extinction in the eye: ‘when we gaze up at the night/when we look lightyears into the past—/we see your eyes staring down at us.’ Merwin shows us the ironies of the ‘Anthropocene extinction’ and bludgeons the reader with a sense of complicity, but Petit’s poem uses the lucid image of a tiger’s eye to connect the reader to this keystone species. In its deployment of intimate as well as immense scales, Petit’s scalar variance captures the ecological, affective, and aesthetic enormity of the ‘Anthropocene extinction.’

‘Her Globe’: The Anthropocene on Local and Planetary Levels Even in the face of extinction, Petit’s poetry celebrates Indian wildlife and places it within a planetary, Earth-systems context. Tiger Girl shows Petit expanding her method of shifting scales between the local level of human characters and individual animals, vaster views of forested regions, and global panoramas of the whole Earth. Such scale variance is informed by aerial views of the Earth from space, but they are far removed from the groundless, lifeless images that Alaimo and others have criticised in visual representations of the Anthropocene. Petit’s poetic scale-shifting never

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loses sight of the planet’s vibrant, organic, entangled life. Scale variance is woven throughout the collection. Poems that deploy scalar shifts are intercalated with poems that consider more human-focused narratives about family history, or placed in counterpoint to harrowing details of exploited wildlife. A series of key images enables Petit to create scale variance: the individual animal as a synecdoche for a precious, threatened planet; objects including a crystal ball and a bridal gown that broaden out to expansive panoramas; and the faces of human and animal characters, which are metaphorically linked to maps of landscapes and skyscapes. ‘Green Bee-eater’ forms the first part of a sequence of poems about Indian birds, and Petit deploys the trope of flight to shift scale between close-ups of individual birds and birds’-eye views of forests, countries, and the globe. The poem follows ‘In the Forest,’ and after a disturbing account of the trapping, mutilation, and sale of wildlife, Petit’s celebration of this precious bird creates a counter-narrative of survival—more ‘Chthulucene’ than violent Anthropocene. The poem shifts scale to show how one creature is part of an essential, living mesh: Green Bee-eater More precious than all the gems of Jaipur— the green bee-eater. If you see one singing tree-tree-tree with his space-black bill and rufous cap, his robes all shades of emerald like treetops glimpsed from a plane […] you might dream of the forests

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that once clothed our flying planet. And perhaps his singing is a spell to call our forests back— tree    by tree        by tree. (TG, 17)

The poem stresses the way individual animals are linked to enmeshed forest habitats, through arboreal, organic, and lithic systems. The ‘gems of Jaipur’ will be echoed in Petit’s later poem ‘Her Globe,’ but here, they speak as much of the priceless value of living organisms as of the Anthropocene’s ‘geologic turn.’ The individual bird and his song that calls for reforestation suggest the vaster forests that once helped to stabilise the climate of ‘our flying planet.’ The poem was well received by the literary community: it appeared in the American journal Poetry, one of the best poetry journals in the English language, and it was selected for the Forward Prizes’ anthology Poems of the Decade 2011–2020. This shows how well it resonates with the intellectual, environmental, and ecopoetic preoccupations of its time: the ethically responsible anthropomorphisation of the bee-eater allows the poem to call up absent forests without preaching to the reader. The pronoun ‘you’ at once draws the reader in and develops a more inclusive poetic register than the lyric ‘I,’ suggesting an interlinked, inclusive ecopoetics that can accommodate diverse human presences. The image of a crystal ball is a yet more striking device that enables Petit to reframe disembodied views of the Earth from space by using visual imagery to link organic and lithic planetary processes. The crystal ball in ‘Her Globe’ reinvents the often lifeless, detached images that characterise the Anthropocene ways of seeing, enabling dramatic shifts in visual scale. Petit links the lithic past to vegetation and to animals’ ways of perceiving and marking space: Her Globe This amber-emerald globe, its metamorphic lustre, the chrysoprase of its chatoyant forests, crystal thickets

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echoing with alarm calls, streaked with ultraviolet urine, territorial scat, hotspots where a chital’s hooves have sparked. Every time she tells the future is a ride into the convex mirror of a tiger’s eye. (TG, 35)

Gems including amber and ‘metamorphic’ emerald evoke ‘deep time,’ but Petit’s poem relishes the elaborate language of geology and gemmology without mentioning the economic value that drives ‘geotraumatic’ exploitation of such precious stones. The poem begins with language that suggests astronauts’ views of the Earth, whose precious beauty Buzz Aldrin likened to a jewel,22 an image that Petit reworks to link vibrant ecosystems to ‘deep time.’ Alaimo and others have criticised Anthropocene science for focusing excessively on disembodied views of the Earth from space or on stony geology rather than vulnerable living beings. Yet Petit’s poem shows the intimate links between the lithic, the ligneous, and the living: amber has its origins in fossil forests; living forests are described using the poetic and gemmological term ‘chatoyant,’ while the ‘tiger’s eye’ suggests both the animal gaze and a distinctive gemstone. The poem ‘zooms in’ to create a close-up of thickets that are defined not in terms of human geographies, but as animal territories. The move between a glittering globe and animals’ territorial urine-marks is not a very intuitive one for humans, but animals’ perceptions of space and territory differ from ours in important ways, including their ability to detect marks only visible under ultraviolet light. The crystal ball offers a perspective on animal viewpoints that is profoundly anti-anthropocentric. The poem links scrying into the crystal ball to taking a glimpse through animal eyes. The animal gaze, for Derrida, is a primary way of connecting with other species’ alterity (382), and even more so for Petit: the poem imagines ways of seeing beyond the limits of human perspectives. Petit’s poem moves from evoking dynasties of tigresses to an intimate close-up of the grandmother’s crystal ball and a glimpse of the vastness of space: Her face floats on the surface, then is sucked in, as if our earth has inner globes nested inside, whirlpools of spiralling  Buzz Aldrin famously used the metaphor of a jewel to describe the Earth viewed from the Moon. See Aldrin’s Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. 22

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planets opening their diamond mines, and she, the only adventurer to brave their deeps. (35)

This movement, from the intimate ‘nest’ that Heaney also deploys as a synecdoche for the Earth, to the vastness of outer space where Oswald’s poems also travel, subverts grandiose scientific panoramas of the Anthropocene. ‘Nested’ globes and the matriarchal lineage of tigresses in this poem suggest feminist alternatives to patriarchal narratives of the Anthropocene. Throughout Petit’s collection, the grandmother appears as the speaker’s ‘guide’ to the ‘forest maze.’ The history of exploration and natural history are dominated by white men; Petit’s image of an elderly ­half-­Indian woman as ‘guide’ in the forest is a powerful feminist revision of such narratives, which are the foundations of certain concepts associated with the Anthropocene. Petit’s poem ‘The Anthropocene’ further develops an optic for viewing this brave new epoch, but this time, the visual device is not a crystal ball but the ‘eyes’ adorning the plumage of an iconic Indian bird, the peacock. This poem is the clearest example of Petit’s method of shifting scale to consider one organism as a synecdoche for a wider environment—in this case, the entire, imperilled planet (see also Introduction). The poem deploys a stepped form to mark dramatic shifts in scale: emerald forests    bronze atolls        lapis islands

Petit has explained that the poem was informed by an image of a bride in China wearing a peacock-feather gown. In an interview, Petit commented on the visual beauty of the image and the exploitation of birds that led to its creation: ‘I wanted to capture the beauty of it, and my ambivalent feelings, as the dress shows how we exploit nature for its beauty. This wedding gown haunted me. I saw it as being our planet dancing through the black theatre of space, the train her trailing seas, raised like a peacock, to display’ (Petit and Reddick). Shortly after Tiger Girl was published, Petit gave details of the origins of the poem in an interview for Publishers’ Weekly: With ‘The Anthropocene’, I had the moving image of the planet as a bride wearing a peacock dress as soon as I saw the news items of the Chinese bride in hers. The image wouldn’t let me be, so those lines hovered on my desktop. But the song of the poem came later, after I’d read The Night Life of Trees from Tara Books, featuring art of the tribal forest artists, the Gond

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from Madhya Pradesh. I kept looking at the trees they’d printed, and reading the captions from their beliefs. One tree is called ‘The Peacock’, and the caption said “when the peacock dances in the forest, everything watches, and the trees change their form to turn into flaming feathers”. And that gave me my song. The stepped form on the page felt right and might suggest a bride’s train or poised waves. There was a particularly violent hurricane season last year as I was drafting it, so that became the theme, of climate change. (Petit and Popa)

This poem encapsulates some of the primary ecopoetic themes in Tiger Girl. Here is the precious, endangered wildlife of India, and the way ‘Capitalocene’ commodification of animals imperils wild creatures and the wider forest ecosystem. Here, too, is the entangled, planetary enmeshment of flora, fauna, climate, and oceans, important imagistic alternatives to visual representations of the Anthropocene that suggest human dominance and detachment (Alaimo 2017). Petit considers the perspectives of Indigenous artists and comments on their understanding of the enmeshed links between bird and tree. She uses the metaphor of each ‘eye’ of the peacock’s train as a microcosm for the vast issue of climate change. Petit’s concept of Earth’s entangled ecologies returns, linking human to nonhuman, intimate portraits to planetary vastness. ‘Tiger Gran’ imagines this dual movement, ‘My tawny grandma with as many wrinkles as tributaries/in the Ganges, her face a map of India when it’s summer,// the map of Wales in winter’ (TG, 24). This poem’s imagery is linked to close-up portraits of tigers’ faces, and this recurrent image represents a formal and thematic engagement with ecological entanglement. ‘Mahaman’s Face Through Binoculars’ develops Petit’s painterly, cinematic method of shifting scale between local and planetary. From the ‘ghost of a stripe,’ barely visible, Petit shifts between close-up glimpses of the tiger’s face and vaster panoramas of space and time. A tiny blue dot reflected in the tiger’s eye is described ‘as if Earth is rising in her iris’ (95). The famous ‘Earthrise’ image of 1968 and subsequent images of the Earth from space have played an important role in the environmental movement (see Chap. 2). Yet it is significant that Petit’s poem revises potentially totalising, human-dominated, global views of the Earth that characterise some visual representations of the Anthropocene, by envisaging the Earth reflected in an animal’s eye. Here is an alternative way of picturing the planet that avoids the technocratic, eerily lifeless views of Earth from above that Alaimo and others have seen as problematic. If the equivalence between the spherical human eye and the globe is used to anthropomorphise the globe in western visual culture (Cosgrove, 139), Petit

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‘animalises’ the image of the planet’s sphere, suggesting an anti-anthropocentric view of it. The tiger’s eye offers a glimpse of ways to make kin on both individual and worldwide scales.

Entanglements in the Chthulucene Petit’s network of local and planetary links suggests an entangled view of Earth’s systems, where close-ups of biological processes are joined by visual or organic links. Plants, places, and people are presented as part of an intricate mesh. Petit draws on both technological and Indigenous traditional knowledge to navigate the complexities of the mesh. Digital networks of environmental resistance join the organic tendrils of forest networks, while Petit’s poetry is also responsive to the close connections between the Gond people of Madhya Pradesh, their fauna, art, and trees. Two particular poems most clearly illustrate Petit’s poetic response to ecological ideas of enmeshment: the digital networks that enable Extinction Rebellion and a poem about an Indigenous artist’s connection to wildlife, which began as a draft published on Twitter. ‘#ExtinctionRebellion’ was first published on Extinction Rebellion’s website, alongside ‘For a Coming Extinction.’23 ‘#ExtinctionRebellion’ plays with the idea of environmental resistance as simultaneously digital, physical, and organic. Haraway’s concept of the Chthulucene includes ‘IT critters’ (2016, 32), and digital networks, in Petit’s poetry, are likened to biological ones. The poem draws playful lexical parallels between hive-­minds that tweet their resistance to environmental destruction, swarms of bees, and twittering birds: ‘an apiary of apps’ that ‘retweet birdsong/from the archives.’ Petit suggests that a sense of belonging in the digital age can be trans-local, but nevertheless connected to physical ecologies: ‘This is my homepage, where I belong./This is my wood wide web’ (TG, 47), with ‘rootlets sparking towards rootlets’ (48). Here, Petit is responding to Robert Macfarlane’s article ‘The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web’ and its exploration of the scientific and cultural interest in the research on symbiotic networks that connect trees, fungi, and forests (e.g. Macfarlane 2016, 2019; Tsing 2017; see also Introduction). Yet Petit’s likening of ‘fungal friends working in darkness’ to underground environmental ‘resistance’ movements (48) expands Macfarlane’s riffing on digital connections as a metaphor for organic ones. The poem ‘#ExtinctionRebellion’ suggests ways of linking Haraway’s ‘IT critters’ to the organic, earthy origins of the 23  ‘Extinction Rebellion: Writers Rebel.’ 23 Jul 2020. Web. Accessed 16.06.21. https:// writersrebel.com/tag/pascale-petit/

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environmental movement, developing a multi-species alliance that envisages a powerful counter-ideology to the politics of Bolsonaro and Trump. If Petit’s environmental rebels tweet and re-tweet their ideas, such ‘IT critters’ also appear in draft poems, helping her to develop methods of composing poetry through social media. In Tiger Girl, ecology, technology, and Indigenous environmental understanding are presented as different ways of apprehending environmental interconnection. Indeed, ‘Barasingha,’ Petit’s most overt celebration of Indigenous people in M ­ adhya Pradesh, was drafted on Twitter in response to a photograph that the author saw on Instagram. This method of composition contrasts markedly with the drafting practices of the earliest poets examined in this book, some of whom disliked the digital technologies that became mainstream during their careers. (Hughes denounced prose written on computers as ‘fake’ (LTH, 714), while Heaney’s aversion to email (O’Driscoll 468) and preference for old-fashioned faxes was well known to his contacts in literary circles.) Petit began her poem ‘Barasingha’ in October 2019. The first draft evokes the vivid visual impact of the image on Instagram that inspired it: Rain Stag At the end, when fresh water has all gone the spotted deer will come, shake his neck as if shrugging off a shower let the motion ripple all down his spine spray rising from his back in a halo of drops24

Petit’s method of sharing an early draft on Twitter is a brave one, given the prolonged and meticulous way that she developed ‘The Jaguar’ via notebook and computer before she was ready to publish the poem. This reflects the way ecopoetry is responsive to digital visual culture and to methods of disseminating poetry through platforms such as Instagram, which poets including Rupi Kaur have popularised. Several entangled art-­forms—poetry 24  Pascale Petit’s archive. Typescript printout of ‘Rain Stag’ with handwritten notes about the composition of the poem, provided by Petit.

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in print and digital forms, wildlife photography, and the written word— come together in the creation of the poem. This draft quite clearly engages with the Anthropocene and its dilemmas—freshwater use is one of the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s ‘planetary boundaries’—but it does so without any loss of poetic craft. Visual effects and mise en page enable Petit to use line breaks to their fullest aesthetic potential. The adjective ‘fresh’ hangs at the end of the opening line, setting up the reader’s expectations of a pastoral landscape with deer. What we get in the following line, though, is the threat of drought and tainted water. Yet there is hope in the ‘halo of drops,’ the ringing, expansive final image that is not constrained by a final punctuation mark. The poem ends with the freshness of a monsoon season that returns in spite of pollution and climate change. A lengthy redrafting process transformed ‘Rain Stag’ into the collected poem ‘Barasingha.’ Petit developed the poem further on her computer and in manuscript, after researching the life of Pardhan Gond painter Jangarh Singh Shyam. The poem is underpinned by Petit’s interpretation of Indigenous Central Indian understanding of forests, flora, and fauna as networks of entangled lives. Petit has described Shyam as the ‘founder of Gond art’ and has said that the Gond people ‘know the Central Indian forest secrets’ (Petit and Popa). Petit has discussed Shyam’s life and the importance of his work in several interviews. Shyam received an artist’s residency in Japan, but his passport was taken away from him, he suffered from isolation, and he painted his gods, which had never been depicted before. Depressed, alone, and concerned that his gods would be vengeful, Shyam took his own life (Petit and Reddick). Petit’s poem sets out to ‘honour’ Shyam (Petit and Popa), and the legends linking flora and fauna that Shyam depicts are important for Petit’s depiction of ecological meshes. Petit has said: He died tragically early, but I wanted to honour him, so I wrote a poem for him, ‘Barasingha’, about the endangered twelve-tined swamp deer and how his life was changed after coming face to face with one. My cover art [for Tiger Girl] The friendship of the tiger and the boar is by him. (Petit and Popa)

Petit’s ekphrastic method of responding to Shyam’s art is part of her eco-­ cosmopolitan poetic project, although she remains sensitive to alterity and difference. As Petit redrafts the poem, she focuses on Shyam’s depiction of several Pardhan Gond legends. These include the friendship of the tiger and the boar and, the marriage of trees:

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The typescript section of this draft ends with the tiger and boar restoring their friendship. This alliance between predator and prey is a narrative of ecological interdependence, an acknowledgement that the forest’s complex ecosystems require both life and death. Petit’s next draft of the

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poem, in manuscript, also contains a note to put the poem in the first person.25 Using the more immediate, intimate lyric mode that results from

25  Pascale Petit. Typescript printout of ‘The Friendship of the Tiger and the Boar’ with handwritten amendments, recto.

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this, Petit imagines Shyam relating how his art celebrates links between himself and forest animals26: Petit’s turn of phrase, ‘the animals have animals come to me,’ plays on the idea of physical encounters as well as images in the mind’s eye; roots ‘twined around my brain’ suggest a deep connection between the Gond artist and his forest home (and the distress that comes of severing this connection), while the parsa jhad tree is a key source of Shyam’s signature patterned motifs. Petit’s poetic response to Shyam honours forms of ecological thinking that are diverse and widespread in non-western cultures. Shyam’s life-changing encounter with a barasingha stag is the opening image of Petit’s published poem ‘Barasingha.’ Petit has commented on how deer and their antlers are an image of entwined ecosystems in both her work and the painter’s: ‘Like him, I’m obsessed with deer and their antlers and how antlers mirror a forest’ (Petit and Popa). Barasingha (For Jangarh Singh Shyam) I was nineteen when I came face-to-face with the swamp deer. He came out of the fog, his black eyes full of dawn. On his head he bore my forest—teak and evergreen sal that trailed reeds from the marsh. His fur was sunlit earth. The Narmada River thundered from his antlers, turmeric huts of my village draped around twelve tines. (TG, 78)

The poem is set during Shyam’s last residency in Japan, and it imagines the artist’s yearning for connection to the stag, whose antlers serve as an image for interconnected environmental systems. The central image of the poem ‘Rain Stag’ returns to bring the poem to a close: When I arrive in his pasture he will shake his neck as if shrugging off a shower, let the motion ripple down his spine—and I will be the spray rising from his back in a halo of drops. (78)

Here, Petit presents the barasingha is both a shamanic guide that helps Shyam to enter a tranquil afterlife and an image for intricate ecological links between Earth’s organic and aquatic systems. The concept of 26  Pascale Petit. Handwritten amendments to typescript printout of ‘The Friendship of the Tiger and the Boar,’ verso.

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Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene’ draws on non-western beliefs about environmental kinship, and such poetic images of interconnection are a counterdiscourse to technocratic, Eurocentric Anthropocene narratives of human ascendancy.

Burning Bright: Tiger Girl, Fire, and Climate Change Despite the healing power of rain and rain stag, fire is a recurrent poetic preoccupation in Tiger Girl. Petit’s consideration of it links to narratives of the Anthropocene that associate it with climate change—Anthropocene as ‘Pyrocene.’ Deforestation, forest fires, fossil fuels, soaring temperatures, and the species they threaten: Petit explores the way one problem sparks another. Her poetry never loses sight of the impacts of fire and climate change on individual animals—a counter-narrative to views of the Anthropocene that focus on the human ‘species’ and its technological triumphs. In her work, light and fire are emblematic of positive aspects of environmental resistance: blazing tiger stripes, the chthonic forces of magma, the ‘green flames’ (19) of resurgent forests. Fire thus has an important duality in Petit’s work, as an artificial harbinger of climate change and as a symbol of igneous Earth-systems or the vital spark of animal life. No poet can write about fiery tigers without raising echoes of Blake’s ‘The Tyger.’ Petit develops Blake’s conceit of the big cat ‘burning bright,’ the ‘furnace’ of its brain,27 for a time when climate change has exacerbated the worst wildfires within living memory. In the way Petit structures the collection, she begins with the largely positive associations of fire, moves towards the anthropocentric uses of fire in India and beyond, and ends by depicting the conflagrations associated with the ‘Pyrocene.’ At the mid-point of the collection, Petit places her poem ‘Flash Forests.’ This poem expands the scalar lens that Petit uses to consider fire, deploying ‘scale variance’ to link deforestation, climate change, and extinction. The poem is a sustained examination of the anthropocentric and Anthropocenic aspects of forest fires and the sense of shock and complicity that they provoke. ‘Flash Forests’ responds to its political and environmental moment: the unprecedented Australian bushfires of early 2020, and the burning of parts of the Amazon rainforest under Brazilian President Bolsonaro.  William Blake. Complete Writings. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford: Oxford UP 1966 214.

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Flash Forests Just as an orphaned fawn will huddle against a wooden deer used for target practice— so I cling to you, my grandmother, while all around us the forests burn. ~ It is I who turned the world-ash Yggdrasil to ashes, I who watched on plasma screens as koalas charred, I who saw sloths with rare eco-systems on their upside-down fur cremated in backdrafts. ~ Let me be your bat pup and you can be my ficus religiosa. I’m hugging what’s left. (TG, 45–6)

This climate change poem begins with an intimate, small-scale glance at an orphaned fawn facing gunfire and expands its scalar lens to Northern Europe, Australia, and South America. The ‘world-ash’ of Norse ­mythology was believed to link multiple realms, supporting what we might now interpret as a vibrant ecosystem of human, human-like, and animal characters (Sturluson, 42–3, 64; Larrington 56). As such, it can be reinvented in contemporary poetry, as a poetic image for considering contemporary issues of ecological interconnection. This tree is also intimately associated with

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writing and poetic creation in Norse mythology (Larrington, 64). However, Petit revises earlier depictions of the world-tree by suggesting that climate change has burnt the very roots of poetry. In order to tackle the huge implications of climate change, Petit’s poem shifts scale to mourn a planetary conflagration, grieve for particular animals, and consider individual humans’ complicity in climate change. The koalas and sloths—endemic to Australia and South American rainforests—are emblems for the loss of animal life in Australasia and the Amazon. Limited in the practical action she can take when she views media broadcasts of such distant destruction, the speaker evokes the complex emotional response that comes of watching cataclysmic fires through ‘plasma screens’—the mixture of complicit unease, awe at the sublimity of these pictures, and the powerlessness, or even ennui, that comes of being repeatedly exposed to such images of destruction.28 The language Petit uses suggests an emotionally charged ethic of care between species—the bat ‘hugging what’s left.’ Spoken by a hybrid literary creation that is part-animal and part-­human, ‘Flash Forests’ revises the anthropomorphic animal-poetry of Les Murray for the ‘Pyrocene,’ giving such anthropomorphic poetry a sombre, prophetic tenor adequate to the enormity of climate change. The Australian bushfires at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 featured as harrowing symbols of climate change, in popular media broadcasts by figures such as David Attenborough.29 Petit’s ‘Superb Lyrebird’ revises Les Murray’s ‘Lyre Bird’ from Translations from the Natural World. If Murray celebrates the lyrebird’s mimicry of other birds, and even of human voices (Murray, 369), Petit creates a catalogue of the voices of other bird species that functions as a memorial to the soon-to-be-extinct:

28  In an interview, Robert Macfarlane speaks of Sianne Ngai’s idea of ‘stupilimity’—the sublimity of human-caused damage to Earth and the stupor that accompanies it. Robert Macfarlane, interviewee, and Rob Hopkins, interviewer. ‘The Metaphors We Use Deliver Us Hope, or They Foreclose Possibility.’ 5 June 2018. Web. Accessed 19.04. 21. https://www. resilience.org/stories/2018-06-05/robert-macfarlane-the-metaphors-we-use-deliver-ushope-or-they-foreclose-possibility/. See also the Bureau of Linguistical Reality’s term ‘Ennuipocalypse.’ Bureau of Linguistical Reality. Aug 2015. Web. 19.04.21. https:// bureauoflinguisticalreality.com/portfolio/slow-ennuipocalypse/ 29  David Shukman. ‘Sir David Attenborough warns of climate “crisis moment.”’ 16 Jan 2020. Web. Accessed 20.04. 21. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51123638

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 When the flames come

he fast-forwards a repertoire      of all the songbirds his ancestors learnt—    fairy wren, jewel-babbler. Even now, he’s dancing    to new sounds— water-plane crash, firestorm surge,     his superb lyre alight. (TG, 88–9)

This ecological elegy can be described as mourning changes that have not yet (fully) happened: if the lyrebird’s ‘ancestors’ learnt the calls of other species in this poem, Petit suggests these other species’ future absence. Sound, mimicry, and echoes heighten the poem’s affective impact, and full rhyme and assonance are deployed to make ‘lyre’ and ‘flier’ echo ‘wildfires’ and ‘alight’ (88). ‘The Superb Lyrebird’ departs from the lyric mode that Petit deploys in much of this collection and which she has favoured in earlier books. The poem’s use of the third-person pronoun functions like an omniscient narrator in a novel, or the presenter’s commentary in a wildlife documentary, expanding the collection’s focus beyond anthropomorphic characters while broadening its geographical ambit. By focusing closely on the lyrebird, Petit’s poem suggests the link between the ‘Anthropocene extinction’ and the ‘Pyrocene,’ giving a powerful account of the Anthropocene issues that (certain) human beings have created. ‘Walking Fire’ draws the collection to a close, and it creates a culminating link between the fires that began elsewhere in Petit’s book: the fiery colours of tiger stripes, the fossil energy that fuels climate change, fire as a primordial human technology, and fire as the hallmark of human impacts on Earth. Petit links cosmopolitan localities in Wales and India through image and rhyme: the ‘tinder track’ through a tigress’s territory chimes with the ‘cinder path’ that leads to the grandmother’s house (105–6). The ritual of firewalking, traditionally a rite of passage, is reinvented as a metaphor for the inferno of climate change through which life on Earth must pass.

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The poem begins with a sibilant line mimetic of the hiss of flames, the crackle of grasses dried in drought: ‘It’s high summer and the grass hisses where the tigress treads.’ Eye contact between speaker and big cat creates a visceral form of ecological connection: She is a walking fire   her glance a flare   that singes my lashes. (105)

The indented form of this stanza is a formal device that Petit has used in ‘The Jaguar’ from Mama Amazonica, showing a close-up of the big cat’s features—but with the crucial difference that ‘Walking Fire’ is a yet more hard-hitting look at environmental crisis. As in earlier poems, fire represents the tigress’s awe-inspiring vitality, but it also suggests that climate change touches even the nature reserves that are designed to keep endangered species safe. The poem shifts from India to Wales, evoking the memory of the grandmother and her tale of looking a tiger in the eyes: You’re sitting opposite, saying, It was like staring at a frozen sun. Your eyes grow coal-black as you think of the day you were left alone in a tent. I’m staring at the fire in your living room, anthracite glowing with forests of our Coal Age,    flickers of fern  horsetail clubmoss embers spitting onto the mat   like sabre tooths springing from a cave. (105)

Here, Petit’s poem shifts spatial and temporal scales, recalling memories not only of the grandmother’s tale of her encounter with the tiger, but far older strata of the Carboniferous. Petit’s term the ‘Coal Age’ calls up this prehistoric period of coal formation, and indeed the horsetails and clubmosses are the primordial species from which this fossil fuel is made. An intricate network of imagery links human beings, animals, and fossil plants in accretions of ‘deep time’: the grandmother’s ‘coal-black’ eyes are linked to the fiery vision of the tiger, the Welsh coal is linked to the fossil forests that formed it, and the embers suggest sabre-toothed big cats from the Ice

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Age, moving between the recent past and the ‘deep time’ of the Anthropocene’s ‘geological turn.’ Yet Petit’s idea that the coal age is ‘ours’ also links the Carboniferous to the Anthropocene, recalling the problems with narratives of the Anthropocene that link it to the Industrial Revolution. The poem ends with the speaker and her grandmother’s spirit discussing the fires that ‘we’ have started—a sense of human complicity that implicates users of fossil fuels. Petit evokes the dual function of fire as an image for the vital spark of animal life, but also as the destructive technology responsible for deforestation: we will talk again about the forests that once reigned on earth the mysteries of beasts who passed through them, the flames of their spirits surging under fur, not one spark escaping. How even their roars are relics of when the great woods blazed.      How it was we who discovered fire and with our knowledge lit the fuse. (107)

‘Walking Fire’ evokes an apocalyptic ‘Pyrocene,’ where human beings’ mastery of fire is conceived of as a primary threat to fauna and forests. Hughes ended his Tales from Ovid with an image of the planet consumed in the ‘first, last forge.’ The final movement of Petit’s book has a Hughesian grandeur: the spiritual tenor of ‘flames of their spirits,’ the majesty of the ‘great woods.’ Petit ends her collection by looking deep into the fires of the ‘Pyrocene,’ as if bearing prophetic witness to an Anthropocene apocalypse.

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Brigley, Zoe. ‘Exile and Ecology: The Poetic Practice of Gwyneth Lewis, Pascale Petit and Deryn Rees-Jones’ (doctoral thesis) 2007. https://wrap.warwick. ac.uk/1118/1/WRAP_THESIS_Brigley_2007.pdf ———. ‘Confessing the Secrets of Others: Pascale Petit’s Poetic Employment of Latin American Cultures and the Mexican Artist, Frida Kahlo.’ Journal of International Women’s Studies 9(2) (2008): 20–28. Cebaddos, Gerardo, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo. ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114.30 (Jul 25 2017): E6089-96. Clark, Gillian. Selected Poems. London: Picador, 2016. Kindle. Derrida, Jacques. ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).’ Critical Inquiry 28.2 (winter 2002): 369–418. Fisher, Andy. Radical Ecopsychology, Second Edition: Psychology in the Service of Life. Foreword by David Abram. 2013: State University of New York Press. Galleymore, Isabel. Teaching Environmental Writing: Ecocritical Pedagogy and Poetics. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Gander, Forrest, and John Kinsella. Redstart: An Ecological Poetics. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 2012. Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1997. French edition first published in 1990. Hart, George. ‘Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (1974).’ In George Hart and Scott Slovic, eds. Literature and the Environment. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004. Heaney, Seamus. Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001. London: Faber & Faber, 2001. Hughes, Ted. Letters of Ted Hughes. Edited by Christopher Reid. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. Humphreys, David. ‘Rights of Pachamama: The emergence of an earth jurisprudence in the Americas.’ Journal of International Relations and Development 20 (2017): 459–84. Macfarlane, Robert. ‘The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web.’ The New Yorker, 7 Aug 2016. Web. Accessed 19.04.21. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-­ of-­technology/the-­secrets-­of-­the-­wood-­wide-­web Macfarlane, Robert. Underland: a deep time journey. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019. Maran, Timo. Ecosemiotics: The Study of Signs in Changing Ecologies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2020. Merola, Nicole. ‘Materializing a Geotraumatic and Melancholy Anthropocene: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods.’ Minnesota Review 83 (2014): 122–132. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010. Murray, Les. Translations from the Natural World. Manchester: Carcanet, 1993. Kindle.

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Niblett, Michael, and Chris Campbell. ‘Introduction: Critical Environments: World-Ecology, World Literature, and the Caribbean.’ In Michael Niblett and Chris Campbell, eds. The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2016. pp. 1–6. Petit, Pascale. The Zoo Father. Bridgford: Seren, 2001. ———. Mama Amazonica. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2017. ———. The Huntress. Bridgford: Seren, 2005. Concord Media, filmmaker, and Pascale Petit, interviewee. ‘The Survival of the Artist and Our World.’ 1990. Web. Accessed 07.05.2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXaHbuV6ph4 ———. ‘Private and Public Wars.’ New Welsh Review 72 (Summer 2006). Web. Accessed on 19.03.2021. http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record72ac.html?id=19308 ———. Fauverie. Bridgford: Seren, 2014. ———. ‘Poetry as Exorcism.’ Mslexia 65 (Mar/Apr/May 2015a): 14–15. ———. ‘Omphalos.’ The Poetry Review 105.1 (Spring 2015b). Web. Accessed 01.02.2022. http://poetrysociety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ 1051-Petit-Omphalos.pdf ———, interviewee, and Danne Jobin, interviewer. ‘Danne Jobin Interviews Pascale Petit.’ November 2018. Accessed 31.03.21. https://poetryschool. com/poetry-­in-­aldeburgh/danne-­jobin-­interviews-­pascale-­petit/ ———. Tiger Girl. Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2020. ———, and Maya C. Popa, interviewer. ‘Q&A with Pascale Petit.’ https://pwpoetry.tumblr.com/post/631889745688084480/qa-­with-­pascale-­petit ——— and Yvonne Reddick, interviewer. ‘The Tiger Girl and the Rain Stag: An Interview with Pascale Petit.’ New Welsh Review, 3 May 2021. Online: https:// newwelshreview.com/category/interview Reddick, Yvonne. Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Skinner, Jonathan. ‘What is ecopoetics?’ Jacket 2, 2011. Accessed on 23.03.21. https://jacket2.org/commentary/somatics ———. ‘Dark ecology: In the wolf-songbird complex.’ Jacket 2, 14 Sept 2011b. Accessed on 23.03.2021. https://jacket2.org/commentary/dark-­ecology Tennyson, Alfred. Poems and Plays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975 [1965]. Tola, Miriam. ‘Between Pachamama and Mother Earth: gender, political ontology and the rights of nature in contemporary Bolivia.’ Feminist Review 118 (2018): 25–40. Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt, eds. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2017. Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. London: Virgin, 2007. William Blake. Complete Writings. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford: Oxford UP 1966.

CHAPTER 7

Kei Miller: Ecopoetics of Relation, Resistance, and Grief

My own understanding of the debate about the Anthropocene is the question of time. When did this catastrophe of climate change begin? And importantly, do we only count it as a catastrophe when the architects of that catastrophe finally become embroiled in it? Because what we see happening now is obviously rooted in the profoundly destructive ways in which we relate to the land. But those destructive relationships, and all their attendant issues of dispossession and extraction and unsustainable expansion, in the desperate desire for increased wealth and capital, have enacted their catastrophes, especially on people of colour and our communities for centuries. We have been living in the Anthropocene for hundreds of years.1

So said Kei Miller in an interview for Magma poetry journal, commissioned as part of the research project that also gave rise to this book. Miller is a Jamaican-born poet, essayist, novelist, academic, and the author of five major poetry collections to date. His 2014 collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (henceforward abbreviated to The Cartographer) won the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection, and the prize focused readers’ attention on the way this collection presents identity, place, environment, and interconnection. His comment quoted above shows that he associates this proposed new epoch with climate change, 1  Kei Miller, interviewee, and Yvonne Reddick and Magma editors, interviewers. ‘“We have been living in the Anthropocene for hundreds of years”: a conversation with Kei Miller.’ Magma 81: The Anthropocene Issue (Winter 2021): 111–14 (111–12).

