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Anthropocene Poetry: Place, Environment and Planet argues that the idea of the Anthropocene is inspiring new possibilities for poetry. It can also change the way we read and interpret poems. If environmental poetry was once viewed as linked to place, this book shows how poets are now grappling with environmental issues from the local to the planetary: climate change and the extinction crisis, nuclear weapons and waste, plastic pollution and the petroleum industry. This book intervenes in debates about culture and science, traditional poetic form and experimental ecopoetics, to show how poets are collaborating with environmental scientists and joining environmental activist movements to respond to this time of crisis. From the canonical work of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, to award-winning poets Alice Oswald, Pascale Petit, Kei Miller, and Karen McCarthy Woolf, this book explores major figures from the past alongside acclaimed contemporary voices. It reveals Seamus Heaney's support for conservation causes and Ted Hughes's astonishingly forward-thinking research on climate change; it discusses how Pascale Petit has given poetry to Extinction Rebellion and how Karen McCarthy Woolf set sail with scientists to write about plastic pollution. This book deploys research on five poetry archives in the UK, USA and Ireland, and the author's insider insights into the commissioning processes and collaborative methods that shaped important contemporary poetry publications. Anthropocene Poetry finds that environmental poetry is flourishing in the face of ecological devastation. Such poetry speaks of the anxieties and dilemmas of our age, and searches for paths towards resilience and resistance.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. Anthropocene Poetry.- 3. 'The World in a Glance': Ted Hughes, Anthropocene Scales and Environmental Cosmopolitanism.- 4. Seamus Heaney's Environmental Poetry: Conservation Causes, Deep Time, Shifting Scales and Climate Change.- 5. Alice Oswald: Voyaging in Anthropocene Waters.- 6. Pascale Petit: Entanglement, Animals and the 'Anthropocene Extinction'.- 7. Kei Miller: Ecopoetics of Relation, Resistance and Grief.- 8. Seasonal Disturbances: Environment, Migration, Science and an Anthropocene Poetics of Relation in Karen McCarthy Woolf's Work.- 9. Coda: Everyday poems from the anthropocene and the Anthropocene Issue.
About the author
Yvonne Reddick is Reader in English Literature and Creative Writing at University of Central Lancashire, UK. She is the author of
Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet (Palgrave 2017) and
Burning Season (Bloodaxe 2023). She is joint editor of
Magma: The Anthropocene Issue (2019), and she wrote and presented the environmental documentary
Searching for Snow Hares (2023), directed by Aleks Domanski.
