Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction

 

Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction
Edited by J. Scott Bryson
Foreword by John Elder
University of Utah Press, 2002
342 pp
Paper $19.95
ISBN 0-87480-701-8

The burgeoning field of ecocriticism is beginning to address the work of such ecopoets as Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, W. S. Merwin, and Wendell Berry, among others, whose poems increasingly deal with ecological and environmental issues. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction assembles previously unpublished contributions from many of the most important scholars in the field as they discuss the historical and crosscultural roots of ecopoetry, while expanding the boundaries to include such themes as genocide and extinction, the lesbian body, and postcolonialism. This volume gathers these necessary voices in the emerging conversation regarding poetry's place in the environmental debate.

"The essays are uniformly thoughtful, perceptive, and readable . . . [and] engage the current scholarship gracefully, without pretense or pedantry. Each chapter is stuffed with insights."
--John Tallmadge, The Union Institute

Contents and Contributors:
Regarding Silence: Cross-Cultural Roots of Ecopoetic Meditation - David Gilcrest, Carroll College
Emerson, Divinity, and Rhetoric in Transcendentalist Nature Writing and Twentieth-Century Ecopoetry - Roger Thompson, Virginia Military Institute
Landscape and the Self in W. B. Yeats and Robinson Jeffers - Deborah Fleming, Ashland University
William Carlos Williams, Ecocriticism, and Contemporary American Nature Poetry - Mark Long, Keene State College
Gary Snyder and the Post-Pastoral - Terry Gifford, University of Leeds
Earth's Echo: Answering Nature in Ammons's Poetry - Gyorgyi Voros, Virginia Polytechnic
"Between the Earth and Silence": Place and Space in the Poetry of W. S. Merwin - J. Scott Bryson
Panentheistic Epistemology: The Style of Wendell Berry's A Timbered Choir - Leonard M. Scigaj, Virginia Polytechnic
The Pragmatic Mysticism of Mary Oliver - Laird Christensen, Green Mountain College
"Everything Blooming Bows Down in the Rain": Nature and the Work of Mourning in the Contemporary Elegy - Jeffrey Thomson, Chatham College
Genocide and Extinction in Linda Hogan's Ecopoetry - Emily Hegarty, Nassau Community College
"The Redshifting Web": Arthur Sze's Ecopoetics - Zhou Xiaojing, State University of New York, Buffalo
In Her Element: Daphne Marlatt, the Lesbian Body, and the Environment - Beverly Curran, Aichi Shukutoku University
Postcolonial Romanticisms: Derek Walcott and the Melancholic Narrative of Landscape - Roy Osamu Kamada, University of California, Davis
A Woman Writing about Nature: Louise Gluck and "the absence of intention" - Maggie Gordon, University of Mississippi
How to Love This World: The Transpersonal Wild in Margaret Atwood's Nature Poetry - Richard Hunt, Mesabi Range College
Primary Concerns: The Development of Current Environmental Identity Poetry - Bernard W. Quetchenbach, Florida Southern College

From Library Journal:

In his comprehensive introduction, Bryson (Mount St. Mary's Coll., Los Angeles) traces the trajectory of nature as a theme in Western poetry, noting how it dominated in the centuries between Beowulf and Blake, took a dive in the age of Darwin, suffered at the hands of Frost and the other anti-Romantics, and eventually made a comeback thanks to Gary Snyder and the Beats. A subset of nature poetry, ecopoetry recognizes the interdependence of all creatures, views humbly the relation between human and nonhuman life, and cultivates skepticism toward the hyperrational, overtechnologized mindset that dominates present-day culture. The 17 essays that follow examine such classic poets as Emerson, Yeats, Jeffers, and William Carlos Williams; contemporaries like Snyder, W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, and Wendell Berry; and others who are lesser known. This first book by Bryson, who modestly terms it "a midterm report," is close to encyclopedic in its historical coverage as well as its attention to individual poets. Of special note is the concluding essay by Bernard W. Quetchenbach, which situates ecopoetry within the vast and varied landscape that is poetry today. For academic libraries. David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

 

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