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capitalism, colonialism, unequal levels of environmental culpability and risk, and debates about the Anthropocene’s timeframes. Miller is better known for criticising white privilege in Caribbean literary circles,2 than for his ecological themes. His poetry engages with issues ranging from sexuality and gender to religion, diaspora, and the traumatic memory of the slave trade. Yet his 2014 and 2019 collections explore how many of these issues intersect with ideas of environment, place, and planet. Plants, animals, apocalyptic floods, and geological events, ‘when the earth breaks/ down to sand,’ have featured in Miller’s poetry since his first book, The Kingdom of Empty Bellies (2005, 11). Yet themes of land, landscape, territory, cartography, and spirituality come to the fore in The Cartographer (2014). The following volume, In Nearby Bushes (2019), is Miller’s most ecopoetic collection to date. At the time when these collections were published, Jamaican and international politics aimed to come up with strategies for the country to adapt to climate change, and to tackle ‘invasive’ species, some of which date back to colonial invasions. In 2010, Jamaica’s National Environment and Planning Agency partnered with organisations including the United Nations and the European Union to release an Adaptation to Climate Change strategy, in the face of more frequent hurricanes and rising sea levels.3 Lewis and Maslin’s threshold for the Anthropocene is the transportation of species around the globe, a process that has increased with contemporary global trade. Jamaican government initiatives included action ‘against invasive alien species’ in 2017; this was reiterated in 2019, along with an initiative to prevent further deforestation and extinctions.4

2  Miller’s essay ‘The White Women and the Language of Bees’ provoked an ‘intense and intersecting set of debates’ and was temporarily withdrawn from the journal Pree, according to the editors’ preface. See Kei Miller. ‘The White Women and the Language of Bees.’ Pree 2018. https://preelit.com/2018/04/13/the-white-women-and-the-language-of-bees/ 3  National Environment and Planning Agency. ‘EU/UNEP/GOJ Adaptation to Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction (Restoration of Coastal Ecosystem).’ October 2010. Web. Accessed 15.06.21. https://www.nepa.gov.jm/sites/default/files/2019-11/climate_ change.pdf 4  Jamaica Observer. ‘Jamaica taking action against invasive alien species.’ 19 Sept 2017. Web. 15 Jun 2021. https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/latestnews/jamaica_taking_action_ against_invasive_alien_species_. For the UN’s report on Jamaica after its sixth biological diversity conference, see UN Environment. ‘6th National Report for the Convention on Biological Diversity: Jamaica.’ November 2019. Web. 15 Jun 2021. https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/latestnews/jamaica_taking_action_against_invasive_alien_species_

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Miller’s poetry takes a searching and sometimes playful look at such contentious issues. He shows how escaped reindeer thrive in Jamaica, how Place Name[s] bear witness to the scars of environmental and racist violence, and how an entangled network of plants and animals persists and resists. The power of hurricanes and oceans suggests both prophetic witness and the coming storms of climate change, while earthquakes show geological processes irrupting violently into the present. Colonial, capitalist, geotraumatic, and gender-related violence against land and people are primary concerns in Miller’s writing. As such, his work offers provocative ways of highlighting the ethical implications of Lewis and Maslin’s proposed threshold of the invasion of the Americas as the starting point of the Anthropocene.

Trying to Map a Way Beyond the Imperial Anthropocene Unsettled So consider an unsettled island. Inside—the unflattened and unsugared fields; inside—a tegareg sprawl of roots and canopies, inside—the tall sentries of bloodwood and yoke-wood and sweet-wood, of dog-wood, of bullet trees so hard they will one day splinter cutlasses, will one day swing low the carcasses of slaves. (13)

In couplets that revel in precolonial Jamaica’s unruly flora and fauna, Miller’s poem ‘Unsettled’ conjures up an entangled ecosystem that baffles and confounds attempts to classify, map, settle, and dominate it. Miller evokes the island through a mixture of formal, standard English discourse (‘unstructured’) and a vernacular idiom that occurs after the excerpt quoted above (‘tegareg,’ ‘leh-guh’), suggesting a playfully transgressive

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portrait of the island that defies settlement. And because it is ‘unsugared,’ this poem implies that it resists the colonial plantation system. This chapter will return to this poem later, but it encapsulates the way in which Miller’s writing celebrates vibrantly rebellious nonhumans. From vernacularising colonial cartography to showing the local manifestations of planetary tectonic processes, Miller’s work suggests ways of viewing the Anthropocene that call up an intricate mesh of local and transnational connections. Such planetary interconnections provide an alternative to visual depictions of the Anthropocene that depict the globe as an eerily lifeless and homogeneous entity, viewed from above (see Chap. 2 and Alaimo 2017; Latour 2017). Here is where the humanities and arts can draw out the ethical problems with such totalising views. For postcolonial ecocritics DeLoughrey and Handley, ‘This new era of human impact on the globe known as the Anthropocene has made it possible for countless individual perpetrators of environmental wrong to hide their actions in the midst of the complexity and collectivity of global processes and thus escape accountability’ (26). Ironically, such an understanding of global processes is a ‘by-product of a global consciousness derived from a history of imperial exploitation of nature’ (12). For Miller, mapmaking, global trade, and the transportation of organisms across oceans and continents are intimately linked to colonial and neo-colonial issues. Indeed, DeLoughrey and Handley argue, ‘To speak of postcolonial ecology is to foreground the historical process of nature’s mobility, transplantation, and consumption’ (13). The narrative that places the ‘golden spike’ at Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in 1492 is, of course, problematic in its emphasising of European male agency—although, for postcolonial ecocritics, such a threshold also draws useful attention to the way ‘biotic agents were participants in human history and the radical ecological changes wrought by empire’ (DeLoughrey and Handley 2011, 12). Lewis and Maslin’s ‘imperial Anthropocene’ brought the decimation of indigenous populations, deforestation, and the transportation of flora, fauna, and diseases around the planet. The result is ‘a globalization and homogenization of the world’s species, which continues today’ (Lewis and Maslin, 158), and yet such histories of ‘homogenization’ took their toll on human lives. As mentioned in Chap. 2, Kathryn Yusoff’s scholarship interrogates the imperialist and racist implications of such accounts of the Anthropocene. She argues that ‘coloniality and anti-­ Blackness are materially inscribed into the Anthropocene,’ whether it is proposed to begin with the invasion of the Americas, the Industrial

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Revolution in the 1800s, or the Great Acceleration of the 1950s (19). The concept of the ‘Plantationocene’ and theories of ‘geotrauma,’ with their unequal impacts on different groups of people, are also important to my interpretation of Miller’s poetry in this chapter. The ecosystems that one encounters in the ‘nearby bushes’ of Miller’s poems are diverse and ramifying by nature—they tell a ‘Nansi story’ (2019, 8) of queer Jamaican presences that revises Jamaican folk tales of Anansi the trickster spider. If scientists such as Joan Roughgarden have presented the vibrant array of sexes and sexualities in the more-than-­ human world (see also Chap. 5), Miller’s poetry develops the idea of the LGBTQIA+ community’s connection to Jamaica’s profusion of understories, forests, and hinterlands. Black LGBTQIA+ perspectives on the Anthropocene, and on environmentalist discourse in general, are particularly important given the implicitly white and heterosexist assumptions that environmentalist rhetoric often makes. Protecting ‘our children’ from the depredations of the Anthropocene was problematised in Chap. 1, and Nicole Seymour’s ecocritical work suggests ways of expanding such arguments further. Queer ecological literature understands ‘oppressed humans (including working-class individuals and people of color, in addition to queers) and oppressed non-humans (degraded landscapes, threatened neutral resources, and other flora and fauna) to be deeply interconnected’ (1). The flourishing field of recent ecopoetry by LGBTQIA+ authors, such as Maya Chowdhry’s Fossil, Caleb Parkin’s This Fruiting Body, and Seán Hewitt’s Tongues of Fire, shows that there are many poetic counterparts to the North American novels and films that Seymour examines. The concept of what is ‘natural’ was a contentious issue in early queer theory (Seymour, 3), and yet for Miller, homosexual encounters are enabled by ecological connection. Miller’s queer perspective on land, land rights, flora, fauna, and safe forest spaces for the gay community points out that LGBTQIA+ issues are inherently environmental. The final section of this chapter will examine how the forests, understories, wood-wide webs, homosexual encounters, and the ‘Nansi story’ in Miller’s poetry are queer, ecological forms of relation. This chapter turns next to Edouard Glissant’s influential concept of the poetics of relation as a framework for analysing interconnection. Glissant’s seminal theories of diaspora, land, and interconnection link the Caribbean and its environments to the world beyond. Glissant is an important figure for postcolonial theorists and ecocritics alike. His concept of the poetics of relation provides an important theoretical model

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that I expand and develop here, with reference to ecocritical and ecopoetic theory. Ecocritics and postcolonial ecocritics, including Carine Mardorossian (2013), Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley (2011, 27), and Alexandra Campbell (2019), have deployed Glissant’s theories, while Jana Evans Braziel’s concept of a ‘poetics of (eco-)relation’ (112) is one that I adapt and apply to Miller’s work. Glissant’s theories have also been productive for scholars exploring the Anthropocene. His work has been applied to the Anthropocene in Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s latest monograph (2021) and is a point of departure for Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018). My contention is that Glissant’s oceanic, rooty, and rhizomatic images offer an important alternative narrative to accounts of the Anthropocene that are Eurocentric, totalising, or anthropocentric. Glissant began developing his concept of the ‘poetics of relation’ in the essays in Caribbean Discourse (published as Le discours antillais in 1981 and partially translated as Caribbean Discourse in 1989), and this is expanded in The Poetics of Relation (1990). Caribbean Discourse examines how Martinique’s landscapes, flora, and fauna have been changed by historical and recent systems of capitalist exploitation. Glissant clearly displays a postcolonial, ecological sensibility. He laments the disappearance of aquatic ecosystems—‘The delta has been chewed up by make-believe entrepreneurs’—and of scented flowers (1989, 11, 51). This ecologically aware critique of ‘development’ suggests the environmental cost of the ‘Capitalocene.’ Glissant contends that ‘[t]he creative link between nature and culture is vital to the formation of a community’ (1989, 65), an argument that resonates with Miller’s idea that ‘place is language’ in his creative practice (Miller and Wachtel 2018). Glissant proposes that establishing relations between Caribbean landscapes and their people is all the more necessary because the inhabitants of Martinique have been dispossessed of links to their earlier homelands. This has happened through historical exploitations: the near-complete genocide of indigenous Caribs, the slave trade, and the drastic alterations that the plantation system has wrought upon colonised islands (1989, 90). Glissant expands Barbadian author Kamau Brathwaite’s idea that in the Caribbean, ‘the unity is submarine’ (Glissant 1989, 66).5

5  Kamau Brathwaite. ‘Caribbean Man in Space and Time.’ Savacou 11–12 (September 1975): 1.

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Glissant reconsiders the image of ‘roots,’ which later features in the poetry of Miller and McCarthy Woolf. ‘Roots’ are a significant idea for scholars of the Black Atlantic, suggesting the African ‘roots’ of the Black Diaspora. Paul Gilroy argued that people of African descent must move fluidly between ‘roots’ and ‘routes,’ in order to undermine the appeal of ‘Africentrism’ or the ‘Eurocentrisms’ that it has been set in contrast to (190). Yet Glissant’s interpretation of ‘roots’ is more fluid, organic, and expansive. When considering relations between the Caribbean and the wider world, Glissant evokes ‘Submarine roots’ that are ‘not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches’ (1989, 67). Such worldwide relations produce a ‘nonuniversalizing diversity’ (253) that can be deployed as a counter-discourse to totalising, global views. Glissant’s imagery of root and branch is an apt theoretical tool for this book’s analysis of Miller’s poetry of plantations and forests. Rhizomes, rootiness, and fibrils expand, and are expanded upon, in Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. This seminal collection of essays begins in the bowels of the slave-ship (1997, 5), yet it develops in some markedly organic directions. Most notable for ecocritics is Glissant’s deployment of the image of the rhizome as a non-hierarchical, connecting mesh between places and people. Developing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome, in contrast to the root, as a non-hierarchical image for connectivity, Glissant argues, ‘Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other’ (11). Local and international connections are reconsidered in a non-hierarchical network: ‘[I]n the poetics of Relation, one who is errant (who is no longer traveller, discoverer, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this—and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides’ (1997, 20). Glissant’s model of connectivity contrasts with perspectives on globalisation that link it to technology and capitalism, while his highly organic imagery gives scope to expand his poetics of relation to include Anthropocene theories of kinship and entanglement. His essay ‘The Burning Beach’ shifts scale fluidly, between an intimate evocation of place and Earth’s vast volcanic, oceanic, and climatic systems. Glissant wonders: ‘Is this some community we rhizome into fragile connection to a place? Or a total we involved in the activity of the planet?’ (206). His poetics of relation embraces the local and the global, without privileging either. For him, the foundational voyage of the Black

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Diaspora is a crossing of ‘the land-sea that, unknown to you, is planet Earth’ (7). Crucially, he is aware of ‘the Earth’s illnesses’ (125)—environmental and human. Jana Evans Braziel develops Glissant’s work to examine a ‘poetics of (eco-)relation’ (112), analysing how Glissant, Derek Walcott, and Jamaica Kincaid posit rhizomatic ‘eco-relations between humans and their animal, botanical, and mineral others’ (111). In considering how Miller creates an ‘ecopoetics of relation’—but also of resistance—I pay further attention to how relation (or the absence of it) functions in Miller’s poetry and poetics, on a formal and compositional level.

Ecopoetics of Relation and Resistance Environments and the social, economic, and (neo-)colonial issues that shape them are crucial to several generations of Caribbean poets. These range from canonical voices such as Derek Walcott (Omeros, 1990) to a new generation of ecologically informed poets such as Richard Georges (Make Us All Islands, 2018). What Miller’s work does for debates about the Anthropocene is to reconsider how issues such as cartography, human labour, the transportation of plant and animal life, and the exploitation of natural ‘resources’ are tightly bound to issues of empire and the Black Diaspora. Miller’s view of the Anthropocene quoted above relates to capitalist and colonialist exploitation of the land, and in his poetry, the ‘destructive relationships’6 he comments on lead to depredation—but also to surprising alliances between humans and other species. Miller’s ecopoetics of place is multi-scalar, exploring how Jamaican localities interact with wider, global networks of diaspora, human displacement and animal migration, land rights and globalisation. As he comments, ‘This is what happens when you live in a country that is not the centre of the world; you become blessed with a kind of double vision. You see your life from the inside, and also from the outside—both locally and globally’ (Miller 2013, loc 195). As such, Miller’s poetry offers possibilities for reinterpreting the Anthropocene as a time of unequal power relations between different groups of people, but also as a time of resistant, entangled alliances between humans and nonhumans. 6  Kei Miller, interviewee, and Magma editors, interviewers. ‘We have been living in the Anthropocene for hundreds of years: a conversation with Kei Miller.’ Magma 81 (October 2021): 111–114 (112).

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Postcolonial ecocriticism has paid close attention to the diverse literatures of the Caribbean, and the work of Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, George Handley, and Renée Gosson on environmentally engaged Caribbean authors paves the way for my reading of Miller through the lens of Anthropocene theories. Campbell (2019) and McCarthy Woolf (2019a) have laid the foundations for Miller’s work to be read as ecopoetry. McCarthy Woolf explores the way non-white writers frequently have their ecological themes downplayed in favour of readings that focus on identity: ‘Often, writers of colour are read by default for identity-oriented issues, sometimes at the expense of other significant themes. Kei Miller and Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo both consider cultural and physical geographies’ (‘Green Roots, Brown Shoots’). McCarthy Woolf’s spiritual ecocritical analysis of The Cartographer pays attention to the collection’s ‘theological ecology’ (‘Hybrid Hierophanies’ 94), while Michael Rose-Steel mentions the ‘eco-political’ issues the collection raises (41). Yet of all the literary critics who have analysed Miller, McCarthy Woolf is the only one who devotes considerable space to Miller’s deployment of poetic forms (‘Hybrid Hierophanies’). There is much scope to analyse how Miller’s environmental and geographical themes are played out in the formal features of his ecopoetics. A poem that has attracted attention from both theorists of the Black Atlantic, and ecocritics, is ‘When Considering the Long, Long Journey of 28,000 Rubber Ducks,’ which Miller places near the end of The Cartographer: When Considering the Long, Long Journey of 28,000 Rubber Ducks To them who knew to break free from dark holds of ships who trusted their unsqueezed bodies instead to the Atlantic; to them who scorned the limits of bathtubs, refused to join a chorus of rub-a-dub; to them who’ve always known their own high tunes, hitched rides on the manacled backs of blues, who’ve been sailing now since 1992; to them that pass in squeakless silence over the Titanic, float in and out of salty vortexes; to them who grace the shores of hot and frozen continents [….] (53)

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Productive cross-currents between ecocritical theory, Anthropocene theories, and theories of the Black Diaspora can be created by bringing together different readings of Miller’s distinctive poem. Here, I compare two critical analyses of Miller’s poem: the first by Alan Rice, who interprets the poem with reference to the Black Diaspora and global capitalism, and the second by Alexandra Campbell, who analyses the poem by deploying Anthropocene theories of waste. I then build on both approaches to develop a reading of Miller’s poem that shows how these themes are conveyed by his ecopoetics: the lexical and formal features of this richly multifaceted poem of the Anthropocene. For Alan Rice, a scholar of the literatures and cultures of the Black Atlantic, Miller’s poem is a ‘tongue-in-cheek celebration of the possibilities of migration and commemoration of the traumas of the Middle Passage’ (303). According to Rice’s reading, the rubber ducks are a critique of ‘the excesses of contemporary capitalism’ and a memorial to the victims of the slave trade on which the capitalist system is founded (204). The plastic ducks in question were released when the container ship Ever Laurel sank in the Pacific in 1992. This was 400 years after Columbus’s incursion into the Americas, which initiated the ‘modern world order that the poem critiques.’ (One could make a link here to Lewis and Maslin’s view of where the ‘golden spike’ of the Anthropocene should be placed.) Rice notes that the ducks are ‘mass-produced goods made by Third World labour for First World consumers’ (305), evoking contemporary forms of unfree labour that persist long after the abolition of the slave trade. Alluding to slave revolts and resistance, Rice finds that Miller uses the ducks ‘to commemorate creative survival as much as rebellion’ (306). Expanding this through the lens of ecocritical theories reveals that the ducks’ ‘survival’ also draws attention to their materiality. This playful poem is, for all its celebration, an engagement with the plastic that contaminates the world’s oceans. The ‘Plasticene’ is a humorous alternative label to the Anthropocene that is particularly apt here (see Schneiderman 2017, 172). For ecocritic Alexandra Campbell, Kei Miller’s poem ‘enacts a playful and powerful recalibration of the Caribbean beachcombing trope, linking the historical violence of the Middle Passage with a new oceanic threat—plastic’ (202). Oceanic connections between the Caribbean and Scotland take place through not only slavery and migration, but the ‘transoceanic movements of marine waste’ (196). Campbell finds that Miller and other poets with littoral preoccupations ‘link together contemporary stories of production, exploitation and pollution that

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circulate across the global ocean’ (206), enabling them to ‘access and critique the networks of capitalist and colonial exploitation that currently circulate within the world’s oceans’ (195). Yet, building on Rice and Campbell’s readings, I argue that the poem suggests ways of celebrating the unruly agency of matter, even as it finds irony in consumerism and its exploitative foundations. Such material agency is embedded in the poetic form that Miller uses to sculpt his poem. First, I turn to Miller’s thematic, environmental preoccupations, and I then demonstrate how these are shaped and conveyed through poetic form. The ducks evoke both drifting marine plastic and migrating animals, while the ‘dark holds’ conjure up images of forcibly transported people enduring the notorious Middle Passage. The material that these ducks are made of counts. Miller’s title calls them rubber, the traditional and colloquial term for them that recalls the rubber trade’s roots in plantations and forced labour. Rice shows that the ducks are actually made out of plastic; this reading can be expanded to link them not only to global supply chains but to the petroleum economy and to future deposits of ‘plastiglomerate’ rock.7 The ducks ‘float in and out of salty vortexes’ (Miller 2014, 53) and ‘grace the shores of hot and frozen continents’; in the poem’s eleventh line (not quoted above), the ducks offer instruction on the ‘movements of currents’ (53). The rhyme-word ‘vortexes’ is submerged in the middle of a line and the eye-rhyme ‘continents/currents’ is placed prominently at the end of a line, suggesting connections across vast oceanic spaces. The poem’s scale-shifting between the lowly plastic ducks and panoramic vistas of exploration provides a humorous alternative to totalising views of the globe. Miller’s poem suggests that ocean currents are nonhuman agents that create intricate relations between local and global. The ducks have ‘hitched rides on the manacled backs of blues’: ‘manacled’ recalls the shackles of slavery, but it also raises auditory and imagistic echoes of ‘barnacled,’ the image one might expect to associate with a blue whale. ‘The blues’ is the music of resistance (Rice, 306), and yet Miller is simultaneously evoking music and whale-song. Plastics are presented as harming whales in series such as the BBC’s Blue Planet II (2017). However, an ecopoetics of relation for the Anthropocene might even allow alliances to 7  For a popular journalistic account of the toy ducks and the oceanographic research they have enabled, see, for example, Donovan Hohn. ‘The great escape: the bath toys that swam the Pacific.’ Observer, 12 Feb 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/ feb/12/great-escape-bath-toys-pacific

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form between the charismatic blue whale and the humble plastic duck. The ‘hail’ at the end of the poem suggests an uplifting poetics of survival. The Anthropocene and its more ecologically focused offshoot the ‘Chthulucene’ are messy, intricate, inter-species networks, where human creations refuse to conform to colonial, capitalist, and ecocidal logic. The poem’s formal strategies have received little attention from earlier critics, and the effects they create are examined here. Half-rhyming near-couplets (‘continents/currents’ (53)) echo the songs that feature prominently in this collection, a dash of Hudibrastic rhyme (‘blues’, ‘1992’) adding humour. Couplets would be seen as formally conservative by ecopoetics scholars such as Griffiths, who favours ‘Modernist aesthetics’ (9), and by Lynn Keller, whose main focus is the ‘experimental’ (19). A poem like this would be unlikely to find a place between the (digital) pages of Jonathan Skinner’s journal ecopoetics. Bate and Buell focus on Wordsworth’s blank verse and Walcott’s terza rima—so is Miller’s poem more aligned with the supposedly ‘mainstream’ work discussed by these early ecopoetry scholars? Rhyming near-couplets might evoke neat forms of relation at first sight, but the form of the entire piece suggests that things do not quite match up. A publisher’s proof of the poem provides further information about how Miller developed his formal strategies as he reworked the poem. On a printout of the proof, Miller’s editor Helen Tookey wrote to ask Miller if he wanted to keep the double line breaks that he had used in his manuscript, which had been removed during the editorial process.8 The double line breaks are clearly an important effect that the author wanted to retain, as they are restored in the published version. In the published version, the double line breaks create expansive space on the page, casting each line adrift as those ducks bob through vast ocean gyres. It is telling that Miller’s poem is a thirteen-line ‘unlucky’ sonnet. This distinctive form suggests that the voyage is unfinished and that the plastic ducks have a long future ahead of them. Dislocated rhymes create the idea that some things are left unfinished in this poem—rhymes such as ‘ships/Atlantic/Titanic’ are distanced from one another. The final line of the poem is half the length of all lines preceding it; the voyage is ongoing and the durability of the plastic ducks stretches into the far future. Formally, this poem is far from experimental—but it does subvert the shape of a traditional sonnet. Thematically, 8  John Rylands Library, Carcanet archive. Acc 24, box 11/2. Kei Miller. Typescript of The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Printout of typescript with editor’s queries in manuscript, p. 42.

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Miller’s poem shares some common ground with far more experimental work, such as Adam Dickinson’s The Polymers (2013), in suggesting that the material agency of plastic has a persistent and unruly future. An Anthropocene ecopoetics of relation must grapple with the violent past of forced transportation and extractive industries, while acknowledging how consumer products form uncanny and unpredictable links with the far future.

Cartography, Environment, Place, and Planet: The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion Those plastic ducks appear as one of the final poems in The Cartographer. The book explores how issues relating to place intersect with colonial history, globalisation, the use of natural resources, and the lives of nonhuman animals. It dramatises the meeting of two voices and views: the cartographer and the rastaman. The cartographer is ‘used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it,’ according to Carcanet Press’s synopsis on the book’s back cover. The rastaman, on the other hand, stresses the ‘immapancy of dis world’ (21). One speaks mostly formal, standard English; the other often uses Jamaican patois. For Karen McCarthy Woolf, these characters are used to set up a discussion between two contrasting viewpoints: ‘Miller redraws the map of his native Jamaica through a socio-theological debate that takes place between two archetypal opposites’ (‘Hybrid Hierophanies’ 91). Miller’s poetic geographies draw on Rastafari traditions and their expression in musical forms such as reggae. Mount Zion is a Rastafarian’s home in Africa and is a physical, rather than intangible, heaven (King, 24; Rice 2003, 101); Miller’s frequent mentions of ‘Babylon’ reference the Rastafari use of this term to designate the degenerate and oppressive aspects of white-dominated society (OED ‘Babylon’; see also King, 52). (Neither the cartographer nor the rastaman has his name capitalised, which hints that they might be two people who end up united through community links. The two characters can even be read as two facets of the same literary self, since their voices merge towards the end of the book. Miller has described them as two sides of his own mind (Rose-Steel, 41).) This section develops ecopoetic interpretations of the book by considering place, planet, ecological, and human relations through the lens of Anthropocene theories.

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The Cartographer put Miller firmly on the literary map. The book raised his profile in the UK, the Caribbean, and beyond when it won the coveted Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2014. This accolade suggests an important sea-change in the literary establishment, notorious for its privileging of white heterosexual men. Miller’s win marked the first time the award had been won by a writer of colour. The Ledbury Report on the State of Poetry and Criticism, which monitors diversity, notes that Miller’s win was followed by further Forward Prize wins by writers of colour: Claudia Rankine (2015), Vahni Capildeo (2018), and Danez Smith (2019) (University of Liverpool Centre for New and International Writing 8). In the cartographer’s view, ‘one can observe/the clear/curve of the earth’ (32) from a plantation house. This visual image suggests European ways of seeing territory—the way a landscape is not lived in but looked at (Cresswell 2015, 19). Miller’s collection critiques the colonial histories of cartography and classification—the cartographer describes the sea as ‘an arc/of shining measure’—but it also considers the way both local knowledge and nonhuman agents participate in creating and understanding place. Lewis and Maslin connect the science of mapmaking to their favoured threshold for the inception of the Anthropocene: the invasion of the Americas is one of the factors in the refinement of western scientific methods that began in the 1500s, including improvements to European navigational charts (2018, 170). (It is important to note that both mapmaking and navigational charts long predate 1500.) If Lewis and Maslin’s ‘Orbis Spike’ and Jason Moore’s ‘Capitalocene’ point to a system of colonial expropriation and exploitation, Miller’s collection considers vernacular forms of knowledge, putting colonial understanding into dialogue with the rastaman’s alternative ecological, geographical, and spiritual wisdom. Cartography of the colonial era raises ethical questions about ‘the power relations that shape our world and our view of it’ (Rose-Steel, 44). Miller is far from the only author to consider the imperialist basis of mapmaking and its flaws—Walcott denounces early European maps as ‘raggedly inaccurate’ (2005, 51) and rejects ‘the god-given cartography of empire’ (ctd in Handley 2005, 203.) (It is important to nuance these points by noting that cartography is hardly confined to the west—witness western mapmakers’ debt to Arabic, Sephardic, and Persian geography, navigation, and cosmology (Cosgrove, loc 910–17).) Yet Miller’s poetry often explores European cartography as a colonial tool that displaces earlier forms of mapmaking. Miller describes his poetry as ‘deeply invested in questions of

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place and landscape, and what they mean.’9 His project to unearth the untold stories of places spans several books: the essay collection Writing Down the Vision (2013) and the poetry collections The Cartographer and In Nearby Bushes. In an interview, Miller has elaborated on how the cartographer uses ‘Western science and a Western way of knowing the world,’ forms of knowledge that ‘always reduced Black people’s lives,’ as the map is ‘a major tool of the colonizer’ (Miller and Wachtel). Sites of resistance to (neo-)colonial control are important in The Cartographer. Significantly for this reading of the collection through the lens of Anthropocene theories, nonhuman agents play an active role in defying the cartographer’s attempts to map the island. These nonhuman agents range from flora and fauna to earthquakes. Particular Jamaican sites are celebrated for their resistance to colonisation, for human-centred control and mapping, and also for their ritual significance in Rastafari traditions. For DeLoughrey, Handley, and Gosson, particular Caribbean sites were ‘vital repositories of indigenous and African beliefs and assertions of rebellion against plantation capitalism.’ These included ‘mountain ranges, mangrove swamps, [and] provision grounds’ (2–3). The Cartographer is a collection of relations between people, plants, animals, and places, but these relations also provide alliances to resist colonial ways of mapping, classifying, and exploiting the land. Miller’s branching, rhizomatic way of connecting people, places, and environments is played out through his poetics and the way he structures the collection. He interweaves several poetic sequences. His choice to intersperse them creates an interlocking structure that sets up formal, lexical, and thematic links between distinct parts of the book. Thus, the collection’s very structure is relational, and even rhizomatic. The rastaman and the cartographer discuss their ways of knowing place in a series of numbered poems that recur in groups throughout the collection. Miller indicates that they form a narrative, with character development and structural progression, by giving them subtitles that parody the chapter headings of Victorian novels: ‘in which the cartographer asks for directions’ (27). Prayer-poems and hymns to wildlife weave a relational structure throughout the volume, suggesting forms of spirituality that aspire to multi-species coexistence. These spiritual poems begin with ‘A Prayer for the Unflummoxed Beaver’ and move towards ‘For the Croaking Lizards,’ 9  Kei Miller, keynote reading at The Anthropocene and Race conference, University of Central Lancashire, 6 February 2021.

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while ‘Hymn to the Birds’ develops a relational link between flight and literary creation: ‘not to birds but to words/ which themselves feel/like feather and wing’ (48). The third sequence is the series of ‘Place Name’ poems. These ‘Place Name’ poems are formally distinct from the other sequences in Miller’s collection: their layout on the page suggests prose poetry. If the prose poem is defined as ‘a short composition employing the rhythmic cadences and other devices of free verse … but printed wholly or partly in the format of prose, i.e. with a right-hand margin instead of regular line-breaks’ (Baldick, 294), Miller’s ‘Place Name’ poems conform in part to this. Yet he plays with the expectations of genre by terming a second series of ‘Place Name’ poems ‘micro-essays’ in In Nearby Bushes (2019, 27). The ‘Place Name’ poems in The Cartographer blend the prose poem with the essay, beginning with standard English and gradually incorporating more patois. The poems in the sequence employ either a collective narrative voice (‘our people,’ 41) or an omniscient narrative mode that contrasts with the first person I in some of the essays in Miller’s 2013 prose collection. Hybridity of form and language suggests that these distinctive ‘Place Name’ poems uncover the hidden, entangled human and environmental histories that the map cannot capture. In The Cartographer, traditional poetic forms such as the sonnet are associated with colonial knowledge and order, while metrical irregularity, the rhythms of reggae, and the prose-poem/micro-essay are associated with vernacular knowledge and exuberant, resistant flora and fauna. Miller has commented in an interview, ‘What kind of poetic voices aren’t privileged because other metres, probably the iambic pentameter, delegitimized those ways?’ (Miller and Wachtel). The third poem in the collection is ‘Establishing the Metre,’ which employs a shifting form that steps rhythmically towards the right-hand side of the page. The poem follows the French scientists who journeyed on foot to establish the metre as a standard measure; Miller views this as a Eurocentric act, as has noted that the metre displaced African forms of measurement (Miller and Wachtel). Miller’s puns on ‘foot’ and ‘the measure that exists in everything’ (11) prepare the reader for his subversion of traditional, European poetic forms such as couplets and the sonnet. (His deployment of forms such as the Persian ghazal (30), on the other hand, further decolonises the landscape and sets up relational, international poetic links.) His reworking of form echoes Miller’s literary project to complicate, critique, and parody colonial, human-centred, and excessively rigid ways of understanding place and environment. Indeed, Miller links European poetic forms to the

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colonial gaze and environmental exploitation: ‘their eyes that smoothly scan the green canefields/ like sonnets’ (33). The sonnet is set in contrast with vernacular or organic measures, including the rastaman’s ‘heartbeat riddim’ and ‘the terrible metre of hurricanes’ (40). If the relationship between human heartbeat and powerful hurricane might be termed relational, Miller also points to moments when relations between land and anticolonial ideologies enable resistance. What might be called an ecopoetics of resistance, as much as relation, comes to the fore in ‘Unsettled.’ This is the first poem in the collection that spans more than one page; the length marks the poem out for its formal and thematic significance. Here, as I have mentioned, Miller celebrates the way nonhuman agents form organic meshes that defy colonial control. ‘Unsettled’ shifts scale from the ‘unsettled island’ to woods, then crows, then mosquitoes, and then microscopic diseases, finally returning to the unmapped island again: macroscopic to microscopic and back. This shift in scale is important because it localises and ‘provincialises’ the Anthropocene. Here is an alternative to the totalising gaze of the atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and Lewis and Maslin’s ‘Orbis Spike.’ The shift in scale points to intricate connections between humans and rebellious nonhumans that resist colonial control: So consider an unsettled island. Inside—the unflattened and unsugared fields; inside—a tegareg sprawl of roots and canopies, inside—the tall sentries of bloodwood and yoke-wood and sweet-wood, of dog-wood, of bullet trees so hard they will one day splinter cutlasses, will one day swing low the carcasses of slaves. (13)

In keeping with Miller’s view that ‘place is language’ (Miller and Wachtel), his use of patois terms alongside standard English creolises and personifies the island’s plants and animals, suggesting intricate, inter-­ species

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entanglement. Terms such as ‘tegareg’ (‘hooligan’) and ‘leh-guh’ (‘let go,’ laissez-faire) celebrate the unruly agency of the undergrowth to resist both the original colonial impulse and the cartographer’s subsequent attempts at mapping. To European readers, who might be unfamiliar with Jamaican patois, they also mischievously confound interpretation. This linguistic strategy is mimetic of the way an unruly tangle of vegetation confounds both coloniser and cartographer. Miller’s turn of phrase ‘sprawl of roots’ resonates with the plural roots and rhizomes of Glissant’s theories of diaspora, suggesting the complex ‘roots’ of Jamaican culture (indigenous Caribbean, African, and British). Miller’s poem celebrates the ‘unsugared’ island, recalling a time before the plantation economy and slavery. (‘[S]wing low’ echoes the African American spiritual song that prays for deliverance, and in the poem, this comes not from heaven but from trees.) The sentences in the lines quoted above spill over in sprawling enjambement; rhyming couplets are shaken loose from a regular structure. ‘Cutlasses’ and ‘carcasses’ are separated by a line break, rather than being paired in a neat couplet; ‘bees’ ends a line while ‘fleas’ pops up in the middle of the following one; ‘red,’ ‘mud,’ and ‘night’ are half-rhymes, but their positioning defies regular metre. Miller’s poem revels in listing vernacular names for the ‘unseemly’ flora and fauna of Jamaica, complicating and parodying the methods of colonial natural history. The ‘dengue’ and ‘hookworm’ (13) that end the catalogue of living organisms suggest an alternative to Lewis and Maslin’s narrative of an Anthropocene that begins with European diseases ravaging the Americas. Here, Caribbean diseases are organic agents of resistance. Miller’s ecopoetics continues to confound the regularity of the cartographer’s ‘metre.’ In ‘Unsettled,’ his poetic form of choice is a series of couplets. (One founder of Carcanet Press, the UK-based firm that publishes Miller, has wryly termed these ‘Carcanet couplets.’)10 Yet these couplets are decidedly unsettled. Miller’s repetition of ‘inside,’ and his catalogue of landscape and living things, echoes an earlier environmentally aware poem: Ted Hughes’s ‘Amulet.’ In ‘Amulet,’ Hughes creates chant-­ like repetitions that are designed to imitate (or appropriate) Inuit song. Hughes’s poem is structurally and syntactically regular: ‘Inside the wolf’s fang, the mountain of heather./Inside the mountain of heather, the wolf’s fur’ (CPH, 260). Miller’s ‘Unsettled’ reworks Hughes’s regular poetic 10  Grevel Lindop, personal communication. Arvon Foundation course at Lumb Bank, October 2015.

