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Mary Oliver's Grass Roots Poetry examines the poetry and essays of Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver. Her writing offers an environmental ethics that is relevant to readers interested not only in poetry but also environmental writing. She neither replicates hierarchical relationships nor romanticizes nature. In situating all as kin while also respecting differences, Oliver creates a grassroots poetics and an environmental ethics that invite readers to rethink our responsibilities and how we interact with others, human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. Respectful coexistence with differences is necessary for the survival of all.
List of contents
Gratitudes - Introduction: Attending to the Anthropocene: Cultivating Attentiveness - Entering the Conversation: Mary Oliver's Essays - Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Mary Oliver's Ecotone Amid Nature Writing and Eco-Poetics - "The Gull Beat the Air with Its Good Wing" - "Such Unforced Love": Mary Oliver Re-thinks Domestication - Conclusion: The Overview - Index.
Report
"Dee Horne's insightful and instructive eco-critical commentary on the essays and poems of Mary Oliver first of all does what all outstanding literary scholarship does-Horne allows us to read and hear Oliver through the detailed and helpful intermediary language of interpretation. She lets us understand Oliver's 'paradoxical strategy' of reconfiguring binary relations-mostly about humans and the natural world, but more than that-through an eco-poetics of 'interrelat-edness' that is both wonderful language art and at the same time important and immediately rel-evant thinking for our times. Horne's work with Oliver here is careful, convincingly considered, and thoroughly researched and contextualized. Her sense of Oliver's poetry as a kind of meta-phorical ecotone is just smart and right. But that is not enough to say about Horne's work. This book matters. If we are in the midst of the Anthropocene, as I believe we are, we need Oliver, and we need Horne, to give us vocabulary and to situate us in place and in relationship with this planet. Horne sees Oliver's work as 'respectful, ethical, and cooperative.' I agree, but I would add that Dee Horne's commentary deserves the same praise and reconfigures those qualities into a constructive and militant scholarship-one that matters." Reuben J. Ellis, Professor of Writing, Woodbury University