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form for a Jamaican context, deconstructing the formal regularity of the English writer’s poem. ‘Unsettled’ ends with a defiant single line: ‘this island: unwritten, unsettled, unmapped’ (Miller 2014, 14), suggesting a unique and resistant island ecosystem. Negative prefixes (‘unsettled,’ ‘unseemly’) are heaped up, but Miller uses them to convey a very positive sense of nonhuman resistance to colonisation. In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant deconstructed ‘the persistent myth of paradise islands’ (1989, 5). Similarly, Miller’s assertion that ‘This is no paradise’ (14) celebrates the island’s cast of flourishing yet deadly organisms. If Lewis and Maslin’s origin-point of the Anthropocene is colonial transportation of people, flora, and fauna, Miller’s poem provides an alternative perspective that frames the island as a site of organic rebellion against the ‘imperial Anthropocene.’ ‘Unsettled’ is followed by ‘What the Mapmaker Ought to Know,’ which continues the idea that Jamaica’s landscape, and even its tectonic plates, refuses the simplistic orderliness of the cartographer’s methods. The opening line, ‘On this island things fidget,’ embellishes the themes of ‘Unsettled’: even supposedly solid ground is unsettled (and unsettling). Miller writes, Landmarks shift, become unfixed by earthquake by landslide by utter spite. Whole places will slip out from your grip. (15)

If Doreen Massey’s progressive sense of place points to mountains on the move (2005, 113), Miller’s evocation of Jamaica’s dynamic tectonics suggests that the very bedrock evades a fixed sense of place. The concept of the Anthropocene, with its planetary geological gaze, draws on planetary earth science theories such as the theory of tectonic plates (Clark 2011, 13–15). Yet this in itself evokes the dynamic mobility of Earth’s systems, which Clark and Szerszynski emphasise in later work (2020). Miller celebrates Jamaica’s rebellious tectonic agency: ‘The landscape does not sit/ willingly’ (15). Miller frames Jamaica as a site of alternative geologies that complicate Eurocentric ways of seeing, such as ‘White Geology’ (Yusoff 2018, 4).

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Miller’s collection initially suggests that multiple agents, from forest vines to volatile bedrock, confound colonisation and cartography. Yet one of the most fundamentally anti-anthropocentric poems in the book suggests that maps are hardly the preserve of humans at all. The poem ‘vii’ marks a point where the cartographer appears to waver in his determination not to concern himself with local, organic specificities—what he has termed ‘the muddy affairs of land’ (18). The poem ‘vii’ is written in the cartographer’s polished standard English, with its emphasis on accuracy and classification (‘precise/hibiscuses’). However, organic relations between cartographer, flora, and fauna suggest forms of enmeshed relation, rather than hierarchical classification: for what to call the haphazard dance of bees returning to their hives but maps that lead to precise hibiscuses, their soft storehouses of pollen? And what to call the blood of hummingbirds but maps that pulse the tiny bodies across oceans and then back? (22)

McCarthy Woolf argues that ‘Miller assigns [the environment] agency literally via “the birds and the bees,” who act as non-human cartographers in the migratory and navigational patterns. That these are Jamaican bees is embedded in his choice of flora, the hibiscus being a national icon; so too the “Doctor Bird”’ (‘Hybrid Hierophanies’ 98). The insects and animals that Miller chooses are indeed Jamaican, and they help to provincialise and diversify forms of geographical knowledge beyond western cartography and human geographical methods. It is significant that these creatures are also mobile or migratory. The hummingbirds who fly ‘across/oceans and then back’ cannot fail to suggest a metaphorical link to people of the African Diaspora. Later in the poem, turtles are also mentioned; they, too, have navigational methods that connect them both to localities and to vast oceanic voyages. Miller’s 2018 essay ‘The White Women and the Language of Bees’ gives further information about how insects, aquatic life, and Jamaican

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landscapes function in his writing. Miller’s main goal in the essay is to examine cultural appropriation by white women writing about Jamaica. Yet the essay also explores how insects and animals symbolise, or actively participate in, local and diasporic knowledge. ‘The language of bees’ is Miller’s term for a vivid, literary evocation of Jamaican places, but this essay is far from localist. The essay notes how turtles participate in migrations that transcend human concepts of territory and nationality: The waters of North America have been kind to them. They have settled there. It is only the need to give birth that pulls them back to the very beach where they had been born years ago. […] These are the original natives. These are the original immigrants. They do not worry or politicize their various migrations. It simply is.11

The essay considers Jamaica’s insects and animals to have their own understanding of the relations between local and planetary scales. The ending of the essay also evokes an inclusive, relational model of writing place and planet. Miller suggests that white writers will be able to employ an organic language to conjure a sense of place: ‘that kind of night that buzzes like bees, and from its ink they will form words, and the words will form flowers that will form flocks of birds that will form sky.’12 He posits intricate relations between nature and culture, between writing locality and writing in diaspora. A complex, interconnected sense of relation emerges from both the poem and the essay. Miller’s poetry suggests an ecopoetics of relation that is cognisant of human imbalances of power, but also the central role that flora and fauna play in writers’ creative processes. The bees and turtles participate in an intimate understanding of place, but their travels also create relational links between air and vegetation, or land and sea. Miller’s work evokes an active and agential role for nonhumans that resonates with Glissant’s poetics of relation and Haraway’s concept of the Chthulucene. An enmeshed sense of human and nonhuman entanglement links ‘vii’ to ‘A Prayer for the Unflummoxed Beaver,’ with its wry yet poignant evocation of an intricate wetland ecosystem. In ‘A Prayer for the Unflummoxed 11  Kei Miller. ‘The White Women and the Language of Bees.’ Pree 2018. https://preelit. com/2018/04/13/the-white-women-and-the-language-of-bees/ 12  https://preelit.com/2018/04/13/the-white-women-and-the-language-of-bees/

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Beaver,’ Miller calls up the ‘unknowable/but perfect paths’ of squirrels, inviting the reader to travel from Jamaica to the Louisiana bayou. (The later poem ‘Place Name: Swamp’ suggests a relational link between the two localities, and this poem will be analysed shortly.) Miller’s poem prays ‘for these acres of water,’ the vocabulary of supplication suggesting that the waterscape itself is sacred, although threatened. Squirrels, cedars, alligators, grasses, Louisiana’s minority language of French, and the memory of a writer friend are all joined together in this unorthodox but poignant prayer. The catalogue of vegetation, water, fauna, and human life suggests an entangled mesh of multi-species relations. Yet, as Anna Tsing memorably puts it, ‘Humans cannot survive by stomping on all the others’ (vii). Miller’s poem is no utopian picture of humans living in harmony with their environment: the ending shows that this interdependence is crucial for our very survival. In the final lines, Miller delicately suggests that humans and nonhumans alike are connected by our shared mortality: ‘A prayer/for the dying that will come to all of us’ (27). This ‘dying’ resonates with the theories of the ‘Anthropocene extinction’ and human extinction discussed in Chap. 2 and elsewhere. He uses the terms ‘death’ and ‘dying’ here to express not only human mortality and animal extinction, but also habitat destruction. From the ritual sacrifice of ‘tethered goats’ (30) to the ‘cetacean slaughter’ in ‘Place Name: Bloody Bay’ (60), Miller exposes the complexities of the way human beings treat, and exploit, other animals. Indeed, ‘Place Name: Bloody Bay’ is a good example of the way Miller subverts (neo-)colonial ways of seeing, by exposing animal slaughter and histories of environmental exploitation. This short, elegiac prose-poem remembers how the killing of whales is inscribed in Jamaica’s geography. The poem underwent significant revisions at typescript stage, and these illuminate the way Miller pares the poem down to increase its poignancy and heighten its focus on the memory of vanished animal presences. Here is Miller’s poem in typescript13:

13  John Rylands Library. Carcanet archive, Acc 24, box 11/2. Acc 24, box 11/2. Kei Miller. Typescript of The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Printout of typescript with editor Helen Tookey’s queries in manuscript, p. 50.

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In this draft of the poem, Miller begins by resisting tourists’ (stereotyped) views of Jamaica as a paradisal island, evoking the way its ‘photogenic’ blue is sold as a commodity. Yet the Place Name reveals ‘the vermilion of history,’ and indeed a more ecologically informed way of perceiving the coastline—listening through a shell—reveals ‘the dying song of whales.’ The ‘Capitalocene’ is a time when Jamaica’s beaches are commodified, and when Miller revises the poem, he cuts the tourists’ (neo-)imperial view of the bay in favour of a closer look at the whales. An oil lamp hints at a colonial-era economy that was powered in part by whale oil,14 while the organic colour ‘hibiscus’ suggests that interconnected ecosystems, both on sea and on land, are menaced by the destruction of large animals. As Miller develops the poem from typescript proof to published piece, the images that might distance the reader from the emotional impact of the ‘cetacean slaughter’—the camera and the conch shell—are cut: Place Name Bloody Bay, after the cetacean slaughter. But only evening tints this water the deep vermilion of history. In the western sky a tilley burns its final portion of oil. And now, the dying song of whales. And now, the hibiscus sea rolling its dead leviathans, their harpooned bodies like giant voodoo dolls. (60)

Miller shortens the piece to create a heightened focus on extinction and European exploitation of animals. The published poem gives historical events a greater temporal immediacy, as Miller repeats ‘And now’ (60), reflecting Anthropocene culture’s preoccupation with compressed 14  For an analysis of whale oil and other fuels as ‘ages’ in literature, see Patricia Yaeger. ‘Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources.’ PMLA 126.2 (March 2011): 305–26.

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timescales. Miller’s eco-elegiac work suggests inter-species vulnerability and grief. Indeed, his elegies reinvent a long canon of European poetry of mourning for an age of environmental melancholy. In a traditional elegy,15 ‘despite death, nature endures’ (Ramazani, 100), and this brings comfort to the bereaved. However, Miller’s work shows that nature itself is often the subject of mourning in the Anthropocene. Miller’s prose essays dovetail with, and illuminate, his poetic preoccupation with extinction and ecological memory. In the elegiac essay ‘Making Spaces for Grief’ from Writing Down the Vision, published a year before The Cartographer, the bayou appears as a landscape destroyed by urban expansion: [T]he bayous are dead. Over one hundred of these magnificent swamps are buried permanently under the roads and the highways that the government thought were more important. And even if I were to take up a pickaxe right now and destroy those many miles of asphalt, the bayous and their birds and their alligators would not come back. [….] [T]he coast of Louisiana is dying. It is drowning every day as if it was a weary swimmer that could not manage another stroke. The landscape changes; it diminishes so quickly that cartographers cannot keep up. The lost bits of coast are never coming back. They have become a past tense. (2013, loc. 1006)

Far from finding comfort in nature’s processes of regeneration, Miller’s essay, which begins with the death of his mother, places personal loss against a vast backdrop of climate change and extinction. Ursula Heise finds that discussions of extinction often ‘rely on the genre templates of elegy and tragedy’ (loc. 354), and Miller’s writing about extinction draws on the former. The theme recurs at multiple points in his poetry and nonfiction. ‘The White Women and the Language of Bees’ suggests a form of environmental grief that is anticipatory since extinction is ongoing: This evening, perhaps, the white women will find themselves sitting on rocks and looking out to the great expanse that is the Caribbean Sea. There are so many things in that sea like ships and their sad cargos, and the dying dolphins and the dying turtles and the dying sharks and all this damned dying that make the white women and the black men want to bawl together. 15  Milton’s Lycidas is an important canonical example of the way nature functions in English-language elegies. Milton deploys images of the cycle of the seasons and nature’s regeneration to imagine an afterlife for the deceased.

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And even the night that seems to grow large from all the relentless dying seems to rise out from the salty depths.16

The distinction between ‘dead’ bayous and the ‘dying’ Caribbean Sea matters here. For Timothy Morton, ecological lament ‘speaks elegies for an incomplete process, elegies about events that have not yet (fully) happened’ (2010, 254). David Gilcrest concurs that the environmental lament ‘is necessarily prospective’ (22), as it grieves for an uncertain future. Yet what is striking about the passage about the ocean quoted above is that Miller sees the grief of Black men and white women for slaves and threatened ocean creatures as shared. This suggests a relational form of environmental concern that links both Black Jamaicans and the white descendants of British colonists to ocean and land. Miller elaborated on the essay: ‘in that moment in that essay, there is so much death happening, there is so much calamity and catastrophe. How do we find a unified place, despite the complications of history and the complications of ownership? How do we find a place to weep together and a future that we can argue for together?’17 Elegies for human and nonhuman victims of violence are a primary concern for Miller in In Nearby Bushes. If Ted Hughes elegised individual species such as the passenger pigeon and black rhino, Miller’s poetry grieves for both individual species, such as sharks, and entire ocean systems. This suggests that contemporary environmental elegies shift scales to encompass much vaster forms of environmental loss—the enormity of the ‘Anthropocene extinction’—without losing sight of the impacts on individual species and localities. Miller has commented on the way he views Jamaica ‘locally and globally’ (2013, loc 195), and this dual perspective is relayed in ‘ix. in which the cartographer travels lengths and breadths.’ The unfinished stock phrase in the title is rich in meaning. A less skilled writer would put ‘the length and breadth of the country,’ but the ‘lengths and breadths’ end up creating an open-ended, relational model of place that encompasses local settings and some broad global links. The poem plays with Place Name(s) both evocative and humorous, relishing the bold defiance of ‘Me-No-Sen-­ You-No-Come,’ a Place Name that has a later ‘Place Name’ prose-poem  https://preelit.com/2018/04/13/the-white-women-and-the-language-of-bees/  Kei Miller, interviewee, and Magma editors, interviewers. ‘We have been living in the Anthropocene for hundreds of years: a conversation with Kei Miller.’ Magma 81 (October 2021), 111–14 (113). 16 17

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devoted to it. If Place Name(s) such as Duppy Gate (Ghost Gate) speak of distinctively local legends, the poem opens out to a broader consideration of global links: the cartographer will know places named after places—how this island spreads out as a palimpsest of maps: for here is Bethlehem; here is Tel Aviv; here is Gaza; also Edinburgh; Aberdeen; Egypt; Cairo; and here is Bengal; Mount Horeb; Albion; Alps; they say—all of here is Babylon. (2014, 25)

Many of these Place Name(s) have colonial origins that speak of the ‘mapping’ of one territory onto another; some, such as Edinburgh Castle, are shown to be sites of slavery and murder later in the collection (47). ‘Babylon,’ as mentioned above, designates a white-dominated system of control: as Bob Marley once sang, ‘Babylon system is the vampire.’18 These Place Name(s) bear witness to the scars this system leaves on memory and land, and to ongoing systems of oppression. Miller’s ‘Place Name’ pieces also unearth local histories shaped by the trans-oceanic forces of empire, and often point to the role of nonhumans in shaping place. ‘Place Name: Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come’ is the first of these, wryly rewriting the fairy tale of Goldilocks and the three bears as a metaphor for plantation slavery and colonial invasion. Miller envisages the landscape and its vegetation as participating in a critique of European presences in Jamaica: ‘Me-no-sen-you-no-come: without invitation, you’re not welcome. Or else, come in as you please—just know that this ground, these bushes, these trees observe you with suspicion many centuries deep’ (26). The landscape itself is cast as an active participant in resistance to slavery and neo-colonial presences, after ‘many centuries’ of the ravages of the ‘Plantationocene.’ The ‘Place Name’ essay-poems are stitched through the collection as recurrent threads, and they share common ground with Miller’s essays in Writing Down the Vision (2013). Rose-Steel has observed that ‘[t]hroughout Miller’s collection one can trace the scars, both obvious and subtle, of European expansion and slave-trading, but also the grafting on of new meanings and connections’; vernacular renaming of a colonial site can be 18  Bob Marley and the Wailers. ‘Babylon System.’ Survival. Island Records LP, 1979. For further information about the use of ‘Babylon’ in Jamaican musical culture, see also Rice 2003, 101.

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‘a repossession’ (51). The prose-poem ‘Place-Name: Swamp’ suggests the uncreation of a human settlement by natural forces—including climate change. The poem considers the unpredictability of nonhuman agents such as floodwaters, evoking local manifestations of the global forces of climate change. Although Miller does not see climate change as at the ‘foreground’ of his writing, he has stated: ‘It’s a part of my imagination and the great existential crisis we have: being alive—barely—in this time.’19 ‘Place Name: Swamp’ considers development and construction, contemporary manifestations of the ‘Capitalocene,’ and the ways settlements are uncreated. Miller’s describes a ‘backbush of Moneague, forgotten place until 2003,’ where ‘nothing in that brambled landscape bore proof of name—nothing to say moisture, or damp that could set in furniture, no bones of alligators.’ The centuries-old name of the place recalls its formerly flooded state, suggesting a long view of environmental change that goes beyond human lifetimes. The Anthropocene is preoccupied with the geological ‘deep time’ of the dizzyingly distant past, but Miller’s poem and his comment that ‘We have been living in the Anthropocene for hundreds of years’ suggest conceptual timeframes that are cognisant of entangled human and natural histories. A temporality that considers environmental change in decades and centuries, as well as geological eras, is required for helping people to perceive the alarmingly swift impacts of climate change. And yet, the language of ‘Swamp’ suggests a personalised—even provincialised—perspective on the Anthropocene and climate change. The first proof of the collection shows Miller altering the poem to emphasise vernacular speech-rhythms. He evokes the character Quashie, whom McCarthy Woolf describes as a ‘Jamaican Everyman’ (‘Hybrid Hierophanies’ 93). Quashie’s vernacular tones have more in common with the rastaman’s speech than the cartographer’s. Miller changed the standard ‘they’ to the vernacular ‘them’ and ‘what Quashie know’ to ‘what Quashie did done know.’ He also cut the resonant (but perhaps too formal and obvious) adjective ‘misplaced’ used to describe the tour guide’s speech.20 19  Kei Miller, interviewee, and Magma editors, interviewers. ‘We have been living in the Anthropocene for hundreds of years: a conversation with Kei Miller.’ Magma 81 (October 2021), 111–14 (113). 20  John Rylands Library, Carcanet archive. Acc 24 Box 11/2. Kei Miller. First proof of The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Typed printout with editor Helen Tookey’s handwritten amendments, p. 34.

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When Miller adjusts the tone of the poem towards the familiar and the colloquial, he creates a text that can both apprehend the vast timescales of climate change and provincialise this issue in a particular locality. In Miller’s essay collection Writing Down the Vision (2013), human activities call back floodwaters that have been absent for seventy years. Miller imagines that this process begins with uttering the name of the place: Swamp, swamp, swamp. So the place finally remembered its past, remembered its swampish landscape, and before you could say “hurricane season” or “tropical weather conditions” or “flash flood warnings,” those large, lovely houses ended up at the bottom of a swamp. The developers, trying to recoup some of their money, put up a Ferris wheel on the bank of the waters and offered boat rides to tourists who came—pouring in, as it were. The tour guides on the boats would say: Welcome to Moneague. Welcome to Swamp. We are now sailing over an avenue, and now we are sailing across a boulevard; yes, my dears, underneath us is a line of twelve two-storey houses, twelve back gardens, and many many yards of soaked carpet. The tourists in turn would look vainly into the murk underneath the glass-bottomed boat, and say Ooooh! imagining the community below like a little Atlantis. (2013, loc. 1070)

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Miller’s 2013 essay imagines that the place is highly agential and dynamic, possessing memory and the ability to resist human development projects. Although the place ‘remembered its past,’ one of the alterations brought by climate change is the suddenness of this inundation: one does not normally associate the waterlogged ground of a swamp with ‘flash flood warnings.’ Both Miller’s 2013 essay and his 2014 essay-poem humorously look at the link between human presences, capitalist development, and climate change. When Miller puns on the idea of tourists ‘pouring in’ and shows opportunistic developers putting up a Ferris wheel, ‘trying to recoup some of their money,’ he suggests the ongoing and absurd impacts of climate change in the ‘Capitalocene.’ The prose-poem in The Cartographer, in contrast, pays closer attention to the language used to evoke landscapes, and to the treatment of nonhumans. In the prose-poem, Miller’s invented past participle ‘brambled’ echoes Dylan Thomas’s coinage ‘heron/ Priested’ from ‘Poem in October,’21 creating a hybrid piece that is essayistic in form but poetic in tone. The sacrifice of a ram-goat fails to hold back the flood, as ‘old magic measures don’t always work here’ (35); the language of poetic and spiritual ‘measures’ contrasts with the 2013 essay’s more factual lexis of ‘developers’ and ‘two-storey houses.’ Miller changes the tour guide’s speech as he adapts the 2013 essay to become the 2014 prose-poem. In the prose-poem, the tour guide has a habit of dropping the letter ‘H’ in colloquial speech and hypercorrecting his pronunciation when speaking to tourists—a speech pattern that Miller uses for comical effect: ‘ladies and gentlemen, below hus in this deep is yards and yards hof grief, plenty plots of soak-up dreams’ (35). Miller highlights the absurdity of this situation through a form of dark humour that is reminiscent of Morton’s idea that the ridiculous offers relief from the darkness of environmental melancholy (2016, 144). The idea of ‘yards’ of grief and ‘soak­up’ dreams poetically clashes together the absurd and the mournful, the concrete and intangible, linking to Miller’s essay ‘Making Space for Grief.’ In both the essay and the prose-poem, Miller selects poignant and humorous relics of the attempts to transform Swamp into a settlement: ‘Today a Ferris wheel spins on the bank of a come-back pond’ (2014, 35), ‘like a little Atlantis’ (2013, loc. 1070). Here is a highly local and specific glimpse of what many coastlines and floodplains might look like in an advanced stage of climate change. Swamp itself is also left without human inhabitants, suggesting a microcosm of a world where sea levels are on the rise.  Dylan Thomas. Collected Poems 1934–1952. London: Dent 1952 95.

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Many scholars have written that climate change poses conceptual challenges to narrative forms such as the novel (Clark 2015; Ghosh 2016; see Chap. 2). Yet the way Miller works at his material in an essay and a prose-­ poem suggests that climate change demands multiple formal strategies; its enormity defies expression through one genre alone. An array of literary forms are needed to grapple with Anthropocene issues such as climate change; Miller’s ecopoetics expands to include innovative, hybrid forms. Trees, root-networks, vines, and webs form intricate meshes in both The Cartographer and In Nearby Bushes, linking these two literary projects together. Miller’s interest in forests, ‘backbush,’ and understories resonates with Glissant’s evocation of Martinican forests and their historical significance. For Glissant, a richly vegetated hinterland contains important sites of resistance to slavery: In the north of the country, the knotted mass of somber greens which the roads still do not penetrate. The maroons found refuge there. What you can oppose to the facts of history. The night in full daylight and the filtered shadows. The root of the vine and its violet flower. The dense network of ferns. (1989, 11)

As in ‘Unsettled,’ entangled vegetation provides spaces of refuge and resistance to colonialism. Both authors also use landscape to explore different forms of knowledge: for Glissant, the coloniser insists on ‘the facts of history,’ and for Miller, the cartographer embarks on a futile attempt to ‘untangle the tangled’ (16). In both cases, the ‘dense network of ferns’ in Glissant, and Miller’s ‘crawling/brawl of vines’ (2014, 13), defy colonial systems of classification and conquest. Trees, vines, and undergrowth form a knotty web throughout The Cartographer, and Miller reveals their importance in creating a sense of place. The Place Name ‘Wait-A-Bit’ derives from a tree: ‘Observe the sturdy Acacia greggii—“catclaw”, “devil’s claw,” “wait-a-minute” or “wait-a-bit” tree’ (37). The Latin binomial shows that the tree was named for American explorer and naturalist Josiah Gregg (Walcott denounced the western-centred origins of ‘the botanically correct and Latin-tagged label’ and ‘the tag with the name of the “discoverer”’ (2005, 56)). Yet the language of colonial-era taxonomy, and the formal injunction to ‘Observe,’ is quickly replaced by a local understanding of flora and place. Vernacular Jamaican botanical knowledge is further explored in In Nearby Bushes. In ‘Wait-A-Bit,’ the poetic voice changes from standard English to patois partway through, as if the cartographer’s

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voice has been replaced by that of the rastaman: ‘Strong macka that can hold yu and jook yu’ (‘strong thorns that can hold you and poke you’).22 Miller evokes ‘landscapes that scrape’ and cautions ‘careful man! This here is bruising land’ (2014, 37), expanding his consideration of how nonhumans resist colonial ways of knowing. Trees and their roots, rhizomes and routes: the tree is a recurrent focus for Miller, and it becomes a poetic device for considering entangled geographies and multi-species relations. The later ‘Place Name’ poem, ‘Half Way Tree,’ considers human history and arboreal time as entwined. Miller uses the image of reading letters under the tree to expand his consideration of the links between language, landscape, and literary creation. In ‘Half Way Tree,’ Miller uses the tree as a focal point for his exploration of the long timeframes of tree growth; environmental memory and mourning; Jamaican settings and global relations: Place Name Half Way Tree—half-way between Greenwich and the brown barracks of Stony Hill, 90 foot cotton under which soldiers could ease boots from swollen feet, catch a lickle West Indian breeze. Cue now a sound like feathers as letters retrieved from back pockets, their contents already known by heart, are unfolded and read again—words as fuel for the second portion of journeying. And how that arboreal shade could make a script more beautiful! So hail now the dearly departed half-way tree; the language tree; hail all that was read and written underneath; hail the loop of names carved as practice onto its wallthick trunk; hail Mary O’Leary of Ulster and Allie Mac Dhughaill of Glasgow—the ‘dear loves’ told to come, come and smell the fruity rot of this place; hail the tree first mentioned in 1696 which held its ground despite hurricanes, earthquakes, and even the British; hail tree which from its great height saw an island change It fell in 1866 of good and natural causes. There rises now in its place, sepulchre-shaped, the Half Way Tree clock. (46)

If ‘Wait-A-Bit’ envisages vegetation that mounts a prickly resistance to the cartographer and his European ways of understanding the landscape, the Half Way Tree symbolises an enduring, precolonial presence that transcends human concepts of time. The tree that ‘held its ground’ against the British is celebrated as a survivor from ‘unsettled’ precolonial Jamaica, but its branches suggest complex, ramifying relations between people and trees, Old World and New.  See ‘macca’ and ‘jook,’ OED.

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Miller’s book is preoccupied with different forms of connection (and disconnection) with places and across geographical distances. At times, Miller draws parallels between human and animal ways of knowing and connecting with place; at others, he contrasts human apprehension of geography with nonhuman ways of understanding it. ‘In Praise of Maps’ playfully explores the technology of cartography and the imperial control it facilitates. The poem offers a humorous take on grandiose, global, cartographic visions, which, in the west, have their origin in colonial, maritime, and military technologies. Miller changed the poem’s layout and wording as he revised the first proof of the collection. He originally envisaged a lengthy, reaching line that suggests geographical breadth, but altered the poem at the proof stage23:

 John Rylands Library, Carcanet archive. Acc 24 Box 11/2. Kei Miller. First proof of The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Typed printout with editor’s handwritten amendments, 63. 23

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Miller changed the layout of the poem because of issues with mise-en-­ page. He complained about ‘disliking’ the look of the poem ‘with breaks that the page forced’, and told his editor that the poem might be stronger with alternative line breaks.24 The published poem has a formal orderliness that suggests cartographic precision: In Praise of Maps

hymn then a song in praise of maps, without which we could not dream the shapes of countries: the boot of Italy, the number 7 of Somalia; without which we could not trace the course of rivers— feel a papery Mississippi beneath our fingers; without which pirates would string nylon down the necks of useless shovels, play them each night as banjos; without which submarines would beach themselves like omens— rusting mermaids on arbitrary beaches. (63)

Line endings bound together by half-rhymes evoke boundaries (‘river/ singers,’ ‘them/omens’; Miller 2014, 63). The changes in meaning that come with the changes in line breaks are subtle, but they enhance the poem’s thematic preoccupation with geographies of power. When Miller places ‘the boot of Italy’ next to ‘the number 7 of Somalia’ and pinpoints these two countries in a single line, he highlights colonial Italian involvement in East Africa. The next locality he charts also speaks of the ‘imperial Anthropocene,’ the Black Diaspora, and plantation cash crops: the banks of the Mississippi are associated with cotton production by enslaved Africans. In this poem, one can trace a movement from Europe (Italy) to East Africa (a former Italian colony) to an infamous plantation area in the US: not quite the geographies of the notorious ‘triangular trade,’ but nevertheless a movement linking former colonial powers to sites of dominance, slavery, and resistance. The pirates’ banjos are a humorous reference to the African origins of this instrument associated with the Caribbean and the Mississippi, which is so important to the history of the Blues.25 A lack 24  John Rylands Library, Carcanet archive. Acc 24 Box 11/2. Kei Miller. Emailed correspondence with editor about The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Printout of correspondence about first proof, p. 2. 25  See Laurent Dubois, The Banjo: America’s African Instrument. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard UP, 2016.

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of mapmaking is associated with a lapse back to a pre-linguistic, animal state: in the twelfth line (not included in the excerpt above), Miller uses the word ‘gekkering’ to describe the calls of foxes, a far more effective verbal noun than the ‘language’ that Miller originally wrote in the proof. The collection sets up two contrasting perspectives on other species’ apprehension of place: if ‘vii’ saw hummingbirds, bees, and turtles as having their own ‘maps,’ this poem offers an alternative perspective that points out how absurd it would be for humans to abandon cartography completely and, in the fourteenth line, return to the foxes’ feral ‘dens.’ Miller’s praise-poem for maps pokes ambivalent fun at this imperial and human-centred way of understanding and dominating places. Yet the collection as a whole celebrates the unruly ‘immapancy’ of vegetation, and the way nonhuman entities, from migrating hummingbirds to the mythical River Mumma, understand place. The book presents Jamaica’s geography as more exuberant and entangled than orderly. The Cartographer ends up by bringing together the cartographer’s methods with the rastaman’s vernacular understanding of people and places, flora, and fauna. Their different ideas about place, globe, and geography are placed in a relational dialogue. In contrast to models of globalisation that stress the movement of global capital, such as Harvey’s concept of timespace compression, Miller’s vision of Jamaica is rooted in the local but documents a broad, complex, and at times surprising network of links to farther afield. The poems suggest ways of re-interpreting Massey’s ‘progressive sense of place’ and Ulrich Beck’s concept of cosmopolitanism as entangled and organic; The Cartographer can be described as a map of Jamaica for the Chthulucene. Forests, hinterlands, the Half Way Tree, and the Wait-A-Bit tree provide places of resistance to colonial cartography and apprehension and bear witness to the enduring linguistic imprints of precolonial Jamaican landscapes. Yet Miller does not set up a simplistic model of colonial discourse and vernacular counter-discourse. The rastaman voices the last two poems, and thus Miller gives him the last word. Yet the collection as a whole leaves room for an intricate, relational, and multifaceted way of perceiving place and planet. As such, Miller’s poems suggest alternatives to the imperial narrative behind Lewis and Maslin’s model of the Anthropocene by complicating totalising, dominant views of the globe, revealing the violence of the plantation, celebrating vernacular ways of seeing place, and showing the agency of nonhumans in shaping places. The rastaman wishes the reader ‘Inity’ (70) in the last poem, and this ‘inity’ suggests an entangled, enmeshed community of people and their environments.

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Understories of Entanglement and Violence: In Nearby Bushes If The Cartographer looks for ‘inity’ in spite of historical and environmental violence, Miller’s later work shows the tensions that affect the process of relation. Glissant calls for a rhizomatic way of thinking, ‘in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other’ (1990, 11), and wonders whether the way people ‘rhizome into fragile connection to a place’ (206) is a local or global process. Yet rhizomes can be uprooted and branches can be cut. In Nearby Bushes examines what happens when relations with groups that might be considered Other—the gay community, Jamaican women, introduced species, endangered forests—are ruptured by violence. Connections between places, plants, animals, and groups of people are indeed ‘fragile’ in this collection; the poems evoke the tension between relation and rupture, connection and grief. In Nearby Bushes (2019) ventures into a landscape scarred by violence. The first section of the collection expands the meditations on flora, fauna, and environmental concerns that Miller began to explore in The Cartographer. The following movement of the book continues the ‘Place Names’ project that Miller began in The Cartographer, uncovering hidden stories of landscape and language. The collection ends with two sections examining how the ‘nearby bushes’ conceal hidden ‘understories’ of queer encounters, gang violence, and gender violence. In an earlier essay, Miller describes the bushes as a place where hidden practices—gay encounters and kumina ceremonies—can take place: ‘in order to see these things you have to park your car on a lonely road, part the bushes and march into the hillside in search of drums, and dissolve yourself into silhouettes’ (2013, loc 1541). In Nearby Bushes plays on the idea of ‘understories’ of vegetation as ‘stories underneath’ (2019, 8): violent crime, colonial domination, homophobic murder, environmental exploitation, and continuing, racialised struggles surrounding land. Miller’s collection explores the contrast between relational, entangled ways of connecting with flora and fauna in Jamaican hinterlands, and the way these very hinterlands conceal crime, gender violence, and geotrauma. Yusoff writes that ‘the geotrauma of a billion Black Anthropocenes’ lies in the way geology is used ‘to separate forms of the human into permissible modes of exchange and circulation’ (84). ‘Geotrauma’—a wound on the Earth—describes forms of human violence and violence against Earth itself (Merola, 123), resulting in an ongoing and incomplete form of

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environmental grief (124; see also Chap. 6). In Miller’s work, the violent irruption of earthquakes, the scars of the plantation system, and the ghostly presences of extinct species lead to a complex mixture of geotrauma, environmental melancholy, and ecological elegy. The return of the human body to the earth at the end of In Nearby Bushes inspires fractured forms of elegy, exploring the intricate relationship between the bodies of Black women and gay men, the land, and the vibrant yet vulnerable ecosystems of Jamaican hinterlands—and the way a heterosexual, patriarchal society threatens them all. In its exploration of human violence, and Earth’s vast and violent processes, In Nearby Bushes deconstructs several stereotypes associated with European discourse about Caribbean environments. Thus, Miller’s work offers ways of problematising theories of the Anthropocene that frame it as an event of colonial and environmental violence. If Lewis and Maslin’s Anthropocene is Eurocentric, Miller’s work ‘provincialises’ this by privileging a Jamaican understanding of place, flora, and fauna. Caribbean islands’ supposed primeval fecundity was praised by early colonial authors, while the tourist brochure images of Caribbean landscapes continue to market them as lush and unspoiled. Columbus and European colonists thought that Caribbean forests ‘recalled a primeval, pre-Adamic world’ (Paravisini-Gebert, 99), and Western imperialism projected its ‘nostalgia for terrestrial paradises’ onto colonised territory (Handley 2005, 202). Yet the plantation system brought profound changes. The environmental cost of the ‘Plantationocene’ was ‘deforestation, drought, soil erosion, and decreased soil fertility’ (Handley 2005, 202). Thus, holiday companies must sell images of the Caribbean as a ‘restored earthly paradise’ (202)— one that does not have any ‘peasant communities’ (203) working the land. Ironically, paradisal images of the Caribbean encourage tourists to come to environmentally damaging resorts, such as the Hilton spa in St Lucia against which Walcott protested (204). Miller’s poetry overturns such tourist brochure images of Jamaica, revealing how the bushes contain ‘understories’ of geotrauma, homophobic violence, gender violence, and the colonial violence that creates plantations and is remembered in certain Place Name(s). Miller acknowledges that the stereotype of Jamaica as a ‘paradise’ glosses over centuries of environmental and human exploitation. A shift in human understanding of the landscape is behind this change:

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With plantation slavery, there was so much clearing. Whole valleys got wiped out. These are the things you have to do for large-scale agriculture. I never thought about that before: about how much the physical landscape of the Caribbean had to be altered to accommodate enslavement and sugar cane production. It became obvious: if Jamaica is presented as a kind of paradise, that has one meaning. But the minute it becomes a plantation, it has another meaning. Because you’ve changed the meaning of the land, you can physically change the land. This keeps on happening over and over again. When we change the name of things, it gives us agency to make physical alterations.26

In Nearby Bushes explores such changes to the meaning of the land. Miller’s aforementioned essay about Swamp, ‘What Names Recall,’ wonders whether the wetland returned because of a combination of naming, climate change, and also the agential power of the landscape; In Nearby Bushes examines the tension between physically changing landscape and the resistant lives of nonhumans. Miller begins his collection with epigraphs that explain the significance of those ‘nearby bushes’ in Jamaica. He quotes Jamaican blogger Paul Tomlinson, who stresses that criminals escape to ‘the bush’ to evade police, and a professor of criminal justice who analyses the difference between ‘the nearby bushes’ and ‘in nearby bushes’: I make a distinction between “the nearby bushes” and “in the nearby bushes”. Perhaps it is my corrupt imagination. “In the nearby bushes” equals concealment, danger, while “the nearby bushes” equals a place of opportunity to do what one wishes to be hidden from others—sex, dispose of waste be it bodily waste or household waste. (ctd in Miller 2019, 2)

This quotation encapsulates the twofold role that ‘nearby bushes’ play in the collection. ‘In the nearby bushes’ is a locality for concealing violence. Yet ‘the nearby bushes’ are an entangled place with a more ambivalent meaning: they function as the dumping ground for the detritus of the Anthropocene, yet also an important refuge for the gay community. If one considers the connotations of ‘the bush’ in a wider postcolonial context, Miller’s work reinvents this imperial term. ‘Bush’ has a specific, colonial 26  Kei Miller, interviewee, and Magma editors, interviewers. ‘We have been living in the Anthropocene for hundreds of years: a conversation with Kei Miller.’ Magma 81 (October 2021), 111–14 (113).

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meaning, defined as ‘Woodland, country more or less covered with natural wood: applied to the uncleared or untilled districts in the former British Colonies which are still in a state of nature, or largely so, even though not wooded; and by extension to the country as opposed to the towns’ (OED). ‘The bush,’ the forest, and rural spaces function as places of danger, resistance, and also refuge in the work of several canonical authors. Joseph Conrad finds ‘death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush’ (7), and in Heart of Darkness, ‘the bush’ is a place of danger for Africans and Europeans alike. Yet the ‘bush’ later appears as a place of armed anticolonial resistance: ‘the bush was swarming with human limbs in movement’ (Conrad, 55). Conrad is important for Miller’s collection because the poet quotes and revises Heart of Darkness in his poem ‘Here Where Blossoms the Night.’ However, the ‘bush’ may also function as a place of sanctuary and for the survival of Indigenous beliefs, in other postcolonial traditions. Nigerian author Amos Tutuola reframes the ‘bush’ as a place haunted by the spirits of Yoruba traditions, but also as a refuge from slave traders, in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954). In Caribbean literatures specifically, the forest is the site of ‘multiple power struggles,’ although ‘the forest and rural spaces in general have been recuperated as sites of refuge for the escaped slave and places of folk authenticity in nationalist movements’ (De Loughrey and Handley, 31). Indeed, Glissant celebrates the entangled forests of Martinique as places of refuge for maroons (1989, 11, see above). One can view Miller’s ‘nearby bushes’ as networks that provide refuge for a vibrant array of nonhumans, from dogs to orchids to the ‘Caribbean caribou’ (18). When Miller re-maps the colonial ‘bush’ as the contemporary ‘nearby bushes,’ he also opens the possibility for Jamaicans who venture there to discover something within themselves. In an interview, Miller has elaborated on the journey into the nearby bushes as an encounter with danger within oneself: It is a place of mystery and danger. And the danger goes two ways: it is physical danger, as it’s a place of violence. But sometimes that danger is the danger of the self—it’s the danger of discovering something about yourself. To go into the bushes is to enter a dangerous, primordial place where something might be discovered. I think for the writer, that’s so alluring—why not travel into a place to which we never attach language? When you come from a place like the Caribbean, where landscape is always so profoundly marked and signified in all kinds of ways, it feels like

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no matter how much you write about the land and its dangers, you can never bring enough nuance to it, or untangle some of those complexities.27

If Miller set out to ‘unlock these histories’ of place in The Cartographer (Miller and Wachtel), In Nearby Bushes can be described as more focused on considering how place and self are mutually co-constitutive. The journey into various selves takes place through Miller’s use of the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you.’ His multifarious use of the pronoun ‘you’ ranges from hurling a Jamaican curse (7) to imagining a reader who must learn the different shades of green (17); from speaking to deer (20) to addressing a white reader who does not immediately make the link between sugar and slavery (24); the final ‘you’ is a murder victim hidden in those tangled bushes (66). The use of ‘you’ is more arresting than the lyric ‘I,’ and it draws the reader into ways of understanding place, contemplating queer perspectives on connecting with nature, considering the legacies of slavery, and confronting contemporary violence. If the ‘you’ at the end of the book returns to the earth, the second-person pronoun also sets up a relational link between the reader and the earth in which they will one day be buried. The collection begins with a prefatory list of recent victims of violent crime, ranging in age from nine to seventy-two. The majority are young people in their twenties, murdered in their prime. The first poetry-­ sequence of the book, ‘Here,’ begins with a poem that introduces the collection’s twofold preoccupation with violence and returns or connections to the land. In ‘Translation of a Jamaican Curse,’ Miller explores the way violence takes place in wooded hinterlands—the curse in question is ‘Guh dead ah bush!’ The bushes are a place where human bodies are reunited with the land, although this provides little comfort: Or else, you could say: may death wait for you in the undergrowth, the understory; may you drag yourself there, like a wounded dog towards the hem of hedges. And there, where is the darkness, where is the furnace of worms, where are the fallen leaves, may the world above you be a buzzing, colourless thing. May you feel the earth’s rhythm and weather and wear; may you think ‘of all places I have ended here’. (Miller 2019, 7) 27  Kei Miller, interviewee, and Yvonne Reddick and other interviewers. ‘“We have been living in the Anthropocene for hundreds of years”: a conversation with Kei Miller.’ Magma 81 (October 2021).

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‘Earth’s rhythm and weather and wear’ show the dead being integrated into vast processes of climate and erosion, the longue durée that characterises many of the poems of the Anthropocene examined in this book. If ‘A Prayer for the Unflummoxed Beaver’ considered the shared mortality of humans and nonhumans, this poem considers how death in the wooded hinterland is at once horrific—the ‘furnace of worms’—and uncannily beautiful—the elaborate, alliterative metaphor ‘hem of hedges.’ The ‘buzzing’ of the surroundings evokes a vibrant yet hungry network of insect life, while the simile of the ‘wounded dog’ unsettles human exceptionalism. If Walcott envisaged slaves who died during the Middle Passage as returning to a vividly organic seabed in his stately elegy ‘The Sea Is History,’ and Saidiya Hartman wrote of the ‘remnants of slaves’ accreting as lifeless ‘matter’ in layers on the floor of a slave dungeon,28 Miller’s stark elaboration on the Jamaican curse could be described as similarly posthuman and postcolonial. Interconnection in what Donna Haraway terms the ‘Chthulucene’ is distinctly unnerving, and Miller’s vegetation- and earth-­ focused elegies resonate with Haraway’s derivation of the word ‘human.’ ‘Human,’ for Haraway, is ‘soiled with the earth and its critters,’ deriving from the same root as ‘humus’ (2015, 169–70). As she puts it, ‘We are humus, not Homo, not Anthropos; we are compost’ (55). Haraway’s lively, entangled Chthulucene focuses on life, yet ‘earth’s rhythm and weather and wear’ also require death, and Miller’s collection explores the affective and ecological sides of this in detail. ‘The Understory’ puns on terms for both narrative and vegetation, creating a poem that mingles meditations on language, gay presences, and crime with the vibrant flourishing of the eponymous ‘nearby bushes’: The Understory Here that is the unplotted plot, the intriguing twist of vines, the messy dialogue—just listen how the leaves uh & ah & er nonstop.     The ‘horse dead & cow fat’ is here, as well     the sob story, the tall story & the same old story.     Whomever did tell you there was two sides

28  Saidiya Hartman. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2021 (2007) p. 115.

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to every story is someone who don’t know the true nature of stories. Try two hundred, or two thousand, & they are all here. A web of Nansi story hangs thick    between the trees… The long bench is here, perfectly sized, that you might hear the long story that will not be cut short. Here where is the hard luck story, the likely & unlikely stories,     & all the tales that were put on shelves,     ‘Oh,’ the teller had said, waving a hand,     ‘that’s a whole other story!’ Well, my dear, they are here—in the complication of roots, in the dirtiness of dirt. Are there stories you have heard about Jamaica? Well here are the stories underneath. (8)

Miller’s wordplay ‘unplotted plot’ humorously frames plant species as (hesitant) makers of language, a playfully posthuman glance at meaning-­ making beyond the species boundary. Miller writes later in the collection that trees ‘send messages across a complex network of roots’ (37), and the field of ecosemiotics studies how sign-making flourishes in nonhumans, from individual organisms to whole ecosystems (Maran 2020). When Miller mentions ‘the true/ nature of stories’ (8), he casts nature as narrator. Here is an entangled, rhizomatic idea of the creative process that echoes the inter-species networks that Tsing and Haraway view as important to their organic interpretations of the Anthropocene, Plantationocene, and Chthulucene. One of the important ‘understories’ that Miller shows his readers is that of gay presences in Jamaica. On the island, gay men exist ‘flamboyantly yet invisibly,’ as he puts it in an earlier essay (2013, loc 542). When Miller writes, ‘A web of Nansi story hangs thick//between the trees’ (2019, 26), he alludes to the ‘understory’ as a safe space for gay men to express their sexuality. Anansi, the spider-trickster of Jamaican folklore, makes an appearance in The Cartographer (Miller 2014, 32), but the spelling ‘Nansi’ suggests a multi-species alliance between gay men, tricksy Anansi, and the nearby bushes; verdure, sexuality, and folk tales with West African roots intertwine. This is important because of the unease with which early queer theory approached the issue of what is ‘natural’ (Seymour, 3, see above);

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Miller’s poem, in contrast, suggests alliances between gay men and their forest refuge. In a later poem, gay encounters take place in ‘the bushes’ in ‘a place between places,’ where the threat of homophobic murder is ever-­ present (2019, 26). The ‘Nansi/Anansi’ wordplay creates a queer, ecologically aware revision of Gilroy’s ‘webbed network’ and Glissant’s rhizomes, with spider-tales travelling between West Africa and the Caribbean. The poem ends by opening out the collection’s preoccupation with ‘stories’ that run as countercurrents to tourist brochure images of a paradisal Caribbean: ‘Are there stories you have heard about Jamaica?/ Well here are the stories underneath’ (2019, 26). The ‘complication of roots,’ the ‘twist of vines’ evoke an entangled, rhizomatic web of connections, a complex plurality of origins and origin stories; but like Glissant, Miller is acutely aware that colonial and ecological violence mediate Caribbean relations with the land. Such ecological exuberance also goes against the grain of colonial stereotypes of Caribbean forests, which feminised them to stress their fecundity or their sexualised availability to (male) colonists.29 Miller’s poetry suggests that homophobic violence forms part of a continuum of heterosexual, masculinist violence against land, gay men, and women30 that began with colonialism. Indeed, Miller’s prose mentions that it was British colonists who introduced Jamaica’s so-called anti-buggery laws in the first place.31 Miller’s meditation on geography, violence, territorial possession, ‘Capitalocene’ inequality, and ecological entanglement, ‘Here that Was Here Before…’ takes the reader back to the precolonial and pre-urban territory of ‘Unsettled.’ However, this later poem opens a vaster scalar and temporal view of Jamaica. The poem’s main preoccupations, in its first five stanzas, are private property, the geography of class privilege, and the violence and surveillance that these bring with them. Yet the poem inevitably connects these issues of land ownership, privilege, and the aftermath of 29  See, for example, Walter Ralegh’s assertion that ‘Guiana is a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenheade.’ The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, With a Relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa (Which the Spaniards Call El Dorado etc), Performed in the Year 1595. Ed Robert Schomburgk. London: Hakluyt Society, 1848. 115. 30  See also Miller’s blog post ‘A Lion in a Den of Daniels,’ 11 June 2014. Under the Saltire Flag. https://underthesaltireflag.com/2014/06/11/a-lion-in-a-den-of-daniels/ 31  See Miller’s blog post ‘If a Gay Man Screams in the Caribbean, and a White Man Isn’t There to Hear Him, Has He Still Made a Sound?’ 13 July 2015. Under the Saltire Flag. https://underthesaltireflag.com/2015/07/13/if-a-gay-man-screams-in-the-caribbeanand-a-white-man-isnt-there-to-hear-him-has-he-­still-­made-a-sound/

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colonialism to ecological issues and Earth’s systems. Miller brings these to the fore in the final section, which provokes my reading of it as a piece that exposes issues that are simultaneously economic, societal, and ecological. The poem begins in microcosm with ‘the invention of doors’ and ‘the invention of town,’ evoking private property in its often ironic and darkly humorous enumeration of ‘gates’ and ‘burglar bars.’ The ‘Plantationocene’ and ‘Capitalocene’ create profound inequality, and Miller suggests that the defence of private property by wealthy Jamaicans echoes colonial processes: ‘the invention of fences’ is linked to ‘the invention of countries’ (9): Here that Was Here Before… the invention of doors (which was the invention of the outdoors); before the invention of town (which was the invention of the outskirts, the peripheries); before the invention of gates (which was the invention of the outside, the outsider, the barbarians in wait. It should be noted that there are many kinds of gates & many kinds of barbarians; in Jamaica, the gates of Kingston produce a kind offensively called ‘butu’); [….] before the invention of boundaries, (which was the invention of fences, and also the invention of countries). (9)

The geographical ambit of the poem widens towards the end, exploring the landscape ‘before the invention of time’ and even ‘before the invention of place (which was the invention of the world as we know it),’ exploring how these concepts are anthropocentric constructs. Miller shifts scale at the end of the poem, revealing a vast and highly organic view of Earth’s biological systems: Here that is here in the now & that was here in the before & that shall be here in the after that shall hold our bodies, our cities, our outdated stamps in its endless cycle of green & brown & flower & thorn & stone. (10)

This enmeshed, entangled sense of place is profoundly anti-­anthropocentric. The final line of this poem cannot fail to call up intertextual echoes of Wordsworth’s ‘rocks, and stones, and trees’ in ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit

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Seal’ (Wordsworth 1969 [1904], 140). Yet Miller reinvents this Romantic immersion in nature for a Jamaican context: ‘brown’ delicately suggests the hue of skin tones and earth, while ‘green’ evokes the green of nearby bushes and the Jamaican flag. If the Anthropocene has been criticised for being human-centred, Miller’s poem opens the possibility not merely for multi-species survival, but for a view of place that exists regardless of human presences, absorbing them into Earth’s complex systems. Deploying long lines and a loose, semi-prose form that contrasts with the greater regularity of, for example, ‘When Considering the Long, Long Journey of 28,000 Rubber Ducks,’ Miller’s consideration of how place is made shares some formal and thematic similarities with his essays on the subject. Miller’s prose essays further illuminate how places are created, how human settlements have an ecological impact, and how white stereotypes of Jamaica as the ‘jungle’ impact modern society—and moreover who speaks out about societal issues in the Caribbean. In an essay that otherwise considers (paternalistic) white American advocacy for the Jamaican LGBTQIA+ community, Miller draws an extended analogy between a human presence that hears a tree falling in a forest and who hears whose voice in different communities: ‘what lives matter, and what lives don’t?’ as he puts it. The essay develops its analogy by examining the environmental cost of human building projects and the ecological interconnections that are disrupted when a tree falls: I think that almost every building has already caused a displacement. They have displaced trees and whole communities we never thought to give a damn about. So what about the intricate nests and burrows that were on the land before the building came? What about that architecture—that history—that detailing? […] The tree in the forest lives in a dynamic ecosystem. It is its own life, but it also contributes to the lives of others—to bugs and tree frogs and mice. Of the hundreds of thousands of lives that must be in any forest, how could there be no one to hear it fall? But of course, by ‘no one’ we mean, no human. The ears of frogs and snakes are different from the ears of humans—but they do have ears. They hear. The ears of insects are also quite different—but they too receive vibrations. The ears of mice or foxes or rabbits—these are much more like our own ears. They hear sound in much the way that we hear sounds. Sometimes more intensely. Think of a parcel of deer grazing in a field who all look up suddenly, at once, as if they were in a choreographed dance, and who then run off into the trees. What did they all hear? It is possible that they heard the soft step of a hunter, kneeling behind a bush and pointing a rifle at them.

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Or else a tree, somewhere in the distance, falling. And yet, they too are dismissed. They are ‘no one’. Their hearing—their witness does not matter. It seems to me that this question must then have particular resonance for those of us who grew up in places often considered to be jungle—the heart of darkness—we who grew up in our own forests making our own wild sounds. Can we give notice that the forest is not empty, and in fact it has never been? It is full of witnesses. Can we witness our own lives? Can we say that in these forests, you will not hear every sound—every tree that falls—but that we who live here, we hear. We bear witness. And it matters.32

This essay hinges on Miller’s critique of white American gay activists’ actions as damaging to Jamaica’s own LGBTQIA+ activist organisations; and (neo-)colonial perceptions of Jamaicans as inhabiting ‘places often considered to be jungle,’ the ‘heart of darkness,’ ‘our own forests.’ One form of white ignorance is used as an extended metaphor for the other. This short article illuminates Miller’s view of the way human societies mirror, and link to, perception and communication in complex ecosystems. The fall of a tree, by analogy, is violence against a member of the Jamaican LGBTQIA+ community, which sends shockwaves through the rest of that community. What Miller has to say about bearing witness is important for In Nearby Bushes. His choice of the tree metaphor is important because of early queer theory’s reticence about considering ecological issues, and long-standing debates in LGBTQIA+ cultural theory, about what is ‘natural’ and what is ‘unnatural.’ The ‘crawling//brawl of vines’ in The Cartographer (Miller 2014, 13) has its offshoots in Miller’s poem ‘Here Where Blossoms the Night.’ This is Miller’s most sustained engagement with complex ecosystems and human participation in inter-species networks; it commands readerly attention, as it is the longest poem in the book. Miller explores vernacular Jamaican names for plants, suggesting an enmeshed, hybrid view of ecosystems. Here is the first part: 32  Kei Miller. ‘If A Gay Man Screams in the Caribbean, and a White Man Isn’t There to Hear Him, Has He Still Made a Sound?’ 13 July 2015. Under the Saltire Flag. https:// underthesaltireflag.com/2015/07/13/if-a-gay-man-screams-in-the-caribbean-and-awhite-man-isnt-there-to-hear-him-has-he-­still-­made-a-sound/

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Here Where Blossoms the Night Here where blossom the orchids, two hundred      & twenty in variety. Some have adapted to bone dry places, to being purple amongst the stone.      Here where blossom Jamaican Ladies Of the Night, I mean the flowers—      their petals, the colour of weddings, their perfume, the scent of parlours.      There is much that blossoms in these bushes & much that rots, like Jamaican ladies of the night—      I no longer mean the flowers. Here where grows the Hog Apple, the Hog Money. Here      where wild hogs rut at the roots of things. (11)

The forest is a significant place for Caribbean authors, evocative of precolonial presences in Walcott’s Omeros (1990, 4–5), and a space of refuge and vernacular knowledge (DeLoughrey and Handley, 31). Gender violence, especially against women, and gendered concepts of land and landscape haunt the first part of the poem. Miller’s wordplay on ‘Jamaican Ladies/of the Night’ (orchids) and ‘Jamaican ladies of the night’ (sex workers) casts the bushes as a space for the sex trade, with all the dangers this brings to women (the ‘blossom[ing]’ and ‘rott[ing]’ in the second stanza that mentions these ‘ladies of the night’). The poem does steer close to gender stereotypes here, but it does so to expose the continuum of heterosexist violence that Miller criticises both in this poem and in his nonfiction essays. Homophobia in Jamaica is particularly hypocritical, Miller claims, because of the dangers that heterosexual men pose to women, to gay men, and to each other: ‘Jamaica has one of the highest murder rates in the world and […] no story of any other gang killing or murder or rape that is in the papers every minute of every day has ever borne a headline, “Heterosexual Gang kills 3 men in Portmore.” “Heterosexual men gangrape woman.”’33 Miller’s poem explores the forest not only as a refuge for sexual encounters, but also as a place of danger 33  Kei Miller. ‘A Lion in a Den of Daniels,’ 11 June 2014. Under the Saltire Flag. https:// underthesaltireflag.com/2014/06/11/a-lion-in-a-den-of-daniels/

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for women, in order to suggest that gender violence and ecological violence form part of a continuum of heterosexist, patriarchal dominance. Miller’s poem calls up an entangled environment, where plants with names that suggest hybridity must coexist with the detritus of the Anthropocene. The plants in later stanzas, such as ‘Bullock’s Heart’ and ‘Dog’s Tail’ that ‘seem not to belong/to bushes’ are listed shortly before the ‘broken/bottles & burnt cars’ (11). Bruno Latour argues that the distinction between nature and human beings was blurred by a proliferation of human-created hybrids (1993, 10–11), and here, Jamaican names for plants suggest an organic form of hybridity that creates a vibrant sense of entangled life. Anna Tsing’s concept of entanglement acknowledges that Earth is a ‘damaged planet’ (Tsing et  al. 2017), while Haraway’s Chthulucene recognises that human-created agents and nonhumans are inextricably linked: Miller’s ecological meshes include both luxuriant vegetation and all the litter of the Anthropocene. In Miller’s work, the language of landscape, naming, flora, and fauna reveals important issues of relation and reclamation. Caribbean writers have long explored the link between colonial classification and the domination of the land, and found opportunities to subvert both. Such work suggests a way of provincialising models of the Anthropocene that begin with the conquest of the Americas, the event that paved the way for the global transportation of biota and gave rise to colonial natural history. For Walcott, the creole names for trees in the Antilles are ‘suppler, greener’ than their English names (1998, 80). Walcott brands acts of colonial classification as ‘arrogance’ and prioritises Antillean knowledge of plants: Here is an unknown plant. Take the arrogance of an Old World botanist naming this plant then, this one on the grass verge of the beach that I do not even have a name for, and I now believe that my ignorance is more correct than his knowledge, that my privilege makes it correct as quietly as Adam’s, or Crusoe’s, and that what it reminds me of, its metaphor, is more important than the family it springs from. A whole method of our learning has been founded on this acceptance, but eventually the botanically correct and Latin-tagged label or, even worse, the tag with the name of the “discoverer,” disappears; it keeps its creole or country name according to its properties, and without properties, medicinal, magical, or edible, without use it remains anonymous. (2005, 56)

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Walcott, and Miller after him, celebrates a vernacular understanding of plants and animals. Yet if Walcott claims not to know the name of the St Lucian plant he encounters, Miller’s poem names every Jamaican plant in sight. Miller’s encyclopaedia of Jamaican names for flora, complete with their ‘medicinal, magical, or edible’ properties, proposes an alternative form of knowledge to imperial forms of classification. For DeLoughrey and Handley, Linnaean and imperial taxonomies of flora and fauna also led to the grouping of humans into different categories, thus ‘contributing to biologically determinist discourses of race, gender, and nature’ (2011, 12). As the poem continues, Miller parodies such determinist discourses of race, satirising Joseph Conrad’s depiction of the ‘wild// & passionate uproar’ (12) of Black people in Heart of Darkness (while also offering a queer perspective on the ‘passionate’ encounters that take place in the forest). Indeed, he celebrates the bushes as a place rich in vernacular beliefs with African roots. He describes the bushes as a refuge for the ‘Wild Caesar Obeah’ (13) and a place for ‘kumina, the never-dead of spirts [sic]’ (12): the bushes are both the locality for, and participants in, rituals with African origins. Miller’s selection of plant name does not evoke an uncomplicated link to African ‘roots,’ but a rhizomatic network of etymologies from multiple locations. The plant names have appropriately hybridised and creolised origins: the ‘obeah’ of ‘Wild Caesar Obeah’ derives from an Igbo root, ‘Pawpaw’ derives from Spanish via Arawak, and ‘Ramoon’ has Spanish origins (OED). In these plant names, Miller captures three crucial influences on Jamaican culture: the African Diaspora, indigenous Caribbean people, and European colonisation. Plant names are also creolised, diverging from their Spanish and Latin roots:     Here where shines the Raw Moon—     ‘Raw Moon’ being folk etymology. Original word, Ramoon. [….]     [T]he slow greening & rootsing        of Latin; ‘Semen contra’ becomes Semi-contract, ‘Sempervivum’ becomes ‘Simple Bible’        becomes, ‘Sinkle Bible’. (13)

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The Latin language is associated with imperial domination in some Caribbean poetry (witness Walcott’s reinvention of Latin tags in Omeros, such as ‘pro Rommel, pro mori’ (1990, 25)). Yet changing ‘Semen contra’ to ‘Semi-contract’ and ‘Sempervivum’ to ‘Sinkle Bible’ enacts a more profound form of linguistic transformation than Walcott’s subtle subversion. Miller has said during a keynote address that ‘when you take the Latin word “Sempervivum” and you turn it into “Sinkle Bible,” you are claiming proprietorship over both the language and the landscape.’34 If the reinvention of Place Name(s) enacts a ‘repossession’ of formerly colonised territory in The Cartographer (Rose-Steel, 51), ‘Here Where Blossoms the Night’ suggests ways of repossessing plants, but also of understanding their properties. The vernacular names for flora, and local understanding of powerful herbal remedies, are celebrated later in the book, in a companion poem ‘Here Where Is the Cure.’ The poem celebrates local herbal remedies ranging from Donkey Weed for ‘bellyhat’ (belly-hurt) to Standing Buddy for impotence (Miller 2019, 23). ‘Here Where Blossoms the Night’ shows that the bushes ‘cannot be held/ by the small arms of English’ nor ‘by the English’ (12), evoking a decolonised and creolised sense of place. The ‘greening & rootsing’ of plant names invites a postcolonial ecocritical interpretation of Miller’s book, that is cognisant of both race (roots) and environmental issues (‘greening’). Here are the ‘green roots’ and ‘brown shoots’ that Karen McCarthy Woolf finds in Miller’s poetry (2019). By ‘[G]reening & rootsing’ the language, Miller explores rhizomatic connections with land and landscape on a local level. Yet the ‘greening’ in Miller’s connection develops more planetary links in ‘To Know Green from Green,’ which ends with an expansive, rhizomatic sense of place and planet: To Know Green from Green ‘And all this in a million shades of green.’ —James Henderson, describing Jamaica. [….] Look: a parakeet, its wings bright against the night, you must know midnight different from malachite different from the leathery shade called crocodile,

34  Kei Miller. Question and answer session following keynote reading at The Anthropocene and Race conference, University of Central Lancashire, 6th February 2021.

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You must know emerald different from jade; know greens that travel towards grey—laurel, artichoke, sage. Forest is different from jungle is different from tree which is itself a shade of green. You must know India, Paris & Pakistan: that breeze can rustle language out of leaves: Spanish, Persian, Russian, & still a million tongues between. (17)

If Glissant has proposed a twofold, rhizomatic connection to place and planet (1990, 206), Miller’s entangled shades of green suggest that such local and global connections can be apprehended through vegetation. The green might, of course, be the green of the Jamaican flag, but while Jamaica is Miller’s starting point, the multitude of shades of green that he evokes suggests a plurality of living organisms, of ways of perceiving them, and of countries that they inhabit. Miller riffs on and reworks the ‘million shades of green’ mentioned in the tourist guidebook that he quotes in the poem’s epigraph. Plurality and diversity are the essence of this poem, which instructs the reader to ‘know seafoam different from sea, teal different from tea,/ & still a million shades between’ in the poem’s opening tercet (17). Miller alludes to the violence that haunts the collection— mentioning ‘army’ and ‘hunter’ as shades of green in the second tercet— but this is juxtaposed with living, vulnerable flora and fauna in the section quoted above (‘a parakeet … the leathery shade called crocodile’ (17)). An organic sense of poetic creation, similar to Miller’s ‘language of bees,’ is developed when Miller alludes to the ‘laurel’ (emblem of poetic creation) and ‘sage’ (a symbol of wisdom). The poem ends with a global sense of plural languages that are linked to organic sources: ‘Spanish, Persian, Russian’ linked to ‘a million tongues.’ Here, Miller echoes the importance not only of roots but of a worldwide network of branches and languages, to many authors of the Black Diaspora. Walcott linked leaves and language in his essay ‘Isla Incognita,’ written in 1973 but published three decades later: ‘It has taken me over thirty years and my race hundreds, to feel the fibres spread from the splayed toes and grip this earth the arms knot into boles and put out leaves. When that begins this is the beginning of season, cycle time. The noise my leaves make is my language’ (2005, 57). If Walcott’s vision of language develops from St Lucia, from ‘this earth,’ rather than ‘this Earth,’ Miller’s method of developing ‘language out of leaves’ is rhizomatic in its worldwide connections. Miller’s poem develops Glissant’s concept of rhizomatic connection to place and

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planet; the poet suggests further ecological dimensions to the ‘Submarine roots’ that Glissant saw ‘extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches’ (1989, 67). Miller’s rhizomatic picture of international biotic links is not utopian, though. He places his poem about multiple, international shades of green against a distinctly ambivalent look at what happens when species are transported between continents. The following poem, ‘Here Where Run the Wild Deer,’ examines the damaging, ambiguous, and often absurd situations that arise when living animals are taken far from their original habitats: Here Where Run the Wild Deer In 1988, a show brought six reindeer to Jamaica. A subsequent hurricane allowed for their escape into the hills of Portland. Without natural predators, the population of Jamaican reindeer now stands at approximately 6,000.      Here where run the wild deer— the Caribbean caribou—does this      surprise you, deer without snow not even the possibility      of snow? Here, they are like echoes of a long story—the brutal     history of dis place which is not to say      they are not their own stories, but that they know, as we do     the tightness of ships & how to lose whole continents,      & how to be wary of white men wielding whips,      & how to end up here.      There is such a thing as the perfect storm. It includes an actual storm & deer      in weak cages & nearby bushes.

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    How wonderful to escape into hills that have always been escape.      They are the new maroons. At dawn      they descend on quiet hooves to loot from the estates …. (18–19)

In light of Lewis and Maslin’s idea that the Anthropocene is marked by the global movement of flora, fauna, capital, and people, this poem suggests a pointed engagement with the ‘Columbian Exchange’ and its aftermath. Rather than improving agriculture, as Lewis and Maslin propose at one point (159), Miller humorously shows that introduced species may also wreak havoc. When Miller introduced the poem during a reading at a conference in 2021, he commented that ‘one of the most profound harms we can do to a landscape is to introduce a kind of life to it that doesn’t really belong there.’ The organisers of the Christmas show that featured the reindeer did not count on ‘the environment doing what the environment does.’ Miller further illuminated why he was drawn to this topic, and decided to make the link between slaves escaping to freedom with introduced species: ‘What is incredible to me is that the deer took the same paths that the maroons had taken hundreds of years before, and so the Jamaican reindeer become an unwitting echo of another history. […] As magical and wonderful as they are, you can imagine, the ecological impact is profound.’35 Miller’s punning evocation of ‘dis place’ in the poem calls up echoes of Kamau Braithwaite’s Born to Slow Horses (2005, 78) but with the difference that he uses the example of the reindeer to explore human and creaturely displacement: the ‘new maroons.’ The idea that ‘how to end up here’ is a skill that must be acquired, recalls Glissant’s concept of relation in diaspora, expanding it to include nonhuman creatures. The deer escape ‘in nearby bushes,’ recalling the importance of the forest as a place of liberty for escaped slaves. Yet the poem shifts tone after the section I have quoted. Miller’s correction of his initial description of the (colonial) ‘estates’: these are now ‘farms’ owned by Jamaican country folk. Miller humorously shows a ‘field of ruined carrots’ where a farmer curses, ‘Dem nyam every godalmighty ting!’ suggesting the harm brought  Kei Miller. Keynote reading at The Anthropocene and Race conference, University of Central Lancashire, 6th February 2021. 35

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by the Anthropocene’s distribution of biota. Yet when Miller quotes the farmer as declaring, ‘Dem sooo pretty!’ (19), he wryly suggests a way of moving towards an inclusive, relational acceptance of introduced species. In a shift from the ridiculous back to the sublime that any writer would envy, Miller ends the poem by returning to a lyrical tone, with visual images of ‘the majesty of antlers,’ and a rhetorical request to the deer to teach Jamaican people how to belong in a place ‘where we do not belong’ (20). The speaker’s question to the deer evokes rhizomatic links between nonhumans and people of the Black Diaspora; addressing them in this way recalls Galleymore’s responsible anthropomorphism, implying that they are potential interlocutors (see Chap. 6). By ‘naturalising’ the deer in this way, Miller underscores the need for different species to coexist on what Tsing and her colleagues term ‘a damaged planet.’ From damage to localised ecosystems, to ruptures in the Earth’s very bedrock, Miller’s book explores multiple ways of existing on a ‘damaged planet.’ As in The Cartographer, In Nearby Bushes contains tectonic events. The processes of ‘deep time’ are usually too slow for human beings to observe. Yet the moment of an earthquake sees these forces bursting into everyday life, often catastrophically. Miller’s poem plays out this clash of timeframes both lexically and formally. If the idea of the Anthropocene, and the theory of tectonic plates, might risk turning our gaze away from both the local and the organic, Miller’s poem provincialises lithic narratives of the Anthropocene. His poem ‘Hush’ resonates with ideas of ‘geotrauma’ and environmental grief: Hush Jamaica experiences, on average, 3 earth movements per month. These are mostly never felt. Here that cradles the earthquakes; they pass through the valleys in waves, a thing like grief, or groaning that can’t be uttered. Observe the breadfruit leaf, How it shivers without wind— this quiet that is not quiet, this peace that is not peace,

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this hush trembling in the landscape, it is the stifled earthquake. (21)

This poem suggests various forms of geotrauma: violent tectonic events, violence inflicted on the earth (Merola), and the traumas inflicted on what Kathryn Yusoff terms ‘black and brown bodies’ (4) in the name of geological extraction. Miller’s likening of earthquake to ‘grief’ and ‘groaning that can’t be uttered’ suggests multiple forms of suppressed violence and mourning. These include the scars of the plantation system, the traumas of slavery and diaspora, homophobic and misogynistic violence, and the ‘groaning’ of both damaged bedrock and the enslaved Taino miners whom Miller elegises in a later poem (34). If a dubious ideological side of the ‘imperial Anthropocene’ narrative is its ‘deadly erasure’ of enslaved and colonised bodies, for Yusoff (8), Miller’s poem suggests that the earth itself is a site of memorialisation that extends to those who fall victim to violence in those ‘nearby bushes.’ ‘Hush’ is the eighth poem in the collection, which contains several poems that are mirror images of each other; a later prose-poem numbered ‘viii’ revisits the ‘geotrauma’ of the earthquake. In ‘viii,’ Miller relates further, traumatic events that happen during earth tremors: ‘A man was standing on what he knew as ground. In just seconds he was drowning. To drown on your own acre of land—isn’t that something!’ (63). Swamps that flood anew, the return of the racial and geological repressed during earthquakes, the liquefaction of the very ground itself—In Nearby Bushes dramatises profound and unsettling transformations in Earth’s systems. Miller’s focus on trauma and mourning suggests that environmental grief is indeed a ‘primary affect’ (Merola, 124) of the Anthropocene. Environmental mourning, memorialisation, and the entwined human and environmental dimensions of the ‘Plantationocene’ are the subject of Miller’s poem ‘For the Sake of Sweetness.’ The poem considers a long-­ standing plantation economy, and its focus on the impact of plantation agriculture on humans, animals, and plants suggests the multifaceted problems of the ‘Plantationocene’: For the Sake of Sweetness Here that burns of the sake of sweetness; the cane rats are running towards the river. On evenings like this, the air smelling

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of what you might call molasses & I might call slavery—it is hard to tell what century we are in. The sky, red as the bandanas the cane cutters wear around their faces like bandits, hangs low as if breathing we might choke on clouds & its black confetti of ratoon & chaff & tares. (24)

When one considers the impacts of sugar production, slavery and deforestation are the obvious evils that come to mind. Rodents are not the most iconic victims of industrial sugar production, but they are the first living things that Miller shows us in the poem. ‘For the Sake of Sweetness’ explores the fraught relations between animal extinction, human labour, consumption, and, by extension, the impact of plantation burning on the climate. (Miller’s choice of animal, the cane rat, is significant: indigenous Caribbean rodent species were driven to extinction by deforestation and introduced species in colonial times.36) The air smells of ‘what you might call molasses & I/might call slavery’; Miller directly addresses white readers here, suggesting the ideological problems with narratives of the Anthropocene that begin with imperialism or the Industrial Revolution. Sugar produced by slaves provided the calories needed by Industrial Revolution coal miners and labourers (Yusoff, 40), and Miller’s poem thus undoes the ‘deadly erasure’ (Yusoff, 8) that ignores the role of slave labour in this proposed threshold. Shifting environmental timescales in a move characteristic of Anthropocene culture, Miller casts doubt on the century in which his poem is set. His conflation of the red of cane-cutters’ bandanas with the red sky and air pollution from cane-stalk burning—‘as if breathing we might choke on clouds’—calls up narratives of Capitalocene and Plantationocene, pointing to the impacts of both on people, biodiversity and climate. If Miller’s ‘A Prayer for the Unflummoxed Beaver’ opens a space for grief that is as wide as the bayou, the mention of the cane rat prepares the reader for further ecological grief in the poem ‘Here, the Diminishing Miles.’ Estates named for crocodiles, caimans, and alligators recall the destroyed ‘swamps’ where they once lived: 36  Jonathan Amos. ‘Caribbean super-rat history extracted from DNA.’ BBC Science & Environment. 22 Apr 2015. Accessed 10.03.2021. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ science-environment-32412191

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Here, the diminishing miles of crocodiles who having survived asteroids & the frozen earth may not survive here where they are reduced to the smallest yards. (25)

Miller employs the focus on ‘deep time’ characteristic of Anthropocene culture to draw out the irony that crocodiles have survived catastrophic ice ages, and the cataclysmic asteroid hit that triggered a mass extinction, only to be severely menaced by an extinction that some thinkers associate with the Anthropocene. This is the environmental cost of human geological agency. Miller signals the status of this poem as an ecological elegy by employing the word ‘lament’: ‘This is a lament for them—/the crocodiles who lay their fragile eggs in a fragile place’ (25). The fragility of Jamaica— itself shaped like ‘a fat crocodile’—suggests that part of the significance of place is lost when a species is lost. One could also read the poem as reflecting the rising sea levels that threaten to change the shape of the island— ‘soon it will be the shape of memory.’ If aerial, detached views of the Anthropocene ignore its vulnerable biota, Miller’s focus on animal vulnerability resonates with theories of ecological elegy and environmental mourning. Grief for lost human presences and lost animals is juxtaposed, and Miller’s ‘micro-essays’ that evoke the histories of Place Name(s) consider what is erased by colonial presences. However, there are also surprising moments of survival. The Taino and Carib people are the subject of elegies (33), yet Miller’s poem ‘Place Name: Oracabessa’ questions the ‘completeness of the genocide’ (34). For a poet for whom place is language, the Spanish origins of the Place Name (‘Golden Head’) speak of the racialised, geological violence that Yusoff also interrogates. Miller pinpoints the survival of indigenous Caribbean presences in ‘such leave-over words as hurricane; consider barbecue; consider Xaymaca, land of wood and water—of wood and water but not of gold’ (34). Miller’s work identifies the persistence of indigenous Caribbean languages with the powerful natural force of the hurricane, inscribing the organic presence of ‘wood’ into Jamaica through language. The poem finds moments of organic, linguistic survival, although it grieves for the victims of the gold-greedy ‘imperial Anthropocene’ and ‘Capitalocene.’ Even the process of making a place is a form of environmental damage, Miller suggests. The ‘micro-essay’ ‘Sometimes I Consider the Nameless Spaces’ views place and space along lines that broadly follow Yi-Fu Tuan’s

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view of the difference between place and space, but the poem also suggests a way of reshaping Tuan’s views in light of ecological connections. Miller presents the very act of place-making as a form of environmental violence: I have read that it is possible to hear trees breathing. And that they send messages across a complicated network of roots—warnings of insects, and what defences can be used. And it is possible to observe the slow walk of trees, though it might take you a thousand years to see them inching across a ridge. If sometimes it is possible to hear trees breathing, can you also hear them catch their breaths before the violence of place? Because isn’t place always a violence—the decimation of trees, the genocide of bees, the dislocation of birds, the cutting, the clearing, the paving, the smoothing, the raising up of cement like giant tombstones over the grave of all that was there before. (37)

The ‘roots’ of trees are knotty with human and ecological associations, suggesting the ‘roots’ of the Black Diaspora, but also Glissant’s non-­ hierarchical network of rhizomes. Genocide and ecocide are presented as linked in this poem, and thematic echoes elsewhere in the collection reinforce this: the word ‘genocide’ is applied to bees a few pages after Miller has used it to describe the decimation of the Taino people (34), while the ‘dislocation’ of birds echoes the ‘dis place’ of caribou and maroons in Miller’s earlier poem (18). This ‘micro-essay’ extends Miller’s process of bearing witness to deforestation, homophobia, and white people’s paternalistic attitudes in his 2015 essay,37 but with the difference that the later piece stresses the agency that trees have to bear their own witness: their ‘messages,’ ‘defences,’ and ‘warnings.’ Queer people who venture into the forest are implicitly connected to these trees through powerful alliances that help them to resist the heterosexist, masculinist violence of the ‘Manthropocene.’ However, the book’s elegiac final sequence bears witness to the severity of the violence inflicted on a young woman, and the long series of poems that describes her integration into the forest offers no simple closure to the grieving process. The elegies in the book set up two overlapping timeframes. The first is the historical timeframe of mourning human and animal victims, but the second takes a longer view of 37  Kei Miller. ‘If A Gay Man Screams in the Caribbean, and a White Man Isn’t There to Hear Him, Has He Still Made a Sound?’ 13 July 2015. Under the Saltire Flag. https:// underthesaltireflag.com/2015/07/13/if-a-gay-man-screams-in-the-caribbean-and-awhite-man-isnt-there-to-hear-him-has-he-­still-­made-a-sound/

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environmental history—the ‘thousand years’ it takes to see trees progressing along a ridge, the geological processes that lead to earthquakes. From the point of view of ‘deep time,’ human alterations to the Earth seem brief indeed. When Miller provincialises the Anthropocene, the ‘Capitalocene’ and the ‘Plantationocene’ are presented as periods of violence that will give way to much slower, vaster forces of resistance and regeneration. Like the ghostly future presence that observes the Anthropocene from a time long after the present, Miller invites the reader to ‘consider the future as rubble’ (63), and yet this is not without hope. There is no end to the process of environmental regeneration—the ‘endless cycle of green & brown & flower & thorn & stone’ (10).

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. ‘Your Shell On Acid: Material Immersion, Anthropocene Dissolves.’ In Richard Grusin, ed. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2017. Pp. 89–120. Brathwaite, Kamau. Born to Slow Horses. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2005. Braziel, Jana Evans. ‘“Caribbean Genesis”: Language, Gardens, Worlds (Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, Edouard Glissant).’ In Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Renée Gosson, and George Handley, eds. Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2005. Pp. 110–126. Campbell, Alexandra. ‘Atlantic exchanges: The poetics of dispersal and disposal in Scottish and Caribbean seas.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55.2 (2019): 195–208. Clark, Nigel. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. London: SAGE, 2011. Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshhold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Selections from the Congo Diary. Ed. Caryl Phillips. London: Random House, 2000. Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2015. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke UP 2019. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley. ‘Introduction.’ In Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. Virginia: Virginia UP 2005. Pp. 1–32. De Loughrey, Elizabeth, and George Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.

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Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2016. Gilcrest, David. Greening the Lyre: Environmental Poetics and Ethics. Reno: Nevada UP, 1996. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 2002 [1993]. Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J.  Michael Dash. 1989: Virginia UP. French edition first published in 1981. ———. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1997. French edition first published in 1990. Handley, George B. ‘Derek Walcott’s Poetics of the Environment in “The Bounty”’. Callaloo 28.1 (2005): 201–15. Haraway, Donna. ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.’ Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–165. Heise, Ursula. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2016. Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. King, Stephen A. Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control. With contributions by Barry T. Bays III and P. Renée Foster. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Harvard: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1993. ———. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Trans. Catherine Porter. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017. Lee, John Robert. ‘The Poetry of Kei Miller.’ PN Review 46.6 (Jul/Aug 2020): 38–41. Maran, Timo. Ecosemiotics: The Study of Signs in Changing Ecologies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2020. Mardorossian, Carine. ‘“Poetics of Landscape:” Edouard Glissant’s Creolized Ecologies.’ Calaloo 36.4 (Fall 2013): 983–994. McCarthy Woolf, Karen. ‘Hybrid Hierophanies: Where Rastafari Meets Religious Ecology in Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion.’ Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 3.1 (June 2019a): 91–102. ———. ‘Green Roots, Brown Shoots.’ 2019b. The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry. 2019. Web. Accessed 25 Aug 2020. https://ginkgoprize.com/green-­roots-­ brown-­shoots-­by-­karen-­mccarthy-­woolf/ Merola, Nicole. ‘Materializing a Geotraumatic and Melancholy Anthropocene: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods.’ Minnesota Review 83 (2014): 122–132. Miller, Kei. The Kingdom of Empty Bellies. Coventry: Heaventree Press, 2005. ———. There Is an Anger that Moves. Manchester: Carcanet, 2007. ———. A Light Song of Light. Manchester: Carcanet, 2010.

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———. Writing Down the Vision: Essays and Prophecies. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2013. ———. The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Manchester: Carcanet, 2014. ———. In Nearby Bushes. Manchester: Carcanet, 2019. ———, interviewee, and Eleanor Wachtel, interviewer. ‘An Interview with Kei Miller.’ Brick 101 (16 Oct 2016). Web. 01.03.21. https://brickmag.com/ an-­interview-­with-­kei-­miller/ ———, interviewee, and Yvonne Reddick and other interviewers. ‘We have been living in the Anthropocene for hundreds of years: a conversation with Kei Miller.’ Magma 81 (October 2021), forthcoming. Morton, Timothy. ‘The Dark Ecology of Elegy.’ The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy. Ed. Karen Weisman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. 251–71. Niblett, Michael, and Chris Campbell. ‘Introduction: Critical Environments: World-Ecology, World Literature, and the Caribbean.’ In Michael Niblett and Chris Campbell, eds. The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2016. Pp. 1–6. Niblett, Michael. World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890-1950. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. ‘Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures.’ In Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford: Oxford UP 2011. pp. 99–116. Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994. Rice, Alan. ‘Of Plastic Ducks and Cockle Pickers: African Atlantic Artists and Critiques of Bonded Labour across Chronologies.’ In Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-Hernandez, eds. Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture. Washington: Washington UP, 2017. Pp. 253–65. ———. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. London: Continuum, 2003. Rose-Steel, Michael. ‘Of Metaphors and Maps: Cartographic thinking and the poetry of Kei Miller.’ Green Connections 3 (Dec 2015): 40–53. Schneiderman, Jill S. ‘The Anthropocene Controversy.’ Anthropocene Feminism. Ed. Richard Grusin. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2017. Pp. 169–96. Seymour, Nicole. Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. ———, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt, eds. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2017. University of Liverpool Centre for New and International Writing. ‘The State of Poetry and Poetry Criticism.’ June 2020. Web. 02.02. 21. https://literaturealliancescotland.co.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2020/06/State-­of-­Poetry-­and-­ Poetry-­Reviewing-­2020-­Ledbury-­Critics-­Report.pdf

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Walcott, Derek. Omeros. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. ———. ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.’ What the Twilight Says. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1998. 65–84. ———. ‘Isla Incognita.’ In Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Renée Gosson, and George Handley, eds. Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2005. Pp. 51–57. Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works. Eds Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt. London: Oxford University Press, 1969 [1904]. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

CHAPTER 8

Seasonal Disturbances: Environment, Migration, Science, and an Anthropocene Poetics of Relation in Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Work

It’s quite powerful and it’s quite frightening to think of the Anthropocene in this way—almost like scar tissue, that this is occurring. The speed at which these changes are happening is accelerating. And we do get to these points of the unknown. That in itself is one of the most fascinating things about it. (McCarthy Woolf and Reddick, 6) Is this some community we rhizome into fragile connection to a place? Or a total we involved in the activity of the planet? (Glissant 1997, 206)

Karen McCarthy Woolf’s book Seasonal Disturbances was a prizewinner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry competition. Described as a ‘strange and stunning collection’ by poet Warsan Shire, the book raises as many questions as it answers. The first poem-sequence in the book is not laid out as poetry at all: it reads as a hybrid form, somewhere between poetry and prose. If some poets manipulate other organisms to create ‘biopoetry’ that challenges what literary art is in the first place, McCarthy Woolf’s project is less radical—but she deploys both the process-led practice of ecopoetics and the ecological themes of ecopoetry; reshapes the lyric poem; and challenges and subverts biological science. Scientific data about plastic pollution and subverted texts by Edwardian scientists rub shoulders with lyric explorations of migration. Poems examining inequalities of race, gender, and class are united by a long sequence about the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Y. Reddick, Anthropocene Poetry, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39389-1_8

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power of water to connect humans and nonhumans, and to heal many kinds of trauma. Climate change and global capitalism challenge, and sometimes completely reshape, the way poetic form functions in this book, which is striking for its focus on urban environments. Many of the poets examined in earlier chapters have taken us away from cities—into the bogland or through nearby bushes, downriver to the ocean or through the rainforest. Yet McCarthy Woolf offers a fresh take on Anthropocene entanglements by exploring how humans and nonhumans interact in contemporary London. If feminists have long argued that the personal is political,1 McCarthy Woolf’s poetry suggests that the Anthropocene is at once urban and oceanic, gendered and political, personal and ecological. McCarthy Woolf is a poet, editor, and ecopoetry scholar, based in London. Her first book, An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet 2014), was a book of the month in The Guardian newspaper. Her second book, Seasonal Disturbances (Carcanet 2017), was a Poetry Book Society Commendation and a Poetry School Book of the Year for 2017, in addition to the recognition it received from the Laurel Prize judging panel. Drafts of the collection’s title poem, and an interview generously provided by McCarthy Woolf, further illuminate how the project developed. McCarthy Woolf shares poetic themes, an editorial team, and a publisher with Miller, whose poetry she has researched in her academic work. McCarthy Woolf was also mentored by Petit, and she has commented on the inspiration she draws from Hughes. She shares a poetic interest in river-voyages and ocean odysseys with Alice Oswald, although the two poets focus on very different locales. Seasonal Disturbances is thus a particularly apt focus for this last chapter, as McCarthy Woolf’s work illustrates how ecopoetic methods pass from one author to another, via intertextual links and thematic conceits that are appropriately rhizomatic and relational. McCarthy Woolf also affiliates with a highly international array of poetic sources. With Mona Arshi, she is the editor of Nature Matters (2024), an anthology of poems by Black and Asian poets, tackling issues such as climate change and the Anthropocene. Published by prestigious independent Faber & Faber, the anthology brings diverse ecopoetry to the forefront of literary agendas. Since McCarthy Woolf’s academic research focuses on material ecopoetics, hybridity, and the sacred, her poetry—which has so far received scant scholarly attention—is ripe for 1  Carol Hanisch. ‘The Personal Is Political.’ In Barbara Crow, ed. Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader. New York University Press, [1970] 2000. 113–16.

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interpretation in the light of developments in the environmental humanities. Seasonal Disturbances explores how environmental damage is affecting people and creatures in London and beyond. The book explores the different levels of risk faced by humans and nonhumans: aquatic creatures and trees, women and refugees. Environmentally engaged, scientifically informed, and politically aware, the poems also deploy wry humour and vignettes with a personal tone. Climate change is one of McCarthy Woolf’s primary environmental preoccupations, but other facets of human impacts on the environment feature prominently—the destruction of plant life, marine plastics, ocean acidification. A highly interdisciplinary practitioner, McCarthy Woolf has supported eXXpedition, a women’s research voyage to monitor ocean plastics, as an associate artist; ‘The Science of Life’ sequence in Seasonal Disturbances was written in response to eXXpedition (McCarthy Woolf 2017, 81). She has collaborated with artists such as Sophie Herxheimer on Voyage; with filmmakers and composers; with the multidisciplinary climate change arts organisation Cape Farewell; and with geologists and environmental scientists for a commission for Magma poetry journal. McCarthy Woolf’s work suggests new, ecological concepts of migration and connectivity that expand influential paradigms of migration and diaspora, such as Edouard Glissant’s idea of the poetics of relation (1990, see Chap. 7 and below). McCarthy Woolf’s essay ‘Green Roots, Brown Shoots’ puts forward ways to ‘diversify ecocritical discourse’ and offer new ways to interpret the work of ‘writers of colour’ such as Miller and Capildeo (2019). Her poetry suggests new lenses for considering the Anthropocene: personal and political; local and planetary; lyric and experimental. McCarthy Woolf deploys the concept of the Anthropocene in her academic research on hybridity and the sacred in the work of three major twentieth-century and contemporary poets: Joy Harjo, Louise Gluck, and Kei Miller.2 She writes: ‘Often, writers of colour are read by default for identity-oriented issues, sometimes at the expense of other significant themes. […] In Seasonal Disturbances I wanted to write about London and about politics, and also about “Nature”, with all the inherent contradictions and vulnerabilities that vexed term contains. [….] And with matters of ecological import come politics.’ For her, ‘polemic,’ ‘dirge,’ 2   Karen McCarthy Woolf, interviewee, and Yvonne Reddick, interviewer. ‘Seasonal Disturbances.’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 3, 5.

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and ‘pastoral’ are outmoded ‘generic clichés’ (‘Green Roots, Brown Shoots,’ 2019). Major environmental changes associated with the Anthropocene inspire McCarthy Woolf to rework the conventions of the lyric, deploying hybrid forms that blur the boundaries between poetry and prose. McCarthy Woolf’s virtuoso reshaping of poetic form deploys hybrid forms from an international array of literary traditions. Her intertextual sampling of other authors’ texts shares some common methods with Eliot’s allusive, Modernist depiction of the Thames, and indeed Matthew Griffiths views Modernist poetic methods as most adequate to representing climate change (2017). However, McCarthy Woolf’s intertextual sources and poetic forms are multicultural in origin, including forms invented by prominent African American poets: intertextual ‘golden shovel’ poems after Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Nation, and prominent African American poet Elizabeth Alexander.3 Issues of gender, economic inequality, and race in the Anthropocene shape allusive, and sometimes parodic, poetic forms that subvert patriarchal, Eurocentric scientific texts. McCarthy Woolf’s ‘The Science of Life’ series samples and parodies early twentieth-century biology, and her deployment of absurdity, bricolage, and disconnection suggests postmodern aesthetics (Baldick, 288). Moreover, the poem ‘Tatler’s People Who Really Matter’ suggests postmodernist methods of collaging of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The poem borrows its adjectives and adverbs from a classist popular publication’s ‘rich list’ (McCarthy Woolf 2017,  81) and takes aim at western beauty standards, developing an ironic narrative about migrants arriving in London (‘Mind-blowingly otter-faced, she tells the little ones/everything’s going to be just fine—the lie flawless as pale skin’ (41)). Yet global links—human and ecological—are enacted in both poetic form and thematic content in the poems, from the Afghan landay to the Japanese zuihitsu. Resonating with Glissant’s poetics of relation and Jana Evans Braziel’s “poetics of (eco-)relation” (112), McCarthy Woolf’s highly international poetic forms also suggest a poetic way of exploring Heise’s concept of ‘eco-cosmopolitanism.’ Combining Glissant’s model of relation with recent environmental humanities work on environmental interconnection by Haraway, Tsing, and Morton, I argue that McCarthy 3  These poets’ work provides the stimulus for two poems deploying the intertextual ‘golden shovel’ form, in which the words from a line of an earlier poem provide the line-­ endings for a new creative work (McCarthy Woolf 2017, 81).

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Woolf’s work develops a cosmopolitan and enmeshed sense of life in the Anthropocene.4 Her collection envisages intricate, sprawling, and often surprising connections between human and more-than-human entities— the River Thames and Jamaican rivers, unseasonable weather and hollyhocks, global patterns of trade and migration. As such, it responds to the knotty and intractable environmental issues that have prompted geologists to propose that we are living through an epoch shaped by human actions.

‘Submarine Roots,’ Sea-Routes, and Tree-Roots: Relation and Entanglement If the Anthropocene confronts us with the disturbing evidence of human damage to Earth’s systems, how might we relate to others—human and nonhuman? McCarthy Woolf’s poetic concept of relation links the River Thames to oceanic systems of trade, capital, colonialism, and pollution. Her depiction of Earth’s systems at local, regional, and planetary scales suggests poetic ways of exploring the fluvial and oceanic dimensions of the Anthropocene. Urban rivers are an innovative focus, as they are perhaps the starkest reminder of how human beings are altering watercourses. As mentioned in Chap. 4, ocean acidification due to climate change, human beings’ dominant role in shaping the flow of the world’s rivers, and the breaching of ‘planetary boundaries’ associated with water pollution mean that the Anthropocene cannot be considered as a matter of stony stratigraphy alone. Moreover, McCarthy Woolf’s poetry shows how empires that once ‘ruled the waves’ have founded economic systems that exploit many forms of life, both human and aquatic. For Anthropocene geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, the sea is geohistory (2011), but for St Lucian Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, the sea holds the painful history of trans-Atlantic slavery

4  Timothy Morton. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010 and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2013. Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke U.P. 2016. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, 2015. For further work on enmeshment and the narrative strategies that this concept inspires, see, for example, Marco Caracciolo. ‘We-Narratives and the Challenges of Nonhuman Collectives.’ Style 54.1 (2020): 86–97.

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(‘The Sea is History’).5 McCarthy Woolf’s poetry explores entangled human and environmental histories of exploitation. The Atlantic is a crucial space for authors and theorists of the Black Diaspora such as Gilroy and Glissant, mentioned in reference to Kei Miller’s work (see Chap. 7). As detailed in Chaps. 2 and 7, thinkers including Kathryn Yusoff and Jason W. Moore explore how slavery and colonialism are linked to the Anthropocene’s systems of environmental ravage. In this chapter, I turn again to Edouard Gilssant’s Poetics of Relation to examine how his model of submarine roots and earthy rhizomes can be expanded to show how McCarthy Woolf’s poems consider links between fluvial, oceanic, terrestrial, and urban settings. Yusoff finds an ‘alluvial subjectivity’ (xi) in Glissant’s work that is not mentioned again in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None—but alluvial subjects are given a great deal of space in Seasonal Disturbances. Glissant’s view that an ethics of relation means ‘consent[ing] not to be a single being’ (91) is largely applied to Anthropocene geology and relations between human beings, in Yusoff’s work. Yet this chapter takes another look at Glissant’s rooty, knotty images for relation and shows how McCarthy Woolf’s work expands and reconsiders them. Such images suggest an Anthropocene—or ‘Chthulucene’— cognisant of organic systems as well as rock-cycles and water-cycles. McCarthy Woolf’s work looks again at relations from sea-routes to tree-­ roots, and the way climate change alters our relationship with both. If some poets of the Caribbean have been preoccupied with rootlessness, McCarthy Woolf’s work suggests surprising ways of creating rhizomatic, inter-species connections—even at a time of climate change. In Omeros, Walcott uses the yam (a root-crop) as a symbol for deracination: yams in St Lucia are both a cultivational link to Africa and a reminder of historical uprooting—‘You all see what it’s like without roots in this world?’ (21). Yet Glissant’s ‘Submarine roots’ (1997, 67, see Chap. 7) and these roots and branches—both submarine and terrestrial—are particularly important for Seasonal Disturbances. McCarthy Woolf’s collection suggests fluid movement between Gilroy’s ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ (190), but both forms of migration are particularly organic. The oceanic and the alluvial are fundamental to Glissant’s concept of relation, and McCarthy Woolf reconsiders such watery modes of relation 5  Derek Walcott. ‘The Sea is History.’ The Paris Review 74, Fall-Winter 1978. Web. Accessed 03.09.20. https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/7020/the-sea-is-historyderek-walcott

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for our age of climate change. The Poetics of Relation examines sea-routes and grieves for the traumatic histories the sea conceals: ‘“Je te salue, vieil Océan!” [Hail, old Ocean!] You still preserve on your crests the silent boat of our births, your chasms are our own unconscious, furrowed with fugitive memories’ (Glissant 1990, 7, my translation in square brackets). Glissant’s evocation of the trauma of the trans-Atlantic trade is particularly oceanic, ‘coming to light like seaweed, these lowest depths, these deeps, with their punctuation of scarcely corroded balls and chains’ (6). But if Glissant’s poetics of relation is abyssal, it is also alluvial: ‘[t]he unconscious memory of the abyss served as the alluvium for these metamorphoses’ by which exiled populations formed ‘an alliance with the imposed land’ (7). Recalling a folk belief common to both West African people and African Americans, that the Atlantic is nothing more than a river that one can cross (Phillips, 165; Rice 2003, 26), Glissant evokes the arrival of transported Africans by river: ‘The banks of the river have vanished on both sides of the boat. What kind of river, then, has no middle? Is nothing there but straight ahead? Is this boat sailing into eternity toward the edges of a nonworld that no ancestor will haunt?’ (7). In McCarthy Woolf’s collection, the river-boat finds a mooring at a place where the lyric I can celebrate her connection to birds and water, developing intimate ‘interbiotic’ (McCarthy Woolf and Bury, 23) connections in diaspora. Such an ‘interbiotic’ perspective recalls the work of visual artists of the Black Diaspora such as American artist Ellen Gallagher, whose emancipated, hybrid entities develop from the alluvium and submarine roots of Glissant’s ideas. In Gallagher’s painting Bird in Hand (2006), a sailor’s body features ‘seacreature-like tendrils’ and ‘limb-like roots’ in a mutability of species that ‘speaks back to Enlightenment racial science’ (Rice, 210, 192). Glissant’s evocation of ‘the land-sea that, unknown to you, is planet Earth’ (7), mentioned in the last chapter, is expanded in McCarthy Woolf’s poetry to include an Earth-systems perspective on major oceanic environmental issues, from plastic waste to climate change. Glissant’s essay ‘The Black Beach’ is a productive theoretical tool for further questioning Eurocentric and anthropocentric narratives of the Anthropocene, as it offers a dual perspective on local and global relations. This is highly pertinent to Anthropocene debates about race, Global North and Global South, and human impacts on planetary systems. I wish to turn again to Glissant’s words, ‘Is this some community we rhizome into fragile connection to a place? Or a total we involved in the activity of the planet?’ (206.) McCarthy Woolf’s poetry expands such a poetics of local and planetary relation,

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extending Glissant’s oceanic fibrils, watery connections, and filamentous rhizomes in an urban setting, recalling the knotty, enmeshed era that Haraway terms the ‘Chthulucene.’ Movement, fluidity, ecology, and identity are bound together in Seasonal Disturbances. McCarthy Woolf’s collection engages with both the oceangoing travels of the Caribbean Diaspora and way ocean plastic enters ‘the gyres of the Pacific’ (2017, 34). She does not explicitly mention the trans-Atlantic slave trade in this book: the collection is more preoccupied with more recent racist scourges and their environmental implications. These range from the unequal impacts of climate change, to the racism experienced by refugees fleeing from conflict and climate change-related problems. While Seasonal Disturbances is concerned with far more than human identity alone, canonical Black British, African American, and Caribbean theorists authors join Japanese and Native American intertextual references to underpin the book’s formal and thematic choices. McCarthy Woolf’s engagement with such diverse intertexts is examined later in this chapter. The oceanic and watery poems in Seasonal Disturbances shift from world-city to world, from personal to ecological and back again. These international intertextual references are important for providing a broadened, more fluid model of the Anthropocene that Chap. 5 explores. McCarthy Woolf has commented at length on her own environmental poetics and on how intertextuality, climate change, and ecological relations shape her work. She describes the ‘coupling,’ an intertextual form that she invented and which is discussed below,6 as ‘pushing at the lyric’ (McCarthy Woolf and Reddick, 4). She envisages her deployment of Japanese hybrid forms as lending ‘fluidity’ (McCarthy Woolf and Reddick, 4) to the lyric. She discusses how climate change can be represented in poetry, in a discussion article with fellow poet Dominic Bury that Magma journal commissioned, commenting that the best climate change poetry needs to be both ‘felt’ and ‘logically structured.’ In her poetic practice, she finds that writing from a place of personal, ecological connection is a productive way for her to consider the universality of climate change: ‘I know I’m better off writing “what I know”: e.g. how it feels to go swimming rather than how I’m going to stop the polar ice caps melting.’ In the article for Magma journal’s Climate Change Issue, in which she and Bury 6  The ‘coupling,’ McCarthy Woolf’s formal innovation that combines found prose with intercalated lines by the poet, is discussed shortly in this article.

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discuss these issues, she explores how such concerns are played out formally, in the work of other poets of colour. She states that poetic lacunae and fragmentation are effective formal strategies for poet Safia Elhillo’s evocation of the links between climate change, war, and migration, utilising ‘white space as part of a fragmentary process’ (McCarthy Woolf and Bury, 22)—a method that can also be perceived in Seasonal Disturbances. Yet if McCarthy Woolf examines broken human and ecological relationships, her book presents relations between species and people as urgently needed alliances, given that we live on what Anna Tsing terms a ‘damaged planet.’ McCarthy Woolf’s view is that there is a critical need for a change in attitudes, towards viewing nature as ‘an interbiotic system to which we contribute and belong.’7 The poetic forms and themes in Seasonal Disturbances are frequently rhizomatic, intertextual, and interconnected. Describing the poetry of Joy Harjo, which forms a ‘golden shovel’ found poem in Seasonal Disturbances (p.  48), McCarthy Woolf speaks of forms of ecological relation that are equally present in her own work: ‘If I look out there and there’s a tree, there’s a relationship. All the trees are in relationship with them—they are in relationship with the birds that live in them, and with the squirrels that run beneath them, and […] this relationship can be communicative’ (McCarthy Woolf and Reddick, 3). Seasonal Disturbances presents human speakers and characters as existing in co-constitutive, rhizomatic relationships with nonhuman others, destabilising the concept of a unified lyric self and putting anthropocentrism under pressure. McCarthy Woolf discusses her intentions when writing Seasonal Disturbances in interviews and articles. These texts detail both her creative process, how she envisages her work contributing to (often white-­ dominated) literary criticism, and how she draws on the work of environmental humanities theorists. Several poetic and critical interventions emerge: her primary environmental themes (including water pollution, climate justice, and urban nature in London), and a project to diversify ecopoetics, ensuring that writers of colour are read for their ecopoetic themes. When discussing the poetry of climate change with Bury, she comments that ‘marine litter and plastics pollution, alongside other anthropogenic hazards, are destroying ocean ecosystems at alarming rates’ (McCarthy Woolf and Bury, 20). The thematic issues that she comments on writing about in Seasonal Disturbances include ‘environmental grief,’ 7

 Karen McCarthy Woolf and Dom Bury, ‘Grievous Bodily Harm,’ pp. 22–23.

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while she views her book as exploring ‘the holistic ecology of water: as element, physical space, spiritual dimension and conduit and repository for humanity’s detritus, whether physical or emotional’ (20). She acknowledges that ‘Climate change is what Timothy Morton terms a hyperobject, which in the world of object-oriented ontology is a thing so vast in its complexities and associated meanings, whether temporal, physical and/or political, we find it almost impossible to acknowledge’ (21). Such a vast phenomenon, she acknowledges, requires the poet to ‘make a colossal grief intimate’ (21)—a form of Anthropocene scale-shifting that is played out in the transitions between lyric and planetary in Seasonal Disturbances. Her examination of ‘the holistic ecology of water,’ as she puts it, leads her to consider climate change through human connections to water: ‘I know I’m better off writing “what I know”: e.g. how it feels to go swimming rather than how I’m going to stop the polar ice caps melting’ (23). Her words in this interview invite a reading of her work that remains cognisant of its decolonial, feminist interpretations of ecopoetics: ‘We can’t really formulate an effective post/humanist ecopoetics without a commitment to decolonising the patriarchal space from which we interact with “nature”—until we see it not as “other” or remote from the self, but as an interbiotic system to which we contribute and belong’ (23)—an argument that diversifies Morton’s concept of ecological meshes. Race, too, is a crucial issue in the way ecopoetry is received; McCarthy Woolf highlights the importance of ecopoetic themes in the work of poets from the USA to Sudan and Guyana, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Safia Elhillo, John Agard, and Camille Dungy. She discusses how her environmental concerns, her cultural heritage, and issues of environmental and capitalist injustice shape the political strains in her work: In writing Seasonal Disturbances I’ve been conscious that as a writer of colour I’ve wanted to spotlight environmental concerns. For me writing ‘about’ flowers (or water or birds…) is inevitably a political act: how could it not be with bee population die-off or the Bayer-Monsanto merger? Think also of Louise Glück’s landmark collection The Wild Iris, a deep lyric poetry that was ahead of its time in exposing the pitfalls of unbridled anthropocentrism. As we face a future that is fraught with the material impacts of neo-­ liberal capitalism and its historical precedents, poetry, as an artform of witness, must and will inevitably adapt. (McCarthy Woolf, ‘Green Roots Brown Shoots’)

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The ‘Plantationocene’ and the ‘Capitalocene,’ Yusoff’s argument for Black Anthropocenes, and McCarthy Woolf’s idea that the Anthropocene might be considered as the age of sugar8: these interrelated forms of capitalist, racist, and ecocidal exploitation form part of the preoccupations in Seasonal Disturbances. Yet in spite of this, there is also a deep sense of connection to the Earth as ‘an interbiotic system to which we contribute and belong’ (McCarthy Woolf and Bury, 23).

‘Pushing at the Lyric’: Rhizomes and Inter-Species Relation Seasonal Disturbances begins with ‘The Hollyhocks,’ which reads like an Anthropocene detective story. The questions the poem explores—often playfully—include: is anyone innocent of environmental damage? How do apparently personal actions reveal wider political  and  ecological issues? How can shifts in poetic form, imagery, tone, and voice explore such issues? Unequal gender relations, climate change impacts, the uses of plants and animals, and western society’s everyday acts of consumption are considered from an environmental standpoint. A wealthy couple visit a hotel where: the horse is restless in the stable, he hasn’t been out for days and when she sees the text it’s like the parcel of cold sky hanging over fields covered in snow and studded with blackened Champagne vines. Then all of a sudden it’s—when you’re together does she crawl on all fours? What does she drink? Tell me, I need to know, what does she eat? (McCarthy Woolf 2017, 9)

The locked-in horse, the simile of dead vines that evoke climate change, the male character’s infidelity, the ‘other woman’ crawling on all fours: all 8  Round table discussion with geologists, environmental scientists, and poets for Magma: The Anthropocene Issue. 27th February 2021. Janette Ayachi. ‘Angels of the Anthropocene.’ Magma: The Anthropocene Issue 81 (winter 2021), published online on 31 Oct 2021 at https://magmapoetry.com/archive/magma-81-anthropocene/poems/angels-of-the-­ anthropocene/. See also Introduction.

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are part of an interlinked system of patriarchal control and environmental exploitation. A woman who picks and burns hollyhocks (presumably the wronged party in the couple, although the poet leaves us guessing) provokes a detective investigation; the author humorously evokes a future age when damaging plants is a criminal offence. Shifts in tone and pronoun proliferate in this poem. They destabilise what appears at first glance to be a third-person narrative, even developing towards a parody of high-flown ecological lament, complete with Georgian-style capital letters to open each line—‘O hollyhocks of Ile de Ré…/Grow for me again!’ A shift to prose poetry explores gender oppression (‘That time her ovary pinged like an elastic band as he stood over her in the kitchen insisting on one-inch cubes for the beef’ 10), at once an act of domestic oppression and a small contribution to the meat industry’s climate-changing practices. The poem wryly alludes to the individual’s enmeshment in vast climate systems, when the detective ‘swigs the rest of the melted ice from his glass’ (11). The poet deploys Latin binomials and the Oxford English Dictionary in the poem’s sixth section: Alca Rosea, family Malvaceae. ORIGIN: Middle English: from holy + obsolete hock ‘mallow’, of unknown origin. It originally denoted the marsh mallow, which has medicinal uses (hence, perhaps, the use of ‘holy’). (10)

This section of the poem illuminates the poetry to come, as it evokes very different forms of environmental knowledge from the religious etymological roots of the mallow’s holiness: the system of Linnaean classification, which Miller has critiqued in his poetry. The marshy natural habitat of these plants, too, is redolent of landscapes menaced by climate change, since McCarthy Woolf has mentioned ‘boardwalks across the marshes’ (9). Whether the French marshes of Ile de Ré, or the boardwalks of the Thames estuary, all may be menaced by encroaching waves. Climate change hovers like a spectre over the entirety of the poem-sequence ‘The Hollyhocks,’ and it is presented as permeating air, water, and even human bodies. The darker side of ecological relation is that small acts of environmental damage may have far-reaching consequences for Earth’s organic and inorganic systems—here is McCarthy Woolf’s creative engagement with theories of ecological enmeshment, such as Morton’s ecological ‘mesh’ (2010), his concept of ‘hyperobjects’ (2013), and particularly his idea of ‘dark ecology’ (2018), which is ‘ecological awareness, dark-depressing,’ ‘dark-­ uncanny’ but also sometimes humorous and ‘dark-sweet’ (2016, 5).

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Shifting between prose poetry and lineated verse, the poem’s formal fluidity also dramatises breakdowns in narrative that hint at disruptions to the climate, fractures in the characters’ romantic relationships, and the destruction of plant life. However, unexpected forms of connection and relation emerge. ‘A skeleton leaf tattooed around a scar’ (9) is the single line that makes up the poem’s resonant fifth section, suggesting that shared human and nonhuman suffering might eventually lead to healing and resilience in the long term. Here is the ‘scar tissue’ that McCarthy Woolf associates with the Anthropocene (McCarthy Woolf and Reddick, 6) but is not without the possibility of regeneration. The poet ends the poem on the resonant pun ‘leaves’—if human relations are breaking down, organic regrowth may nevertheless occur. McCarthy Woolf’s poetics of relation depicts an intricate network of connections, where strained human relations give way to unexpected inter-species alliances. After all, mallows produce rhizomes. The collection is underpinned by the ‘interbiotic’ relations that McCarthy Woolf emphasises in her poetry; she deploys the lyric to show animals, plants, and humans in profound enmeshment, although such ‘interbiotic’ relations may be unequal or threatened by human activities. She presents modern London as an entangled and intricate mesh of such connections—but power is not evenly distributed between species and people. If birds provided elegiac imagery in McCarthy Woolf’s first book An Aviary of Small Birds, Seasonal Disturbances presents them as either victims or adaptable, urban survivors. In ‘Up on the Hill,’ a character sketch of Streatham Hill with its people and animals, spring arrives unusually early due to climate change—but the birds are nevertheless adapting to human technologies in unexpected ways. The poem begins: Up on the Hill A young Bulgarian who comes to clear the old mattress and carpet out of the bedroom       asks if Spring always arrives so early here? The forsythia’s not out yet so things must be as they should be.       There’s an order to the colours: snowdrop, daffodil yellow, forget me not. (14)

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Indented lines in this columnar poem emphasise signs of climate change and pollution, or situate the text in relation to animal presences and times of day. The time is clearly out of joint, in this poem, and the sudden formal shifts reflect this by disrupting what would otherwise be an orderly layout. The uncanny arrival of spring, the ‘order’ of flower-colours that is at risk of being altered by climate change, the poem’s later evocation of the ‘noise pollution’ of traffic, and the ‘smoke’ of the city are all either symptoms of climatic disruption, or its causes. The most striking animal presences in the poem are the ‘wrens’ that sing at night to be heard above ‘the babble of traffic’ (14), suggesting animal adaptation and survival in spite of 24-hour commerce: the traffic and smoke of the ‘Petrolcene,’ the 24-hour sales of the ‘Capitalocene.’ Geographically, McCarthy Woolf’s poem moves from Rush Common (now a much-reduced green space) south towards Streatham Hill, and these settings serve as a microcosm for considering weighty issues such as dwindling animal habitats and the fossil fuel economy (which enables the uphill flow of a paradoxical ‘river’ of traffic). The speaker of the poem and her companion argue about ‘nothing that matters’; the irony of the piece is that climate change does matter, and when spring arrives early, the reader knows that ‘seasonal disturbances’ are afoot. Complex thematic and imagistic links between poems mirror the way McCarthy Woolf deploys shifts across geographical space. These shifts reveal multifarious connections between places. Migrating birds, adventurous voyagers of the Black Diaspora, and refugees forced to leave their homes, undertake journeys that stitch the collection together. Birds and their flight-ways weave through the collection, and those nocturnal wrens in ‘Up on the Hill’ are followed by ducklings (15), unnamed birds that ‘travel in pairs’ (16), and the eponymous ‘Gulls’ of the next lyric in the collection. Set in the Canary Islands, ‘Gulls’ suggests that human detritus—like the discarded ‘bottle tops’ and ‘socks’ mentioned in ‘Up on the Hill’ (14)—threatens bird life and is a by-product of ‘Capitalocene’ commerce: Gulls Returning to Arrecife after half a lifetime I notice how there are no gulls at the Marina and wonder

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where or if they are now— is this the last, on the prow of a glistening schooner? Inland, at the vast malodorous tip […] (17)

The poem subtly raises issues of eco-cosmpolitanism by suggesting links between the Caribbean, Britain, and the Canary Islands. The mention of a gull perched on a schooner raises echoes of Walcott’s ‘The Schooner Flight’—an ecopoetic link across the Atlantic. Moreover, the setting of Arrecife (a port formerly involved in the notorious ‘triangular trade’ in human beings) suggests that the ‘Capitalocene’ economy, founded on slavery, is a thematic link between this poem and later poems in the collection that consider more recent forced migration. Yet the speaker of this poem is hardly a victim: she is a cosmopolitan traveller, embarking on a journey that sees her discovering the ecological impacts of the ‘Capitalocene.’ The speaker’s visit to Arrecife reveals an absence of gulls in the harbour—itself suggestive of an absence of fish—and over-­consumption leaves only ‘putrid scraps’ for them. There is some suggestion that the gulls’ tenacious ability to survive and capitalise on polluting rubbish is positive, but the main affective impact of this poem is to evoke pity. This 14-line poem resembles a relaxed sonnet, yet half-rhymes so subtle one might blink and miss them suggest a sense of knotty relation and near-disconnect. ‘Kingfisher’ functions as a lyrical companion piece to ‘Gulls,’ and begins with a lyric statement about human grief that later broadens in scale and ecological scope. McCarthy Woolf deploys the Classical myth of Ceyx and Alcyone, who were believed to have transformed into kingfishers. Much as Oswald and Hughes have offered ecologically aware versions of Ovid, she does so to consider portents of climate change. Here is the beginning of the poem: Kingfisher The truth is I’ve a long history of dead birds     and there’s been no cadavers since those first months mourning my baby son, so

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when I find her, at the top of some steps     on a ledge leading to a beach, full of tourists sheltering from the heat under striped ombrelloni, I do what I always do and lean in to take a picture.     I have no idea this fallen star is Halcyon, immortal daughter of Aeolus, keeper of the winds. (22)

Those tourists in the Aeolian Islands, ‘sheltering from the heat’ under ombrelloni, suggest how climate change, and the consumer practices that contribute to it, can be encapsulated by looking at a single, local manifestation. The highly wrought metaphor ‘fallen star’ recalls Petit’s method of celebrating wild creatures by placing them in the firmament, yet it comes after a down-to-earth, realistic glimpse of contemporary society’s fascination with visual images (the photograph of the dead bird). Deploying an expanding scalar and temporal lens, McCarthy Woolf relates what has happened since Ovid wrote of the days when the god of the winds was fabled to calm winter storms, so that Alcyone’s chicks would survive: ‘Now, even in summer, the crowded boats capsize [….] There are no Halcyon Days; the sea itself is dying’ (23). McCarthy Woolf’s poem is painfully aware that the Mediterranean is the site of perilous sea-crossings for refugees from North Africa and Syria, and repeated hints—the kingfisher ‘out of place,’ the crowded boats—consider how climate change kills other species and drives forced migration among humans. That last half-line, ‘the sea itself is dying,’ expands the poem’s scalar ambit and elegiac impulse, to include the entire planet’s oceans. The human cost of climate change hangs heavily on the lyric poems in the book. As McCarthy Woolf remarked in the discussion with Bury, ‘Climate change is so interlinked to stories of war and migration’ (McCarthy Woolf and Bury, 22). ‘To Dover from Calais’ dramatises a fleeting encounter with those fleeing conflict, in areas where risks are compounded by the impacts of climate change: To Dover from Calais After midnight we drive through Sangatte on the outskirts, where teenagers rush to the tunnel. In the big-cat gleam of our headlamps the boys pause for a heartbeat—disappear in a flash.

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If you’re not really a Syrian is it safer in the Congo, or Afghanistan? [….] Two ferrymen tell me how they feel okay because they pull up the bridge and sail away. It’s only a joke if it’s funny so I don’t laugh when at ‘they weren’t exactly invited.’ (20)

A narrative put forward by politicians including Barack Obama, and by Amitav Ghosh in the literary sphere (144), is that the Syrian refugee crisis is linked to climate change. This has since been debated,9 although drought mitigation in Syria, food security in the D-R Congo and drought, and flood risk management in Afghanistan are indeed areas where the United Nations’ Development Programme is focusing its climate change adaptation efforts.10 McCarthy Woolf’s sardonic final couplets critique racist attitudes in western society; the poet underscores the irony not only of military interventions such as the prolonged conflict between the USA and Afghanistan, but also the west’s role in producing carbon dioxide emissions (Ghosh, 135) and its ‘armed lifeboat’ approach to climate change migration (143). The ferrymen who ‘pull up the bridge and sail away’ recall Chakrabarty’s discussion about whether the rich will have access to lifeboats as climate change worsens (Chakrabarty 2016, 108). Pointed and epigrammatic, McCarthy Woolf’s rhyming of ‘okay’ and ‘away’ takes aim at the white men’s privileged position as gatekeepers of the ‘armed lifeboat.’ 9  Lina Eklund and Darcy Thompson. ‘Is Syria really a “climate war”? We examined the links between drought, migration and conflict.’ The Conversation, 21 July 2017. Web. 24th August 2020. https://theconversation.com/is-syria-really-a-climate-war-we-examined-the-­ links-between-drought-migration-and-conflict-80110. Jan Selby, Omar Dahi, Christiane Frölich and Mike Hulme. ‘Climate change and the Syrian war revisited.’ Political Geography 60 (2017): 232–244. 10  United Nations Development Programme, Climate Change Adaptation. ‘Syria’s Second National Communication: In Progress.’ 2021. Web. Accessed 24.06.21. https://www. adaptation-­undp.org/projects/syrias-second-national-communication-progress. https:// www.adaptation-undp.org/explore/middle-africa/democratic-republic-congo, ‘Afghanistan launches US$71 million initiative to prepare rural communities for climate change.’ 2017. Web. Accessed 24.06.21. https://www.adaptation-undp.org/afghanistanlaunches-us71-million-initiative-prepare-rural-communities-climate-change

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The poem ‘Seasonal Disturbances’ draws readerly attention, as it is the collection’s title poem. The first line deploys surprise tactics to bring the reader up short: ‘On the night of the hurricane/I slept right through it,’ an artfully placed line break underscoring the improbability of sleeping through such a powerful climatic event. This poem evokes a London imperilled by advanced climate change, where hurricanes (more familiar from Caribbean poetry, such as Walcott’s Omeros) cross the Atlantic. The adjective ‘ovenish’ to describe the wind is an eye-catching coinage apt for this urban setting, suggesting that climate change is so all-pervasive that it brings disrupted global weather-systems into the intimate space of everyday life, in western Europe. McCarthy Woolf’s evocation of the mundane events of a disrupted journey to work also makes the vast problem of the climate emergency as personal and intimate as possible. McCarthy Woolf supplied two drafts of the poem for this monograph, and they illuminate the aesthetic, formal, and thematic decisions she made: Draft A Seasonal Disturbances On the night of the hurricane I slept right through it, then got up while it was still dark and went to work, wondering why the streets were empty and there were no cars on the road. The wind was ovenish and I made it to Paddington. All the connections were running when others were cancelled and I knew something wasn’t right. It was blowy, the air was unseasonally warm and I hated how I was wasting my youth, even then, when I was in it. I knew this path was wrong, but I kept on fluttering down it, like a piece of paper that was creased but blank, waiting to be filled with my own life, for my own words that didn’t know how to arrive. My train was the only train running, so I got on, made my way in to the office where everyone else was white and the two typesetters I managed always queried my edits and all along the way looking

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out of the window from the empty carriage I could see trees blown over, their roots curling up into the air. Draft B Seasonal Disturbances      On the night of the hurricane I slept right through it, then got up while it was still dark and went to work, wondering why the streets were empty and there were no cars on the road. The wind was ovenish and I made it to Paddington. All my connections were running when others were cancelled and I knew something wasn’t right. It was blowy, the air was unseasonally warm and I hated how I was wasting my youth, even then when I was in it. I knew this path was wrong, but I kept on fluttering down it. My train was the only train running so I got on, made my way into the office where everyone else was white and the two typesetters I managed always queried my edits and all along the way, looking out of the window from the empty carriage, I could see trees blown over, their roots curling into the air.11

The changes that the poet makes at draft level show the way she alters the poem to heighten both the personal impacts of climate change, and the sense of unexpected links and uncanny disconnections that it causes. Between Draft A and Draft B, ‘the connections’ is changed to ‘my connections,’ which further personalises the scenario and suggests a networked sense of transport links, places, climate systems, and people. The poet changes the line back to ‘the connections’ in the published version (McCarthy Woolf, 61), and this encourages the reader to consider ‘connections’ and disconnect in general: the broken links of climatic 11  Karen McCarthy Woolf. Word processed drafts of ‘Seasonal Disturbances,’ sent to the author on 29.07.2021. My labelling.

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disruption that feature in the background of so much of this collection, and the unexpected alliances that form between people, animals, and plants in these poems. The personal, the literary, and the arboreal combine in Draft A: ‘like a piece of paper/that was creased but blank, waiting/to be filled with my own life, for my own/words that didn’t know how to arrive.’ An intricate network of images links the speaker’s frustration at literary ambitions that are not yet coming to fruition, with the mundane presence of windblown paper litter: one of the Anthropocene’s more ephemeral relics. ‘Seasonal Disturbances’ also sets up a contrast between drawing a (literary) blank, and acts of writing that are achieved through connections across languages, cultures, and the species boundary. The later poem ‘Horse Chestnut II: A Coupling,’ analysed below, features a Japanese poet’s notebook and a piece of loose paper printed by the Black Diasporan woman speaker. As McCarthy Woolf redrafts the poem, she refines the longer, conversational sentences of the first draft quoted here, paring down the meaning of the lines to their essence. The result is that the final lines of the published poem gather momentum in a long sentence that heaps up clause after clause, culminating in McCarthy Woolf’s resonant final image of the uprooted trees. These trees are a realistic image for the severe storms of climate change—witness what Glissant writes about ‘Uprooted coconut palms’ (1997, 121). Yet they also symbolise the broken connections that recur thematically throughout the collection, suggesting the speaker’s sense of being out of place. It is no coincidence that McCarthy Woolf mentions racism in the publishing industry and uprooted trees in the same sentence. If Amitav Ghosh and others have argued that climate change is a racist issue, McCarthy Woolf revises the image of roots that earlier theorists of the Black Atlantic have put forward (e.g. Gilroy 190). McCarthy Woolf’s title poem draws out the ecological dimensions of both Gilroy’s roots and routes; this microcosmic image of uprooted trees suggests the millions of people uprooted by the trans-Atlantic trade and the millions more at risk of displacement because of climate change. However, roots, rhizomes, and trees will offer comfort and connection later in the book; more on that later. eXXpedition enabled McCarthy Woolf to experience a very different form of voyage from the painful ‘routes’ of exile and diaspora: a scientific journey of discovery. The uncanny aspect of ecological relation is that human impacts spread and are pervasive, often becoming global problems. When considering the ‘holistic ecology of water,’ McCarthy Woolf’s

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poetry remains acutely aware of what is being done to aquatic ecosystems. A series of three lyric poems considers this. The first, ‘& Because,’ presents everyday vignettes of urban living, but the poem ends with a view of vast environmental problems: & because water is no longer sacred, our rivers run like sores and mountain streams are bottled, sold, binned then spun into the gyres of the Pacific. (34)

If Eliot’s nymphs were departed and Alice Oswald’s Dunt was severely damaged, McCarthy Woolf shows rivers that are entirely desecrated—the image of ‘sores’ presenting environmental damage in a similarly visceral, bodily way to the ‘scar tissue’ image that she uses to describe the Anthropocene. The ‘Capitalocene’ exploitation of mountain streams leads to a major problem that will leave its traces for thousands of years: plastic pollution. With the ‘gyres of the Pacific,’ McCarthy Woolf contemplates the Pacific garbage patch, as Kei Miller did in his poetic engagement with rubber ducks—but with the difference that her poem has an elegiac tone that lacks the playfulness that Miller brings to the subject. Fragmentary, with each stanza loosely linked to the previous one by an ampersand and lacking a final punctuation mark, ‘& Because’ suggests fleeting moments of disconnection, when relation is tenuous. The final stanza, quoted above, takes an ironic look at the water cycle, and considers that the uncanny side of ecological interconnection is the pervasiveness of disturbing human impacts. The environmental impacts of the ‘Plasticene’ are woven through the collection, from the ‘polystyrene trays of flesh’ in ‘Of Ownership,’ a golden shovel after Joy Harjo (48), to the speaker’s guilt at taking a straw (‘I said yes without thinking to the plastic/straw with ridges that bend’ in ‘Every new construction’ (63)). Yet it is ‘The Island’ that most clearly considers both plastic pollution and the (here, strained) relations between men and women. The poem, a 14-line loose sonnet, concludes with the following couplets: The Island Everything resembles something else when light refracts: translucent

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medusas turn into puffball plastic bags as I soar through the blue gazing down on schools of little fish. You say the moon touches the sea like a stone when you skim it. A stone is a ball of carbon mozzarella over lunch. In lieu of the volcano a row flares up. Obsidian glitters against white walls. (75)

The ‘glitter’ of the ‘Capitalocene’—a holiday in a setting that suggests Lanzarote, where ‘Gulls’ was set—rubs off to reveal an ocean contaminated by plastic bags. Like Miller’s earthquakes, geological events evoke the faultlines of environmental injustice and human inequality, specifically racism and sexism. The poem’s narrative of a relationship under strain also deploys visual imagery to suggest a chthonic eruption of the repressed— Lanzarote’s past associations with the triangular trade and the ‘Plantationocene.’ One could read the dark glitter of obsidian against white walls through the lens of Yusoff’s black Anthropocenes, as a powerful eruption of resistance to white narratives of extraction and exploitation. (Obsidian is both a volcanic rock, and a foundation to support black poets based in Britain, established by poet Nick Makoha.)12

The Science of Life and the Life of Anthropocene Science If the concept of the Anthropocene was initially criticised for being male-­ dominated and white-dominated,13 McCarthy Woolf’s long sequence The Science of Life playfully subverts these biases. The scientific establishment was the preserve of men for many centuries (Haraway 1991; Merchant 1980), and The Science of Life examines its gendered and racial biases in detail. The author’s participation in eXXpedition is a cultural intervention that suggests ways of working against such biases, and The Science of Life 12  Collaborative work from the Obsidian Foundation can be read in Magma Obsidian 82 (spring 2022). 13  See Kate Raworth, Donna Haraway 2016, and Kathryn Yusoff 2018.

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sequence was one result of this collaboration. McCarthy Woolf describes The Science of Life as a ‘found-sonnet sequence’ taken from ‘the encyclopaedia of the same name by H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley and G. P. Wells’ (2017, 81). In an interview, she elaborates on her use of the encyclopaedia, and the tension between its prescient environmental ideas and its backward racism: ‘it was written in 1929, and in some ways it’s ­ecologically very forward-thinking—but at the same time there’s this really dodgy eugenics science, because people were obsessed with overpopulation’ (McCarthy Woolf and Reddick, 5). The third poem in the collection and the first in this sequence, ‘The Science of Life 492,’ takes aim at Hooker and Wells’s eugenics and their criticisms of overpopulation, while examining the ecological issues with which the biologists engage. The poem mocks ‘innumerable plump and hideous/landfolk’ who are ‘rich’ (13), highlighting ‘Capitalocene’ overconsumption and implying that wealthy consumers are more culpable for extinction, climate change, and pressure on natural resources than voyagers or migrants (those whom Glissant might term ‘errant’). McCarthy Woolf reshapes and repurposes the encyclopaedia for our current age of extinction: no birds nesting or singing in the trees; no bellowing, roaring or squeaking savage or small; no caterpillars to eat the leaves; no bees or butterflies; no creatures that do more than crawl.

The poem exposes broken relations with nonhuman others; the full rhymes add a nursery-rhyme tone that lends postmodern absurdity and satirical bite. The poem interrogates and reformulates the racist and anthropocentric connotations of the word ‘savage,’ ironising its human-­centred and Eurocentric connotations by showing how impoverished a planet without birds, caterpillars, or bees would be. Later in the poem, the elevated tone of the ode, too, is open to parody and subversion. The poet samples and fragments the discourse of white male scientists in order to undermine and appropriate it: *An Ode     Another spasm    was being prepared     and the climate began     to change. (McCarthy Woolf 2017, 13)

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Huxley, Wells, and Wells’s text is subjected to outright breakdown, a formal technique that can be read as mirroring broken webs of life, and what is often termed ‘climate breakdown.’ The Science of Life encyclopaedia was written far earlier than major thresholds in scientific awareness of climate change, and McCarthy Woolf’s ironic ode deploys formal techniques such as decoupage to remodel the sonnet for an age that urgently demands engagement with the climate crisis. The lacunae in this poem evoke the difficulty of discussing climate change, which political discourse often fails to address adequately.14 Yet poetry may offer the formal flexibility to attempt to grapple with this (often unspeakable) topic (see Chap. 2), which some writers see as difficult to apprehend through forms such as traditional literary fiction (Ghosh 2016). The lack of a (stable) lyric voice, the disjointed form that McCarthy Woolf deploys, the gaps and erasures, and the stark words that remain highlight this colossal problem that had begun at the time of The Science of Life, but which remained to be perceived by scientists. Breaking and remaking a scientific text that was nearly 90 years old by the time she published her collection, McCarthy Woolf suggests that climate change can be read into publications that long predate advances in scientific understanding of human impacts on the climate. Contemporary understanding of climate change represents a ‘spasm,’ a rupture in human thinking—a fundamental challenge to older forms of scientific understanding and writing. ‘Horse Chestnut I—A Coupling’ subverts a postscript to a letter that Charles Darwin wrote to J. D. Hooker in 1860. Humorous and wry, this ‘coupling’ says as much about (human) sexuality and gender as it does about pollination. Its flourishing sensuality is a humorous affront to Victorian attitudes to sexuality. McCarthy Woolf discusses the ‘coupling,’ a poetic form that she invented, as a process designed ‘to subvert or extend what the original writer was saying.’ The process aimed to ‘push the poem from a botanical to a more erotic vocabulary.’ McCarthy Woolf comments on the playfulness of the process, and the way the coupling’s formal hybridity evokes her experience ‘as a Jamaican-English hybrid Londoner’ 14  Fiona Moore, Eileen Pun, and Matt Howard’s editorial to Magma’s Climate Change Issue (Magma, 72, autumn 2018) argues that poetry must ‘reflect our inadequate [political] response’ (to climate change), as it is able to ‘say the unsayable, address what’s not visible and observe what is, make stories about where we stand, find connections, tell it slant, make it new’ (Magma, 72 (autumn 2018) 5).

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(2014–2015, 49). McCarthy Woolf alternates Darwin’s words with her own, which are presented in italics: So that on all my trees these trees, my roots, these roots attest there has been a gigantic crop of quite useless ideas. & O, how intoxicating the air, as male flowers, with millions of pollen-grains wasted, open, as the male, he flowers, swollen and unsated for there is not a female flower nearly open.— For there is not a female or a flower so open. (2017, 46)

Darwin’s original phrase ‘a gigantic crop of quite useless male flowers’ is parodied as ‘useless/ideas’—the implication being that the patriarchal, western-centred arguments of Victorian male biologists also had their useless aspects. ‘Roots’ suggest the African ‘roots’ of the Black Diaspora, but also Glissant’s intricate, rhizomatic concept of relation, which can be extended to encompass humans and nonhumans alike. This series of interventionist poems pulls the beards of Darwin and Hooker, Huxley, and the Wellses—and by extension, challenges  the masculinist and white-­ dominated history of western scientific enquiry. McCarthy Woolf added an elegiac element to the poem between its first publication in Mslexia women’s journal in 2015, and its appearance in the collection. She noted in Mslexia that ‘the experience of writing about climate change is also connected to the experience of processing loss.’ The first version of the poem that she published contained the line: ‘plenty of hermaphrodite flowers with pistils/in abundance, pert yet’ (2014–2015, 49, original italics). The collected version reads: ‘in abundance, asphodels forever pulsing, pert yet’ (46). The addition of asphodels adds a note of elegiac symbolism in a poem that is otherwise highly sensual: these are the flowers of the underworld in The Odyssey (Homer, trans. Powell, 227). This subtle nod to Homer creates an intricate web of thematic links between voyages, memory, and the ecological elegy. McCarthy Woolf’s allusions to The Odyssey enter a conversation among contemporary poets who are interested in the way ecopoetry and ecopoetics can help us to reread and reinvent historical, canonical texts.

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The second ‘coupling’ in the collection revisits the horse chestnut tree, a further rooty, rhizomatic link that meshes the collection together. This ‘coupling’ responds to a translation of Matsuo Basho’s seventeenth-­ century spiritual travelogue The Narrow Road to the Deep North. If ‘Horse Chestnut I’ aimed to ‘subvert’ Darwin and Hooker, ‘Horse Chestnut II’ aims to ‘extend’ what Bashō writes (McCarthy Woolf 2014–2015, 49): I took a piece of paper from I tore a piece of paper from my bag, and wrote as follows: my book     ‘The chestnut is a holy tree    ‘A holy tree is the chestnut for the Chinese ideograph for chestnut, its seed scattered and brown is Tree placed directly below West. (McCarthy Woolf 2017, 76–77)

McCarthy Woolf’s concept of inter-species relation gains planetary aspects in this poem. An intertextual dialogue between poets ancient and modern, western and eastern, centres upon the tree, much as the rhizomatic structure of Seasonal Disturbances is undergirded by the branches of the two chestnut trees that feature in the ‘couplings.’ The scattered brown seed of the horse chestnut tree alludes to the origins of the word ‘diaspora,’ which connotes the spreading of seed (OED). If the earlier coupling ‘Horse Chestnut I’ has a parodic and subversive tone, this later ‘coupling’ evokes intertextual affiliation and ecopoetic relation via repetition and verbal echoes. McCarthy Woolf’s intertextuality suggests an alternative ecopoetic canon that draws not on western classics such as Wordsworth or Thoreau, but on Bashō’s seventeenth-century Japanese haibun—itself a hybrid form that mixes haiku with prose. The symmetrical reflections in ‘I took a piece of paper from/I tore a piece of paper from’ and ‘The chestnut is a holy tree,/A holy tree is the chestnut’ link Earth’s western and eastern hemispheres, drawing attention to the materiality of the written page and to the cultural importance of the tree from which it is created. (There is also a verbal echo of the ‘holy’ hollyhocks that began the collection—a rhizomatic link between people and plants, and indeed between

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plant-­poems in the collection.) The idea of the chestnut as ‘my love’ in the twelfth line, and the final line ‘My support,’ suggests forms of mutual reliance and affection between species, an enmeshed network of relations that is at once personal and planetary.

A ‘Holistic Ecology of Water’ McCarthy Woolf’s long sequence ‘On the Thames’ flows through the entire book. Comprising 21 out of the book’s 60 poems, the poet highlights this episodic sequence in a way that mimics the Thames’s centrality to London and its importance as an artery of global migration and mobility—not to mention an urban wildlife habitat. Deploying large lacunae, and the combination of poetry and prose that characterises the Japanese zuihitsu, the sequence draws readerly attention via its visual contrast with the more formally tight and structured poems in the collection. The poem includes intertextual references to The Pillow Book, by Japanese courtier Sei Shōnagon (born around 965). (Questions remain about Shōnagon’s life, her authorship of The Pillow Book, and the order in which she structured the book (Shōnagon trans. Morris, x)). In The Pillow Book, one reads, ‘my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects’ (Shōnagon trans. Morris, viii)—and McCarthy Woolf’s re-interpretation of the zuihitsu also contains such observations. Her quotation of Shōnagon’s work can also be viewed as developing a cosmopolitan, feminist interpretation of historical works that could be classed as early forerunners of ecopoetry. Shōnagon’s gender is important, because even diverse anthologies of international poets that frame canonical texts as ecopoems may remain male-dominated. All of the Classical Chinese poets whose work opens Earth Shattering: Ecopoems are men (Astley 2007, 21–4). McCarthy Woolf comments on gender, rivers, and her intertextual response to Shōnagon: It is very much a woman’s voice, and what happened as a result of her book was that all the male poets wanted to write zuihitsus. They used to pretend to be women to write them! I love that. I love the fact that it was written by a scrolling brush as well, so the idea of the water and of flow appealed to me. That concept runs through my book like a river, like a watery backbone. For me, that gives a fluidity to the lyric. One of the things that I was really thinking about, quite profoundly, was: what is the impact of being on, in, or near water? (McCarthy Woolf and Reddick, 4–5)

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The poem was written while the author was ‘physically lying on a barge in the middle of the Thames,’ where she was ‘always moving’ (McCarthy Woolf and Reddick, 5). The sequence forms the collection’s ‘watery spine’ (McCarthy Woolf and Reddick, 4), a body of water that evokes relations between boat-dwellers and birds, climate change and tides, humans and the moon. ‘Conversation, with Water’ quotes The Pillow Book as an ancient source-­ text that anticipates contemporary writing about animal ethics and climate change: I open The Pillow Book on p. 23 to [22] list of dispiriting things: a dog howling in the middle of the day. The sight in spring of a trap for catching winter fish. Robes in the plum/pink combination when it’s now the third or fourth month…           The pull of the tide is the pull of the moon. an oxkeeper whose ox has died. A birthing hut where the baby has died. (McCarthy Woolf 2017, 21)

Here, power hierarchies between humans and nonhumans are examined— a dog howling during the day might be evidence of abuse, while the oxkeeper whose ox has died is evidence of further broken connections between humans and nonhumans. Yet out of season fish traps, and plum-­ blossom robes late in the year, sound an ominous note after McCarthy Woolf has mentioned the untimely emergence of spring flowers in ‘Up on the Hill’ (14). Shōnagon’s text is repurposed for its resonance with the ‘seasonal disturbances’ that provide a focal point for much of the collection. While the tidal connection between speaker, boat, and moon presents a relational, vast-scale conception of ecological links, the last line on this page, ‘A birthing hut where the baby has died,’ links to McCarthy Woolf’s first collection of elegies for a son who died in childbirth—but in the context of her exploration of ecological grief, this line evokes issues such as the Anthropocene’s deep anxieties about the impacts of climate change on future lives. McCarthy Woolf’s zuihitsu ‘Conversation, with Water’ broadens, ecologises, and further internationalises an important literary trope for authors of the Black Diaspora who write in Britain. Encounters with the Thames are the subject of life-writing, poetry, and essays ranging from Olaudah Equiano’s narrative of being pushed into the river (1789), to Fred D’Aguiar’s poetry collection British Subjects (1993), and Caryl Phillips’s

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2012 film and 2013 essay15 exploring the Thames through the experiences of the Windrush generation. McCarthy Woolf’s work builds on these antecedents through ecologically aware re-interpretations of diasporan voyages, and an open-ended, relational depiction of the human subject. Glissant’s traumatic ‘fibril’ of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is reworked into a more healing, generative form of relation: an umbilical or filial connection between women and water. It is undeniable that river-journeys, as described by Glissant (1997, 7), are crucially important for writers of the African Diaspora, as part of the traumatic voyage to the Americas; they are also important to the so-called Windrush Generation, more thoroughly explored in McCarthy Woolf’s ‘Voyage’ (McCarthy Woolf 2017, 56). Yet McCarthy Woolf’s ‘On the Thames’ sequence describes the experience of staying still, rather than voyaging: ‘Although it’s obvious, the experience is all about staying in the same place while strong currents rush to their destination’ (31), a sense of ecological relation between speaker and place that is nevertheless cognisant of the expansive movements of Earth’s river-­ systems. The sequence borrows from Japanese source-texts, mentioning Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (38, 72) and businessman and author Masaru Emoto’s pseudoscientific claims that human emotions could affect water molecules (55, 65). This eclectic, cosmopolitan, and richly intertextual method defies earlier critics’ attempts to stereotype writers of colour by reading them only with reference to issues of (uncomplicated) identity. Instead, McCarthy Woolf’s work creates ecological, literary, and human links that are local, international, and relational—and also highly allusive, opening cosmopolitan and ecological possibilities for poetry that deploys modernist and postmodern methods. McCarthy Woolf has commented on how hybridity functions in her work—‘the sense of cultural hybridity in me is played out in poetic form’ (McCarthy Woolf and Reddick, 3)—and this deployment of poetic form opens her poetry out beyond readings that might stress a unified, stereotyped Black British identity, towards hybridity as a poetic process. She considers the middle of the river itself, in her poetry, to be a hybrid space: ‘It was a space that was not definitively in the north or south, but a hybrid space: one of those liminal spaces that I’ve always been interested in. Water and liminality connect my book formally as well as thematically’ (McCarthy Woolf and Reddick, 5). This sense of 15  Caryl Phillips, ‘A Bend in the River’, in A London Address: The Artangel Essays, ed. by Granta Books (London: Granta, 2013), pp. 75–81.

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hybridity gives rise to a sense of relation between river and speaker. Lines such as ‘I think of you, Dear River, as female’ (2017, 44) create multiple scales of relation between human beings and far vaster systems, from solar system to river-system. Hybridity—human and more-than-human—offers ways of making kin that resonate with Donna Haraway’s call to connect with other species in the ‘Chthulucene.’ Such ways of ‘making kin’ are described as familial in McCarthy Woolf’s ‘Conversation, with Water’: The closest is lying with my head in my mother’s lap,       the thickness of the paint, bottle green and grey— In reality I give thanks for the barrier, your reinforced banks. There’s something in spreading yourself thin. (42)

Here is a section of the zuihitsu that considers the possibilities of ‘making kin’: the speaker does not explain whether contact with the barge, or the river, or both, is similar to lying with her head in her mother’s lap. Suggesting Galleymore’s work on anthropomorphism as capable of highlighting difference as well as similarity, though, this fragment of the zuihitsu presents making kin as complex and mediated by technology. The speaker brings herself up short, the pronounced indentation of the second line creating a pause in the text. This formal effect draws our eye to the paint on the barge that partly unsettles any reading of the relationship between river and woman as organic and uncomplicated. There is an attempt to make kin with the river, but also a reminder that the river itself is a hybrid artefact—the ‘barrier’ and ‘reinforced banks’ are evidence of extensive human modification. Moreover, the Thames barrier now defends the city against the rising seas of climate change, while extreme weather threatens to cause flooding from upstream. Sledmere and Williams have argued that ‘human activity is now materially determining the constituent parts of the earth’ (13), and poetry of the Anthropocene responds to this formally. McCarthy Woolf’s hybrid zuihitsu, between poetry and prose, resonates with the Anthropocene’s unsettling of western notions of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’: ‘Culture has bored into nature; nature has become culture. Where are our categories now?’ (13). McCarthy Woolf’s posthuman, hybrid reshaping of the lyric means that the narrative voice is at times unstable and wryly uncertain:

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O River, here I am, riding on your back in a little dinghy they call a rib. It’s like clinging to a grizzly by the scruff of the neck. Who knows what the water might shake out of me. I confess       must be nautical in origin. (27)

This section of the zuihitsu begins in a way that suggests a stable lyric speaker, with a high-flown address to the river that reworks the ode. ‘Who knows what the water might shake out of me’ suggests a theme of lyric contemplation, while ‘I confess’ prepares the reader for a switch to a confessional mode. Yet the author deploys poetic form to subvert readerly expectations here. The long caesura in the middle of the last line of this section takes the place of pronouns, suggesting an indeterminate speaker who may be human, nonhuman, or hybrid. Here is a human presence that is liquid and unfixed, adding a ‘fluidity to the lyric’ (McCarthy Woolf and Reddick, 4)—a depiction of the river that is posthuman and hybrid. Cohabitation and kinship between species are a crucial focus of McCarthy Woolf’s zuihitsu—an ‘interbiotic’ (McCarthy Woolf and Bury, 23) web of connections that resonates with Morton’s ‘ecological thought’ and Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene.’ The sentence, ‘I have a life jacket and am prepared to swim,’ leads to a long lacuna of white space on the page, followed by, ‘It’s true, there’s a lot of weather here and I also saw a bird with a neck bent like a crowbar perched on top of an industrial winch, scanning for eels’ (24). The lacuna between these sections of the zuihitsu suggests what remains unsaid: the unspeakable problem of climate change, an important facet of what Morton terms the ‘dark-uncanny’ aspects of dark ecology. In the context of the rest of the collection, the reader knows that the pause in the text is a pause for thought about climate change refugees who do not have life jackets, and that ‘a lot of weather’ is an ironic euphemism for major climatic disruption. McCarthy Woolf brings the vocabulary of manual tools and construction into a birdwatching scene, resonating with the way the Anthropocene serves as an uncanny reminder of the baffling enmeshment of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (Sledmere and Williams, 13). (By way of comparison, McCarthy Woolf’s collision of categories makes the fishing scene in Ted Hughes’s poem ‘A Cormorant’ look positively bucolic (CPH, 650–1)). Urban wildlife exemplifies the stubborn will to survive the ‘Capitalocene’ that builds the city, a glimpse of multi-­ species coexistence despite the ‘Anthropocene extinction.’ If wild birds are presented as under threat in the lyric poems ‘Kingfisher’ and ‘Gulls,’ the

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zuihitsu enables McCarthy Woolf to consider intricate and relational forms of mutual survival between birds and human beings. Scale variance, too, sets London’s wildlife in a broader, global context: On the sixth day of the fifth month when the moon is godknowswhere: a pair of Canada geese and four goslings nudge at stones to dislodge worms in the mud at low tide, the chicks orbiting the mother. The river swallows time as a whale swallows plankton, although plankton, we now know, is no longer a certainty. (60)

McCarthy Woolf’s method of reckoning months suggests Shōnagon’s deployment of the lunar calendar, although the absence of a visible moon might suggest that in the Anthropocene, people’s sense of connection to such natural cycles is diminished. The verb ‘orbiting’ is deployed to set the family of geese against a backdrop of much vaster scalar and spatial processes, while the idea of the river swallowing ‘time’ evokes the Anthropocene as an epoch ‘marked by haunted time’ (Farrier 2014, 1). Yet McCarthy Woolf’s evocation of the whale suggests that such ‘haunted time’ is as organic as it is lithic, as scholars such as Alaimo have cautioned (2017). Threats to species ranging from microscopic plankton to whales resonate with the work on Anthropocene oceans discussed in Chap. 5, evoking the Earth-wide intricacies of the water cycle and the menaces it faces. Throughout the zuihitsu, expansive, horizontal lines create a visual suggestion of lapping water. They often evoke ecological forms of enmeshment and relation, offering a specifically aquatic and fluvial perspective on Glissant’s idea of relation. However, the interruptions to the zuihitsu and the large white spaces on the page suggest silences, depths, things left unsaid: the notorious difficulty of discussing climate change, anxieties about environmental futures, and the  broken connections  that are as important to  the sequence as entanglement and enmeshment. ‘Conversation, with Water’ alternates between showing the closeness of relations between humans and nonhumans, human dependence on rivers and oceans, and an awareness that they are suffering from artificial impacts—which in turn threaten humans themselves. The forms of relation considered in Seasonal Disturbances include profound, symbiotic linkages: river as mother; man as tree; roots, routes, and seeds of the Black Diaspora. The book suggests ways of expanding

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Glissant’s fibrillar, rhizomatic concept of relation to include a closer focus on connections between nonhumans and humans, to consider an (often fragmentary and tentative) poetics of ‘“(eco-)relation”’ (Jana Evans Braziel, 112) that presents complex connection between local and planetary issues. This is played out poetically via formal and thematic links between poems and poem-sequences. Intertextual allusions draw out the ecological dimensions of African American, Native American, and Japanese texts, while parodying and challenging Eurocentric, patriarchal science. McCarthy Woolf’s poetry suggests an idea of the Anthropocene that is cognisant of the interconnected artificial and natural meshes and networks that hold London in relation to the rest of what Anna Tsing calls our ‘damaged planet.’ And in McCarthy Woolf’s work, the marks of this damage are deep: the ‘scar tissue’ of the Anthropocene is manifest in broken links, long lacunae, and interruptions to the fluid zuihitsu. Poetic forms such as the ‘coupling’ develop a poetics of hybridity, but the poems are thematically preoccupied with the gross inequalities of the ‘Capitalocene,’ the racist legacies of the ‘Plantationocene,’ the gendered ravages of the ‘Manthropocene,’ the stark inequalities that climate change threatens to worsen. She develops an ‘interbiotic’ picture of London where inter-­ species alliances, and connections between women and water, may arise, in spite of global systems of environmental degradation, capitalist depredation, and the menace of climate change. ‘Ten Minutes After/the Tide’: Collaboration and ‘Activism of the Heart’ The beauty of unexpected relations between humans and other species, and an awareness of the ‘scar tissue’ that severed relations leave behind: here is a dilemma that poetry from the Anthropocene must grapple with. Seasonal Disturbances forms part of several projects in which the author seeks to create wider impacts with her poetry, which she describes as having inherently political themes (‘Green Roots, Brown Shoots’). Her participation in eXXpedition is a quiet, but nevertheless important, way of drawing further attention to the vast problem of ocean plastics. This is active participation in the process of creating multidisciplinary knowledge about problems associated with the Anthropocene. McCarthy Woolf has spoken about art and activism in an interview:

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Thinking of the Anthropocene, we are at this point where every artist has to engage with environmental issues. There’s a huge amount of fun and joy in creating and making the work, and that’s not to say that the work has to be overtly political, but I think there is a political purpose to doing it. For me, it’s about connecting to people’s feelings. That’s what poetry can do. That’s not to say that other art forms can’t do that too, but something that poets want to do in poetry is to make people feel. And if they feel differently, they might think differently. This is what I term an “activism of the heart.” (McCarthy Woolf and Reddick, 2–3)

Yet McCarthy Woolf’s ‘activism of the heart’ goes beyond making her own politically aware work: it actively contributes to the transdisciplinary dialogue in which writers, artists, and scientists are participating. McCarthy Woolf curated a project for young poets in association with Cape Farewell, an arts organisation that brings creative practitioners and climate change scientists into conversation. Such collaborative work deconstructs the often hierarchical way those in the ‘hard’ sciences sometimes view other forms of environmental knowledge. (Witness geologists Autin and Holbrook’s dismissal of other disciplines’ understanding of the Anthropocene as ‘pop culture’—see Chap. 2). Such collaborations also create a collective—and indeed relational—way of constructing and sharing knowledge about the Anthropocene. They suggest alternatives to the gendered and racialised problems with the sciences that McCarthy Woolf parodies in ‘The Science of Life’ sequence. When McCarthy Woolf worked with young poets for Cape Farewell, she wrote to her mentees: Now, as climate change accelerates and we begin to feel its effects with more extreme weather conditions, the destruction of natural habitats and extinction of species, writing about what’s happening feels even more important. I don’t know if poetry or art can change the world, but I do know it can change the way we think about the world and hopefully, by extension, how we live in it.   Cape Farewell brings artists and scientists together to think about climate science creatively.16

McCarthy Woolf’s method involved ‘inviting participants to add their poems to the larger conversation on climate change and what we as 16  Karen McCarthy Woolf. ‘My Method.’ Cape Farewell SWITCH: Youth Poetics project. https://www.capefarewell.com/switch/karen-mccarthy-woolf-2/

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individuals can do about it.’17 The young poets received images from Cape Farewell’s photographers, sculptors, and video artists to spark inspiration. Passing on the baton to a younger generation of ecopoets suggests a form of inter-generational environmental justice—and, one could say, poetic justice. Since the youth climate strike movement has focused so much public attention on human alterations to the climate, this is a small-scale but meaningful way to create a more collective and inclusive understanding of writing and climate change, and to foster further interest in climate change poetry among those who will suffer worse effects than their parents. McCarthy Woolf’s work with Cape Farewell led to an invitation to collaborate with geologists and environmental scientists. Creative work after a collaborative discussion event led to McCarthy Woolf’s new, commissioned poem for Magma journal’s Anthropocene Issue, which was published in 2021. In a spirit of interdisciplinary curiosity, eight poets met four geologists and two environmental engineers at an online discussion that took place in the depths of a COVID-19 lockdown in February 2021. The poets were encouraged to write poems on the theme of the Anthropocene, and they had free rein to use as much or as little information from the discussion as they wished. Geologists showed the group fossil specimens, and poets showed crystals that they owned. Both poets and scientists shared poems that they had written, and two of the geologists had work published in Magma as a result of the collaboration. During the discussion, environmental engineer Champika Liyanage mentioned plastic waste, and poet Rebecca Sharp spoke of astrology as an ancient way of understanding connections between humans and more-than-human influences. Some of these themes are present in McCarthy Woolf’s commissioned poem—although her work had been preoccupied with plastics in the sea throughout Seasonal Disturbances, and alternative forms of environmental knowledge, such as Emoto’s pseudoscience, clearly also informed the book. In the resulting poem, McCarthy Woolf chose to expand her ‘holistic ecology of water’ by selecting a coastal setting. The poem evokes international links and inter-species relations, but also inequality, human folly, and ‘geotraumatic’ events: 17  Karen McCarthy Woolf. ‘My Method.’ Cape Farewell SWITCH: Youth Poetics project. https://www.capefarewell.com/switch/karen-mccarthy-woolf-2/

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Ten minutes after the tide turns        out past the headland, right now it’s misty        I’m perturbed by a low, deep thunder, emanating from the sea         it makes     the roof shudder            like  a subwoofer    reminds me of the minor earthquake that      shook the walls of the  bungalow I rented in LA noise as long-lost echo      maybe it’s a cannon     that threw itself––with gusto into the Napoleonic Wars         something military in any case, and covert     Something secret with a long tail    Every day fishermen come to dig worms walk far out to the mudflats        you can’t buy the fish they catch           they’re for the restaurants The foreshore is etched     with eras: sand from shingle from pebble from rock to plastic bottle top to miniscule blue grit in the mouths of oysters who gape      at midsummer’s strawberry moon       A wave crashes a small flock of starlings startle, a quick        balletic thrum And we are put on earth          a little space——— with map and compass for each incarnation      innocent or otherwise, Blake cared about song       its miraculous reach     its chorus    wise as mycelium, which    continues   with an          unheard answer As if what we fail to imagine is empty, is

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oblivion:    now there’s a Monument to the Preposterous if ever there was one Our Stupidity visible from Outer Space, like all the other Walls erected.              See also Witch Hunt The ransacking and relocation of Egypt Of wombs. Spiders. Appropriated eagles/lions         versus the coyote & let us not forget       proprietal seed as antidote to ecstatic insect-orgies A corporate intervention        of spiky, iron collars, genetic keys       sold as reparations Maybe there is     something to the Protestant work ethic. As Issa said all the while I pray to the Buddha I keep on/killing mosquitos & meanwhile 15.01       it’s high tide      time shimmers on flimsy surfaces as pale blue sky             dappled with cloud——  On the horizon a hopeful wind farm   whirring white our distant saviour——the sun seeping         into my epidermis——something simple to keep us warm in winter.    On the phone a notification   (even in Paradise we check our handsets): the moon     has entered Al-Awwa, indicating transition, benevolence, improvement. (Magma, 81 46–7)

The ‘low, deep thunder’ recalls the hurricane that occurred in ‘Seasonal Disturbances.’ And yet, an important difference is that in this coastal setting, the poet links the sound of thunder to a broader array of international settings: a bungalow in Los Angeles and the historical event of the Napoleonic Wars. The vocabulary of ‘military’ and ‘covert’ thunder emanating from the sea cannot fail to suggest atomic weapons testing

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on Pacific islands, or the British government’s ‘covert’ nuclear waste dumps in the Irish Sea. McCarthy Woolf does not mention the ‘nuclear Anthropocene’ narrative explicitly, but the sound of detonations creates an unsettling undertone that brings this chronostratigraphic threshold to mind. The shoreline ‘etched with eras,’ from the lithic time of the rock cycle to the present of the so-called ‘Plasticene,’ situates the present time within a geological context. Irony—‘you can’t buy the fish/ they catch/they’re for the restaurants’—suggests the inequalities of the Capitalocene. McCarthy Woolf explores the absurd contradictions of the Anthropocene, putting the concept under scrutiny as a ‘Monument/ to the Preposterous’ and ‘Our Stupidity.’ Her use of ironic capitalisation highlights the impacts of building projects on Earth’s systems, also evoking the Great Wall of China and Donald Trump’s plans for a selfaggrandising, exclusionary border ‘wall’ with Mexico. Yet the poem is determinedly cosmopolitan, and indeed eco-cosmopolitan, in its allusions to Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa, and to names for stars and astrological concepts that have their origins in Arab astronomy. The moon and its effects on human beings and bodies of water are a thematic preoccupation in this poem, as they are in Seasonal Disturbances, and propitious lunar signs end the poem with a promise of hopeful times in spite of the Anthropocene’s layer of ‘scar tissue.’ The poem’s formal strategies play out these preoccupations with strata, temporality, and ecological relation despite the depredations of capitalism. A ‘geotraumatic’ event—a minor earthquake or a bomb detonation—intervenes immediately before a stanza break, suggesting the ruptures that have marked the beginnings of earlier geological time periods and the ethical repercussions of placing the ‘golden spike’ for the Anthropocene at a nuclear boundary. The poem includes markers of time, as if it were written in situ to call up the shift of the tide. A title that runs into the first stanza and drifting lines that suggest flotsam floating on the surface of the sea mirror Earth’s watery systems. The poetic form chosen also carries visual suggestions of stratigraphic layers, from shingle to bottle tops. If ecopoetry has a thematically ecological focus, and ecopoetics is driven by processes that mirror the ecological, this poem contains elements of both.

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Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. ‘Your Shell On Acid: Material Immersion, Anthropocene Dissolves.’ In Richard Grusin, ed. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2017a. Pp. 89–120. Alaimo, Stacy. ‘Feminist Science Studies and Ecocriticism: Aesthetics and Entanglement in the Deep Sea.’ In Greg Garrard, ed. The Oxford Companion to Ecocriticism. 2014. Pp. 188–204. ———. ‘The Anthropocene at Sea: Temporality, paradox, compression.’ In Heise, Ursula, Jon Christensen and Michelle Neimann, eds. The Routledge companion to the environmental humanities. Abindgon: Routledge, 2017b. 153–61. ———.‘Introduction: Science Studies and the Blue Humanities.’ Configurations 27.4 (Fall 2019): 429–31. Braziel, Jana Evans. “‘Caribbean Genesis’: Language, Gardens, Worlds (Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, Edouard Glissant).’ In Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Renée Gosson, and George Handley, eds. Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2005. Pp. 110–126. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘Whose Anthropocene? A Response.’ Transformations in Environment and Society 2 (2016): 103–14 (107). Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: the Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Crist Eileen. ‘On the Poverty of our Nomenclature’. Environmental Humanities 3 (2013): 129–47. Farrier, David. ‘‘Like a Stone’: Ecology, Enargeia, and Ethical Time in Alice Oswald’s Memorial.’ Environmental Humanities 4 (2014): 1–18. Gander, Forrest and John Kinsella. Redstart: An Ecological Poetics. Iowa: Iowa UP, 2012. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 2002 [1993]. Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. University of Michigan press, 1997 [French edn 1990]. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. ———. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Abingdon: Routledge, 1991. Kindle. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Barry B. Powell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Keller, Lynn. Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2017. McCarthy Woolf, Karen. An Aviary of Small Birds. Manchester: Carcanet, 2014. ———. Seasonal Disturbances. Manchester: Carcanet, 2017.

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———. ‘Green Roots, Brown Shoots.’ 2019. The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry. 2019. Web. Accessed 25 Aug 2020. https://ginkgoprize.com/green-­roots-­ brown-­shoots-­by-­karen-­mccarthy-­woolf/. McCarthy Woolf, Karen, interviewee and author, and Fiona Sampson, interviewer. ‘Karen McCarthy Woolf: Making a Poem.’ Mslexia (Dec/Jan/Feb 2014–2015): 49. McCarthy Woolf, Karen, and Dom Bury. ‘Grievous Bodily Harm  – Karen McCarthy Woolf and Dominic Bury talk climate change, grief and decolonising ecopoetics.’ Magma 72: The Climate Change Issue (Autumn 2018): 20–23. McCarthy Woolf, Karen, interviewee, and Yvonne Reddick, interviewer. ‘Seasonal Disturbances.’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (December 2020): 1–9. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. 2nd edn. New York: Harper, 1990 [1980]. Milne, Heather. Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics. Iowa: Iowa UP, 2018. Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2016. Nixon, Rob. ‘The Great Acceleration and the Great Divergence.’ MLA Profession 2014. Web. 8 Nov 2019. https://profession.mla.org/the-­great-­acceleration-­ and-­the-­great-­divergence-­vulnerability-­in-­the-­anthropocene/. Skinner, Jonathan. ‘Editor’s statement.’ ecopoetics 1.1 (winter 2001a–2002): 5–8. ———. ‘Why Ecopoetics?’ ecopoetics 1.1 (winter 2001b–2002): 105–6. Phillips, Caryl. Colour Me English. London: Harvill Secker, 2011. Rice, Alan. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. London: Continuum, 2003. ———. Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2010. Rigby, Kate. ‘Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness?’ Australian Humanities Review 47 (Nov 2009). Web. 2 Sept 2020. < http:// australianhumanitiesreview.org/2009/11/01/writing-­in-­the-­anthropocene-­ idle-­chatter-­or-­ecoprophetic-­witness/>. Roughgarden, Joan. Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People. Berkeley: California UP, 2013 [2004], 2nd edn. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, 2015. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Zalasiewicz, Jan and Mark Williams. ‘The Anthropocene Ocean in Its Deep Time Context.’ In Davor Vidas and Peter Johan Schei, eds. The World Ocean in Globalisation. Leiden: Brill, 2011, pp. 19–35.

CHAPTER 9

Coda

Everyday Poems from the Anthropocene and the Anthropocene Issue This book has aimed to show how poets are inventing ingenious literary strategies to enmesh the personal, the ecological, the local, and the planetary. There is a rhizomatic element to the way poetry and science enter into dialogue, and the way thinkers exchange environmental ideas: the two-way flow of discussion about water pollution between Hughes and Heaney; the way Alice Oswald is often viewed as re-interpreting these Faber poets’ river-poems and poetic bestiaries; the trans-Atlantic poetic dialogue between Karen McCarthy Woolf and Kei Miller; Pascale Petit’s mentoring of McCarthy Woolf. The Anthropocene, so often associated with extinction, nuclear fallout, and the climate emergency, is also giving rise to a proliferation of cultural forms that hope for solidarity and survival. These may deploy interdisciplinary, hybrid, and collaborative methods: the collective sound-poem commissioned by New Writing North; volumes of letters to the Earth by schoolchildren and celebrities (Chap. 2); Hughes’s voracious scientific reading and determined ecological activism (Chap. 3); Heaney’s contributions to a lough conservation plan and bog conservation initiatives (Chap. 4); Alice Oswald’s ancient and modern Anthropocene odysseys (Chap. 5); Pascale Petit’s activities spanning visual art, poetry, and activism (Chap. 6); Kei Miller’s interlinked examinations

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of environmental and human violence in an array of poetry, prose poetry, and essays (Chap. 7); Karen McCarthy Woolf’s collaborations with geologists and scientists monitoring ocean plastics and her work as an editor and writer-activist (Chap. 8). Innovative, international collaborations include Linda France’s volume Letters to Katłi ̨à (2022), written in correspondence with Canadian First Nation author Katłi ̨à Lafferty. This collaboration between two authors on different continents, both of whom were their countries’ first ever Climate Writers in Residence, received the inaugural Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year award in 2022. The project has led to commissioned climate change letters from authors across genres (with recipients as diverse and imaginative as a distant civilisation and an endangered beetle); an open call for climate letters from the public; and a climate change writing project for schoolchildren.1 What will become clear here is that no discipline or cultural form can tackle an idea as unsettling as the Anthropocene in isolation. Thinkers are joining forces across national borders and conceptual disciplines. To extend this book’s arguments for an interdisciplinary understanding of the Anthropocene, and shifting and flexible scalar lens through which to view it, I turn to just two examples from Sledmere and Williams’s The weird folds and Magma’s Anthropocene Issue. One appears to have a unified lyric ‘I,’ and to be formally traditional on the page. The other is self-­ consciously experimental, incorporating methods from ecology, digital networks, and visual art. Yet the two poems speak of ecological connections and a tenuous sense of survival in an age of advanced environmental damage. They attempt to create a sense of alliance and interdependence between species and planetary processes, in an epoch of peril. These poems are Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo’s ‘Nocturne #6’ and Anthony Cody’s ‘Analog Jaguar Digitization Forest Canopy.’ Capildeo’s collection Measures of Expatriation won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2016, and their biography describes them as Trinidadian-Scottish (Sledmere and Williams, 281). Since McCarthy Woolf highlights the ecopoetic themes in Capildeo’s work, and they edited Stand’s Ecopoetics issue (see Introduction), their poetry is highly germane 1  The results of the commissions, and some of the pieces from the public call, can be viewed at New Writing North. ‘Yours Sincerely: The Climate Letters.’ 2022. https://newwritingnorth.com/journal/yours-sincerely-the-climate-letters/. Accessed on 22.05.2023. The present author is working to develop a climate change writing impact project for schools and literary groups; some of the writing prompts may be viewed on Twitter and Instagram, under the hashtag #EcoCreativeWriting.

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to this book’s arguments for a rhizomatic, interconnected, and diverse poetry of the Anthropocene. ‘Nocturne #6’ forms part of a sequence of poems set after nightfall, and the selections published by Sledmere and Williams are lyric in perspective and suggestive of human presences and characters inhabiting localities including Venezuela (‘Nocturne #5’). But here, Capildeo reconsiders the introspective, elegiac, and human-centred focus of certain nocturnes in European literary canons, such as Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day.’ Rather than a beloved, a deity, or the deceased, the addressee is Night itself: Nocturne #6 Night, I’m not going to say you aren’t there. You hurt my eyes with promises of rest; stretch weighted blankets on warmed beds under which the hills can crawl starring out their masts, mansions, scars and forests. You press hills into your dark like a brush wetting paper with colour. You are high up and fluid. Night, I’m going to hold on to you, today, in daytime in your absence, in your sharp absence. In bright fluorescence I hold to you, surrounded by fluid darkness, indoors and out, in scathing sunlight darkness nonetheless sheathes me as if I lie down on air, high up. I have not been schooled to see like a scientist; therefore I know your contours without having to touch you— and I know you’re not there, not in that way. I am. Body of exhaustion, frequenting shops where natural tears are sold by formula, with droppers; eyes dried by overwatching,

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overweeping—I am not like that, Night. I expected to break on you. Holding on. The time for warning is done. Night, now is the time for joy. (Sledmere and Williams, 167–8)2

If some poets examined in Chap. 1 and elsewhere name the Anthropocene in their poems, Capildeo’s poem does not need to name its possible epoch to connect with ideas and ideologies associated with the Anthropocene. The poem offers alternative ways of seeing—‘I have not been schooled/to see like a scientist.’ It eschews scientific gazes (historically white, male, and cisgender). This poem offers a meditative consideration of human connection to a planetary process, while providing something that a detached view of the Earth from space cannot: the cultural significance of night and the comfort that a human character can take in it. ‘[N]atural tears’ suggests the commodification of everything, the conversion of human bodies to consumer products, and a subversion of the nocturne’s conventions (the speaker who weeps in Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day’— ‘Oft a flood/Have we two wept, and so/Drown’d the whole world’ (Donne 1971, 72)). At a time when climate change could indeed bring planetaryscale floods, Capildeo frames the sun as ‘scathing.’ Yet Capildeo’s glance at human alterations to natural systems is subtle, and it goes beyond the alarmist process of ‘warning’ that risks pushing some environmentalist discourse towards cliché. Like McCarthy Woolf’s nocturnal wrens, the speaker of this poem considers the harshness of artificial light as ‘fluorescent,’ and this stands in contrast to the aesthetically pleasing, painterly imagery that Capildeo deploys when they write of darkness colouring the hills. If many white poets of the English canon give darkness profoundly negative connotations—Byron’s ‘Darkness’ and the climatic disruption it springs from comes to mind3—Capildeo’s poem develops a positive depiction of this planetary process that embraces half of the world at a time and yet is intimately personal. Nevertheless, human impacts on the environment are indeed presented as geological. The poet encapsulates human 2  This poem appeared as ‘Nocturne #6’ in Capildeo’s collection Like a Tree, Walking (Carcanet 2021). 3  For a link between Byron’s poem, the eruption of Tambora, the climatic changes this caused, and the way this sheds light on debates surrounding the Anthropocene, see David Higgins. British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 56.

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alterations to the hills, in the brief and elegant space of two lines: ‘starring out their masts, mansions/scars and forests.’ Light pollution, the ‘mansions’ of the Capitalocene, forests threatened by the ‘Plantationocene,’ the very earth damaged by ‘scars’: like McCarthy Woolf’s image of ‘scar tissue,’ Capildeo’s work gestures towards geotrauma. However, the night as friend, as lover, as mysteriously planetary process, and as an environment for aesthetic contemplation offers a way beyond ‘warning,’ towards a gentle method of environmental connection that creates ‘joy.’ For Magma’s Anthropocene Issue, editor Cheryl Moskowitz commissioned Californian Latinx poet Anthony Cody to write on the theme of the Anthropocene. The poem he provided was ‘Analog Jaguar Digitization Forest Canopy.’ Responding to the poetry of Chicanx poet Francisco X.  Alarcón, and to Eadweard Muybridge’s film of a captive jaguar, the poem deploys an experimental ecopoetics that considers the jaguar as endangered species, cultural symbol, visual image, and digital icon. The jaguar, such a powerful animal image for Petit and Hughes, is reimagined in a formally daring ecopoetics. Here is what Cody writes about his process of composition: The deeper I journey into ecopoetry, the more I find myself returning to the work of the late Chicanx poet, Francisco X. Alarcón. His poetry is a cosmic, ethereal spirituality that transcends past, present, and future, and often blends English, Spanish, and Nahuatl to create an inclusive and ancestral terrain in each poem. It is in this critical and timeless interconnectedness that the “Jaguar” continues to resonate for me as an elegy toward the loss of the living and the sacred, but also the resolve to find ways to resist, re-­ imagine, and remain. Within the Anthropocene, we are experiencing the destruction of flora, fauna, the displacement of people and villages, as well as the destruction of indigenous lands and heritage sites. These impacts are felt disproportionately across those lacking economic access and within black, indigenous, and communities of color. This link between climate, economic, and racial justice intersects within Alarcón’s “Jaguar” to allow us to see a broader connection that asks us to look toward understanding the jaguar as both an endangered animal and a cultural and psychic representation that complicates and contextualizes anthropocentric loss. [….] ‘Analog Jaguar Digitization Forest Canopy’ serves as an incantation site toward the preservation and liberation of the root animal and being. So that

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despite the Anthropocene’s efforts to eradicate the source, the ancestral, the memory, and path forward, we can find infinite ways to sustain and build toward greater truths and new futures. (Magma, 81 69)

Cody writes that his formal choices pay homage to Alarcón’s creation of ‘poems that could be read left to right and up and down’ and also ‘left to right, up and down, and from the “center”, root line, out.’ The poem is so broad that it is printed across a fold-out page of quadruple width in Magma, and it needs to be reduced in size to fit other formats: {

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drinks

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last remaining saguaro

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cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage ge cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage eg cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage cage

(Magma, 81 70)

Rhizomatic in nature and powerfully interconnected, Cody’s poem suggests that links between forest and jaguar, technology and self (whether human or something else), form an intricate mesh of allegiances. The very method of reading this poem is rhizomatic: those arrows between images and words create complex links. Cody does not look at the jaguar as an embodiment of nature in the raw, but rather the poem considers how the animal is mediated through multiple layers of digital technology: a ‘digitization’ of the creature that employs the (historically western and white) realm of technology to consider an endangered species. The first word of Cody’s poem is ‘stay.’ This is not an extinction-elegy, but an invocation for survival. The ‘saguaro’ situates the poem within the Sonoran Desert that spans parts of Mexico, Arizona, and California. This confirms that this poem addresses one of the vanishingly rare Sonoran jaguars, famed for their elusiveness and threatened at the time by Donald Trump’s vainglorious ‘border wall,’ and a motive for the Sierra Club’s lawsuit against Trump.4 4  Sergio Avila and Dan Millis. ‘Protecting and Celebrating El Jaguar in the Borderlands.’ 24 Feb 2019. Sierra Club. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/protecting-and-celebratingel-jaguar-borderlands

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The term ‘heart-palm’ is rich in a multitude of meanings, playing on the hearts of palm-trees, and the human heart and palm—a Harwayesque multi-species connection that continues Cody and Alarcón’s evocation of Nahuatl ancestral connections between poet and animal. The word ‘cage’ is repeated at the bottom of the page, appearing as a stratigraphic layer that records what human beings do to other species. Yet the word is also downtrodden by the shadowy image of the jaguar pacing beyond its cage, which Cody reproduces from Muybridge’s film, and which becomes progressively clearer as one reads across the pages that the poem spans. The poem deploys arrows that radiate from nodal points, playing with the idea of ecological diagrams of energy flows. All arrows point to the word ‘jaguar.’ When Morton writes of poems as shards of the past and shadows of the future, he evokes a past that is broken and a future that is nebulous, sombre, redolent of ‘dark ecology.’ Yet Cody’s liberation of the jaguar, and Capildeo’s embracing of the night, suggest intricate meshes of inter-­ species survival that transcend the sciences and the arts, that either offer alternatives to scientific perspectives or embrace and build on them. Here is an intricate, entangled way to ‘resist, re-imagine, and remain.’ Poetry, Literary Production, and ‘Activism of the Heart’ in the Anthropocene Thinkers have wondered whether poets are useful for anything ever since Plato cast them out of his Republic. Poetry titles such as 100 Poems to Save the Earth and Poems from a Green and Blue Planet are gaining in popularity, and are appearing across many English-speaking countries.5 Ecocritics’ judgements have varied from the hyperbolic statement that poetry can save the earth (Bate 2000, 283; Felstiner, 357), to branding experimental ecopoetics irrelevant and unintelligible (Timothy Clark 2019). Auge and O’Brien’s view, citing Ghosh, is that ‘modern literary works do not activate a collective imaginary but at best trigger the imaginations of a disjointed agglomeration of individuals’ (Ghosh 2016, 135 ctd in Auge and O’Brien, 8) and are thus futile when faced with climate change. Yet these critics’ judgements miss what modern and contemporary literary practitioners are doing: in addition to collaborating with environmental scientists, many are joining forces with activists. 5  Zoe Brigley and Kristian Evans, eds. 100 Poems to Save the Earth. Bridgend: Seren, 2021. Sabrina Mahfouz, ed. Poems from a Green and Blue Planet. London: Hachette, 2019.

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The cultural landscape in which poets are writing shifted considerably between Hughes’s early climate change research and anti-nuclear poems, and Karen McCarthy Woolf’s citizen science and ‘activism of the heart.’ The timeline of poets discussed here bears witness to a gradual shift from the poetry of conservation to the poetry of a possible mass extinction. It marks the point when we have a term, and a concept, that encapsulates the scale of human alterations to Earth’s systems—and those impacts are deeply unequal in their origins and effects. It indicates a shift in the public understanding of major problems such as climate change and the biodiversity crisis. Poets who are public intellectuals may be trenchantly critical of the status quo. The later poems analysed in this book were published in the age of Extinction Rebellion and the climate strike movement. The Resurgence Prize (later the Ginkgo Prize) for Ecopoetry, founded in 2015, and Simon Armitage’s Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry, founded in 2018, now have an international focus. Ideologically progressive ecopoetry has taken root in the heart of the British literary establishment, and it has international ramifications. Environmentalist Satish Kumar’s Resurgence/Ecologist magazine was instrumental in setting up the Resurgence Prize; judges have ranged from Armitage himself to Mexico’s Homero Aridjis and the USA’s Camille T. Dungy. Different authors have different ideological stances, and not all of the poets examined in this monograph are engaged in environmental activism, of course. Alice Oswald’s public persona is quieter than Heaney’s, while Miller is better known for raising issues of inequality in literature than for writing about the unequal impacts of climate change. Both Hughes and Heaney lobbied prominent political figures over environmental issues. Heaney’s support for conservation causes was less prolonged and outspoken than Hughes’s environmental activism and advocacy. Nevertheless, Hughes’s role as Laureate, at the heart of the establishment, meant that he could not always speak publicly about his ‘radical fury’ regarding environmental issues. Yet since Hughes and Heaney’s time, poets with prominent public profiles do not have to hold back when they wish to criticise climate change, extinction, and the exploitative political and economic structures that contribute to them. UK Poet Laureate Armitage’s Laureateship poems initially eschewed the royal life-events that previous Laureates have felt obliged to write about. In the spirit of his Laurel Prize, Armitage’s Laureate poem ‘Ark,’ a fierce call to bring back creatures menaced with extinction, was commissioned by the British Antarctic Survey and funded

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by the Natural and Environment Research Council. ‘Fugitives’ was commissioned to celebrate Areas of Outstanding National Beauty.6 When Armitage has written about royal matters, he has often done so by using strikingly organic imagery. His elegy for Queen Elizabeth II, ‘Floral Tribute,’ takes a close-up image of a lily-of-the valley as a synecdoche that suggests a glimpse of the globe: ‘I have conjured a lily to light these hours, a token of thanks, / Zones and auras of soft glare framing the brilliant globes.’7 Armitage’s Laurel Prize is an important development in the practice of ecopoetry and climate change poetry. Not even Carol Ann Duffy, who commissioned the anthologies on climate change and insect extinctions that I have mentioned, chose such a close focus on climate change for her signature Laureateship project. In the USA, Joy Harjo, who held the post of Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2022 and has long been known for her criticism of the exploitation of Native Nations peoples and their lands, established the Living Nations, Living Words project. The objective of this is ‘mapping the U.S. with Native Nations poets and poems.’ The Library of Congress’s website for the project shows readers an aerial map of the USA.  The website begins by giving readers an aerial view of the USA, an (almost) God’s-eye of a global superpower, a detached view from nowhere of a nation that played a pivotal role in the Great Acceleration, oil capitalism, and nuclear technology. Yet this is quickly decolonised, localised, and subverted: the reader ‘zooms in’ to read and listen to the work of Native Nations poets.8 Harjo’s work has long contained environmental themes, and her poem ‘Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit’ appears in Magma’s Anthropocene Issue. Poems are usually limited in their practical impacts. Poetry cannot be expected to raise consciousness and change behaviours on as broad a scale as movements such as climate change strikes. But authors can, and do, create change.9 Heather Milne has argued that poetry and art often 6   Simon Armitage. ‘Ark.’ https://www.simonarmitage.com/wp-content/uploads/ Amended-Ark.pdf ‘Fugitives.’ https://www.simonarmitage.com/wp-content/uploads/ Fugitives.pdf 7  https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/13/floral-tribute-poem-queenelizabeth-simon-armitage-poet-laureate 8  https://www.loc.gov/ghe/cascade/index.html?appid=be31c5cfc7614d6680e6 fa47be888dc3 9  For work on writers across genres and their environmental activism, including Arundhati Roy and Ken Saro-Wiwa, see Rob Nixon. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011.

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accompany protest and voice political dissent (Milne 2018, 239), and yet they do more than this: for some poets examined here, poems are the instruments of activism. Heaney and Hughes sold poems in aid of environmental causes. Petit’s support for Extinction Rebellion is open and overt. (The ‘Writers Rebel’ section of Extinction Rebellion’s website contains many examples of the work of writer-activists.) McCarthy Woolf’s joining of the citizen science project eXXpedition suggests a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to conceptualising and communicating issues associated with the Anthropocene. Poets and poetry editors are joining transdisciplinary environmental arts movements to attempt to take action. Such actions include the aforementioned poetry and science journal Consilience, which has an editorial team of 21—a vast number for a poetry magazine—and has held an online exhibition of poetry and art that responds to the Anthropocene.10 The Poets for the Planet collective has 1500 members on social media at the time of writing, while poets, nature writers, scientists, visual artists, musicians, and dancers are brought together by Cape Farewell, founded by artist David Buckland.11 Smallscale environmental poetry initiatives include sustainable book production: the cover of Magma’s 2018 Climate Change Issue is made of recycled coffee cups; the 2021 Anthropocene Issue is entirely recycled, and despite containing two poems with the title ‘Oil,’ the issue is printed without petroleum-based ink. Magma’s Anthropocene Issue features work by Friends of the Earth International founder, Nnimmo Bassey, and poet and environmentalist Dom Bury, who teaches at an ecological college. These activities will not revolutionise energy production, nor absorb any of the human-caused carbon dioxide that is damaging the climate. However, for many of the authors here, poetry forms part of resistance movements, even if its abilities to effect change are limited. In their own way, these writers attempt to diminish the shards of ‘scar tissue’ that will be left behind on our damaged planet, and to imagine a future of survival and resistance. 10  Consilience (founder: Sam Illingworth). The Anthropocene. Digital exhibition. September 2021. Accessed on 21.09.21 at https://artspaces.kunstmatrix.com/en/exhibition/7526365/the-anthropocene 11  For the collective’s outputs, see, for example, David Buckland, editor. Burning Ice. London: Cape Farewell, 2005. The collective’s method of transporting writers and scientists to the Arctic to document climate change can be critiqued for its carbon footprint, and such a (fictionalised) project is satirised in Cape Farewell participant Ian McEwan’s novel Solar (2008).

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Works Cited Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. London: Picador, 2000. Braidotti, Rosi. ‘Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism’. In Richard Grusin, ed. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2018. Pp. 21–48 Capildeo, Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel). Like a Tree, Walking. Manchester: Carcanet, 2021. Chowdhry, Maya, Cheryl Moskowitz and Yvonne Reddick, eds. Magma: The Anthropocene Issue. 81 (Autumn 2021). Clark, Timothy. The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. Donne, John. The Complete English Poems. Ed. by A.  J. Smith. London: Penguin, 1971. Felstiner, John. Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. France, Linda. Letters to Katłi ̨à. Grasmere: Wordsworth Trust, 2022. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Howard, Matt, Fiona Moore and Eileen Pun, eds. Magma: The Climate Change Issue. 72 (Autumn 2018). McCormick, John. The Global Environmental Movement. Chichester: Wiley, 1995. 2nd edn. Milne, Heather. Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics. Iowa: Iowa UP, 2018. Neuman, Eugene. Climate Change and Social Movements: Civil Society and the Development of National Climate Change Policy. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Rootes, Christopher. ‘Foreword’ to Neuman, Eugene. Climate Change and Social Movements: Civil Society and the Development of National Climate Change Policy. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. xiii–xvi.

Index1

A Acid rain, 3, 158, 159 Agriculture, 9, 10, 25, 27, 29, 59, 60, 63, 83, 118, 150, 152, 159, 170, 181, 305, 320, 322 Alaimo, Stacy, 17, 18, 43, 46–48, 79, 87, 89, 94, 95, 97, 144, 179, 184, 185, 187, 189, 190, 197, 198, 200, 204, 232, 240, 248, 251, 253, 272, 362 Anthropocene, 2–19, 18n16, 23–66, 73–105, 110, 111, 121, 124, 125, 132, 135, 135n42, 137, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150–154, 156, 158, 166, 167, 170, 175–207, 211–265, 269–283, 269n1, 285–287, 291, 292, 293n17, 295, 295n19, 298, 302–305, 308, 309, 312, 315, 320–324, 326, 331–368, 371–377, 374n3, 380

Anthropocene Working Group, 9, 10, 16, 23n1, 24, 27, 34, 37, 47, 48, 51, 59, 60, 63, 82, 87, 88, 95, 104, 185, 186, 197 Archive, 4–6, 17–19, 75, 79, 80, 84n25, 88, 89, 110, 116, 117, 119, 122, 125, 127n29, 136, 144, 212, 222, 236n18, 236n19, 254, 255n24, 280n8, 301n24 Armitage, Simon, 77, 78, 216, 217, 378, 379 B Bassey, Nnimmo, 380 Bate, Jonathan, 6, 8, 14, 39, 39n24, 40, 52, 53, 56, 74n3, 77, 95, 115, 116, 147, 157, 185, 280, 377

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Y. Reddick, Anthropocene Poetry, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39389-1

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384 

INDEX

Black Diaspora, 19, 231, 275–276, 278, 301, 318, 321, 325, 336, 337, 344, 350, 355, 358, 362 Blue humanities, 17, 176, 197 Bog, 17, 110–112, 116, 116n13, 117, 119–125, 125n27, 130–132, 134–136, 138, 142, 151, 161, 170, 176, 371 bogland, 6, 17, 114, 115, 119–126, 126n28, 135, 136, 143, 151, 158, 160, 161, 164, 167, 170, 332 Bök, Christian, 11, 49, 51, 56, 92 Bristow, Thomas, 4, 5, 8, 13, 14, 34, 39, 178, 186 Buell, Lawrence, 8, 40, 118, 185, 280 C Cape Farewell, 19, 63, 333, 364, 365, 380 Capildeo, Anthony Vahni Ezekiel, 4, 15, 49, 58, 277, 282, 333, 372–375, 377 Capitalism, 10, 15, 25, 26, 30, 32, 60, 75, 78, 80, 83, 146, 180, 246, 270, 275, 278, 283, 332, 340, 368, 379 capitalist, 7, 18, 19, 31, 32, 43, 63–65, 80–82, 127, 148, 201, 219, 243, 246, 271, 274, 276, 278–280, 297, 340, 341, 363 Capitalocene, ‘the,’ 31, 38, 61, 74n4, 75, 81–84, 88, 92, 146–150, 160, 190, 204, 221, 244, 246, 253, 274, 282, 291, 295, 297, 310, 311, 323, 324, 326, 341, 344, 345, 351–353, 361, 363, 368, 375 Carcanet, 6, 13, 19, 280n8, 281, 286, 301n24, 332, 374n2

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 29, 32, 84, 347 Climate, 2, 3, 7, 12, 17, 18, 23, 26n7, 32, 38, 40, 42, 46, 51, 61–63, 78, 84n24, 85, 121, 124, 145, 152, 153, 176, 180, 190, 191, 233, 242, 243, 250, 253, 308, 323, 339, 342, 343, 348, 349, 354, 364, 365, 371, 372, 375, 378, 380 Climate change, 2–7, 8n3, 9, 10, 12, 15–19, 25–27, 32, 33, 39, 42, 44, 48, 50, 53, 56, 59–66, 74, 75, 79, 84–87, 93, 100–102, 105, 109–170, 176, 179–181, 190–196, 200, 201, 206, 207, 212, 213n1, 233, 242, 243, 253, 256, 260–264, 269–271, 292, 295–298, 305, 332–350, 353–355, 354n14, 358, 360–365, 372, 372n1, 374, 377–379, 380n11 Coal, 26, 29, 59, 63, 74n4, 125, 243, 264, 265, 323 Cody, Anthony, 5, 41, 57, 372, 375–377 Collaboration, 6, 10, 11, 19, 23n1, 63, 91n39, 156, 175, 202, 232, 353, 363–368, 372 Colonialism, 10, 15, 30, 59, 60, 126, 127, 130, 187, 243, 270, 298, 310, 311, 335, 336 Colonisation, 26, 129, 283, 288, 316 Conservation, 2, 5, 6, 12, 17, 25, 60, 75, 101, 110, 112, 114, 116–123, 142, 150, 167, 170, 225, 230, 235, 242, 371, 378 Crosby, Alfred, 26, 31 Crutzen, Paul, 24, 26, 29, 32–34, 59, 78, 84, 102, 111, 154, 158

 INDEX 

385

D Deep time, 7, 8, 8n4, 12, 16, 17, 46, 47, 49, 57, 80, 81, 105, 109–170, 179, 180, 192, 203, 207, 218, 233, 240, 251, 264, 265, 295, 321, 324, 326 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 3n1, 33, 51, 272, 274, 277, 283, 314, 316 Duffy, Carol Ann, 7, 65, 65n54, 176n2, 195, 379 Dungy, Camille T, 15, 340, 378

F Farrier, David, 4–6, 8, 11, 13, 17, 34, 56, 111, 116, 132, 137, 143, 147, 152, 154, 179, 180, 362 Felstiner, John, 377 Fire, 25, 29, 33, 36, 105, 145, 151, 242, 243, 260 Forward Prize, 250, 282 Fossil fuels, 7, 17, 25, 26, 64, 85, 100, 110, 144–150, 152, 154, 158, 160, 207, 243, 260, 264, 265, 344

E Ecopoetics, 4, 6, 7, 11, 13, 15, 19, 41, 46, 51–57, 61, 64, 75, 110, 119, 152, 178, 198, 198n19, 201, 212–214, 216, 250, 253, 269–326, 331, 332, 339, 340, 345, 355, 356, 368, 372, 375, 377 Ecopoetry, 4, 6, 14, 17, 19, 39, 40, 51–53, 55, 57, 63, 65, 110, 114, 116, 118, 163, 176, 181, 212–218, 241, 255, 273, 277, 280, 331, 332, 340, 355, 357, 368, 375, 378, 379 Entanglement, 17, 37, 55, 94, 185, 211–265, 275, 286, 289, 303–326, 332, 335–341, 362 Experimental poetry, 50, 55, 198 Extinction, 2, 5, 10–12, 16–18, 18n15, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 49, 51, 59–61, 63, 65, 75, 78, 93n42, 95, 103–105, 110, 119–124, 124n23, 124n24, 127, 131, 143, 157, 196, 198, 200, 207, 211–265, 270, 290–292, 323, 324, 353, 364, 371, 378, 379 EXXpedition, 63, 333, 350, 352, 363, 380

G Gender, 13–15, 17, 19, 33, 34, 36, 36n19, 60, 63, 163, 179, 185–188, 211, 212, 219, 227, 242, 270, 303, 304, 314–316, 331, 334, 341, 342, 354, 357 Geological, 2, 3, 7–10, 16, 24, 24n2, 26–28, 30, 30n10, 31, 33, 34n16, 35, 35n18, 40, 46, 47, 59, 62, 63, 81, 89, 93, 95, 98, 104, 105, 121, 131, 135–138, 140, 142, 148, 152, 155, 179, 187, 192, 197, 198, 231, 240, 241, 265, 270, 271, 287, 295, 322, 324, 326, 352, 368, 374 Geology, 10, 12, 17, 23, 28, 41, 47, 63, 135, 143, 243, 251, 303, 336 Ghosh, Amitav, 7, 12, 32, 42, 44, 50, 61, 84, 298, 347, 350, 354, 377 Gifford, Terry, 14, 40, 52, 53, 75, 93, 115, 127 Gingko Prize for Ecopoetry, 15 Glissant, Edouard, 18, 19, 38, 219, 273–276, 286, 287, 289, 298, 303, 306, 310, 318–320, 325, 331, 333, 334, 336–338, 350, 353, 355, 359, 362, 363 poetics of relation, 18, 19, 273–275, 289, 333, 334, 336, 337

386 

INDEX

Global, v, 2, 7, 16, 18, 19, 23, 25–27, 26n8, 30, 31, 39–45, 62, 64, 75, 77–80, 84, 84n24, 86, 97, 99, 100, 103, 114, 116, 118, 129, 153, 157, 166, 167, 169, 170, 179, 199, 203, 204, 221, 225, 242, 243, 245, 246, 248, 253, 270, 272, 275, 276, 278, 279, 293–295, 299, 300, 302, 303, 315, 318, 320, 332, 334, 335, 337, 348, 350, 357, 362, 363, 379 Global North, 7, 244, 247 Global South, 7, 10, 244, 337 Great Acceleration, 9, 10, 16, 27, 48, 59, 60, 75, 82–84, 100, 146, 244, 273, 379 Greenpeace, 6, 85 Guardian, The, 160, 176, 195, 332 Guillevic, Eugène, 162, 164–167, 164n84, 166n85 H Haraway, Donna, 17, 19, 34, 35, 37–39, 44, 78, 79, 91, 94, 95, 121, 135, 162, 167, 184–187, 189, 203, 215, 217, 219, 228, 231, 235, 242, 254, 260, 289, 308, 309, 315, 334, 338, 352, 360, 361 Harjo, Joy, 31, 333, 334, 339, 351, 379 Heaney, Seamus, 5–7, 12–14, 13n12, 17, 45, 57, 59, 60, 92, 109–170, 175–178, 184, 186, 218, 233, 252, 255, 371, 378, 380 works by; Death of a Naturalist, 110, 114, 118, 121, 122, 150, 170; District and Circle, 109, 111, 117, 118, 150, 151, 156, 158; Field Work, 146, 147,

149, 150, 169; Finders Keepers, 155n79; The Haw Lantern, 163; Human Chain, 130, 152, 164, 167; North, 111, 115, 136–138, 140, 142, 144–146, 149, 155, 164 Heise, Ursula, 8, 29, 37, 40, 41, 43, 48, 50, 75, 79, 96, 100, 185, 218, 292, 334 Hughes, Ted, 5, 6, 12–14, 16, 49, 56, 59–61, 63, 73–105, 115, 117, 118, 121, 123, 127, 131, 136, 137, 142, 150, 151, 153, 155n79, 169, 175–178, 184, 186, 199, 216, 222, 223, 233, 235, 240n20, 255, 265, 286, 293, 332, 345, 361, 371, 375, 378, 380 works by; Collected Poems, 77; Letters, 77 Humanities, 4, 5, 8–11, 23–25, 28–30, 32, 33, 35, 38, 41, 46, 50, 58, 153, 178, 181, 186, 197, 198, 213, 216, 217, 272, 333, 334, 339, 340 Hume, Angela, 4, 56, 199 Hybrid, 5, 17, 19, 49–52, 64, 133, 196, 203, 217, 221, 231, 262, 297, 298, 313, 331, 334, 337, 338, 354, 356, 359–361, 371 I Ice age, 9, 12, 40, 119, 137, 142, 155, 176, 264–265, 324 Industrial Revolution, 9, 25, 26, 243, 265, 272–273, 323 Inequality, 13, 30, 31, 242, 244–246, 310, 311, 331, 334, 352, 363, 365, 368, 378 Irish Peatland Conservation Council, 6, 112, 113n6, 115n12, 140

 INDEX 

K Keller, Lynn, 4, 6, 14, 46, 54, 56, 65, 75, 199, 280 L Lafferty, Katłi ̨à, 372 Latour, Bruno, 31, 38, 41, 43, 44, 44n26, 51, 112, 121, 162, 217, 272, 315 Laureate, 94n44, 151, 378 Laurel Prize, 5, 78, 211, 216, 331, 332, 378, 379 LBGTQIA+, 14n13, 15 Lewis, Simon, 18, 24n2, 25, 26, 30, 59, 103, 221, 225, 270–272, 278, 282, 285–287, 302, 304, 320 Lyric, 5, 8, 15, 19, 54–57, 66, 130, 153, 153n73, 154, 155n79, 170, 177, 178, 182, 196, 205, 211, 212, 214–217, 236, 244, 250, 258, 263, 307, 331, 333, 334, 337–340, 343–346, 351, 354, 357, 360, 361, 372, 373 M Macfarlane, Robert, 7, 48, 49, 51, 92, 152, 191n9, 220, 254, 262n28 Magma poetry journal, 8, 11, 63, 269, 333 Manthropocene, 34, 244, 325, 363 Marx, Karl, 26, 30 Maslin, Mark, 8n3, 18, 24n2, 25, 26, 30, 59, 103, 221, 225, 270–272, 278, 282, 285–287, 302, 304, 320 McCarthy Woolf, Karen, 4–7, 11–13, 13n12, 15, 18, 19, 42, 57–60, 59n46, 63, 213, 213n1, 221, 275, 277, 281, 288, 295, 317,

387

331–368, 371, 372, 374, 375, 378, 380 Miller, Kei, 5, 6, 11–13, 18, 18n16, 19, 41, 57, 59, 60, 221, 233, 269–326, 332, 333, 336, 342, 351, 352, 371, 378 works by; The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, 13, 269, 301n24; In Nearby Bushes, 57, 270, 283, 284, 293, 298, 303–305, 307, 321, 322 Morton, Timothy, 10, 32, 36, 38, 42, 43, 44n26, 50, 57, 60, 64, 66, 78–79, 121, 182, 204, 219, 232, 235, 239, 293, 297, 334, 340, 342, 361, 377 Murray, Les, 14, 214, 214n4, 215, 220, 221, 228, 236, 262 N New Writing North, 52, 61, 371, 372n1 Niblett, Michael, 18, 32, 40 Nixon, Rob, 24, 31, 46, 93 ‘slow violence,’ 46, 93 Nuclear, 3–5, 3n1, 7, 9, 12, 16, 25, 27, 28, 33, 43, 49, 51, 59–61, 64, 75, 78, 79, 82, 83, 86–95, 105, 135n42, 154, 368, 371, 379 O O’Driscoll, Dennis, 13, 114, 117–119, 122, 126, 127, 131n36, 132, 137, 149, 149n67, 151, 152, 153n73, 155, 161, 255 Oil, 7, 13, 26, 31, 35, 38, 46, 53, 59, 63, 64, 74n4, 77, 146–149, 152, 180, 181, 200, 206, 207, 231, 291, 291n14, 379, 380 Osborne, Gillian, 4, 56, 199

388 

INDEX

Oswald, Alice, 5, 7, 11–14, 14n13, 17, 57, 59, 60, 63, 65, 76, 175–207, 230, 252, 332, 345, 351, 371, 378 works by; Dart, 57, 175–188, 190, 193, 199, 206, 207; Memorial, 176, 178, 179, 207; Nobody, 176, 179, 180, 196–207; A Sleepwalk on the Severn, 176–179, 199, 206; The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, 57, 175, 192 Ozone, 27, 102, 111, 153 P Parham, John, 4, 50, 51, 169 Peat, 17, 59, 111, 112, 119–121, 123, 125, 133–136, 142–145, 150, 158–161 Petit, Pascale, 2, 5, 6, 12, 13, 13n12, 18, 58, 60, 63, 211–265, 332, 346, 371, 375, 380 works by; Mama Amazonica (MA), 6, 211, 213–215, 214n4, 218–222, 224n15, 226, 228, 235, 236n18, 236n19, 242, 264; Tiger Girl (TG), 2, 213, 217, 225, 241–245, 248, 250–256, 259–261, 263 Petroleum, 7, 11, 17, 64, 146–148, 152, 153, 231, 279 Place, 3, 5, 7–10, 12, 13, 15–17, 25, 32, 34, 38–43, 45–46, 54, 57, 74, 76–79, 84, 92, 95, 97, 98, 110, 114–119, 122, 130–132, 142, 150–170, 175, 177–179, 181, 184, 185, 189–191, 196, 198, 199, 207, 212, 217–222, 225, 231, 240, 243, 248, 254, 260, 269, 270, 272, 274–278, 280–307, 310–314, 316–321,

324, 325, 331, 337, 338, 344, 349, 350, 359, 361, 365 Planet, 2, 9, 12, 17, 28, 29, 33, 37–45, 47, 48, 52, 54, 59, 78, 80, 82, 84, 96–98, 104, 105, 125, 150–170, 179, 180, 191n9, 196, 197, 203, 218–222, 249, 252–254, 265, 270, 272, 275, 276, 281–302, 317–319, 331, 337, 346, 353, 380 Plath, Sylvia, 14, 33, 56, 77, 82, 82n20, 83n23, 84, 87, 90, 91, 91n39, 94, 95, 95n47, 194, 214 Political, vi, 2, 9, 10, 13, 15, 27–29, 50, 60, 81, 89, 95, 110, 113n7, 115, 126, 132, 146, 149, 155n79, 156, 195, 212, 242, 260, 332, 333, 340, 354, 354n14, 363, 364, 378, 380 Pyrocene, 25, 145, 151, 260, 262, 263, 265 R Race, 13–15, 18, 36, 49, 63, 90, 95, 104, 105, 115, 129, 187, 316–318, 331, 334, 337, 340 Raworth, Kate, 34 Recycled paper, 6 Reilly, Evelyn, 50, 51, 55, 56, 198, 201, 204 Romantic, poetry, 343 Roots, 15, 30, 32, 39, 88, 96, 121, 133, 149, 184, 189, 196, 204, 217, 219, 227, 228, 231, 234, 259, 262, 271, 275, 279, 285, 286, 298, 299, 308, 309, 314, 316–318, 325, 336, 337, 342, 349, 350, 355, 362, 375, 376, 378 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), 6, 7, 110, 113n6, 114, 167–169

 INDEX 

S Sandilands, Catriona, 17, 188 Scale, 2–4, 7–9, 16, 17, 23, 26, 28, 32, 40, 42–48, 58, 73–105, 109–170, 182–184, 187, 189, 191, 198, 203, 204, 215, 218, 232, 233, 245, 246, 248–250, 252–254, 262, 264, 275, 285, 289, 293, 311, 335, 345, 360, 362, 378, 379 Science, v, vi, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10–12, 14, 15, 19, 23, 26, 28–30, 34, 37, 38, 45, 50, 51, 55, 59, 60, 62, 63, 74, 86, 101, 104, 185–188, 195, 197, 198, 202, 204, 222, 226, 231, 251, 282, 283, 287, 331–368, 371, 377, 378, 380 Sexuality, 13, 14, 61, 186, 187, 270, 273, 309, 354 Skinner, Jonathan, 4, 6, 52–55, 55n42, 148, 216, 235, 280 Snyder, Gary, 53, 119 Solnick, Samuel, 4, 5, 11, 13, 14, 24, 34, 56, 62, 64, 75, 86, 91, 94n44, 146 Space, v, 2, 3, 7, 14, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 54n41, 55, 57, 60, 64, 66, 84, 91, 95–99, 120, 121, 126, 135n42, 152, 156, 162, 176, 178, 179, 197, 200, 203, 204, 232, 233, 236, 248, 250–253, 273, 277, 279, 280, 298, 306, 309, 314, 323–325, 336, 340, 344, 348, 359, 361, 362, 374, 375 Speculative fiction, 50

389

Stoermer, Eugene, 24, 26, 29, 32, 34, 59, 78, 84, 154, 158 Szerszynski, Bronislaw, 3, 8n4, 27, 28, 45, 104, 287 T Tollund Man, 111n3, 112, 131, 132, 134, 135, 152, 158–162 Tsing, Anna, 31, 37, 59, 78, 79, 94, 182, 185, 219, 220, 254, 290, 309, 315, 321, 334, 339, 363 V Vermeulen, Pieter, 4, 6, 37, 50, 51 W Water cycle, 17, 78, 110, 118, 121, 176, 179, 192, 196, 199, 336, 351, 362 Wynter, Sylvia, 30, 31 Y Yusoff, Kathryn, 13, 18, 19, 31–33, 59, 243, 272, 274, 287, 303, 322–324, 336, 341, 352 ‘Black Anthropocenes,’ 18, 19, 341, 352 Z Zalasiewicz, Jan, 8n4, 25, 27, 28, 33, 48, 104, 148, 151, 180, 191, 197, 335