the anthropocene lyric: an affective geography of poetry, person, place

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The Anthropocene Lyric

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The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, PlaceTom BristowUniversity of Melbourne, Australia

© Tom Bristow 2015

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saff ron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.Th e author has asserted his right to be identifi ed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.First published 2015 byPALGRAVE MACMILLANPalgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fift h Avenue, New York, NY 10010.Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN:978-1-137-36475-3 PDFISBN:978-1-349-57397-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.www.palgrave.com/pivot

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-36474-6

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This book is dedicated to Andrea Curtis

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Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1 Affective geography: poetry, person, place 2 Locating poetry in the Anthropocene 3 Ecopoetics and geocriticism 4 Place perception 5 More-than-human worlds 6 Anthropocene emotion 7 A different literary geography:

earth scripts 8 Literature and space 9 After Marxist geography 11 An Anthropocene paradigm of

place-based personhood 12 Anthropocene counterpoint 15 A renewed poetics of place 18

1 Jam Tree Gully 19 Affective geography: a preface 21 Attributes and affects: minority

geographies 23 The world of the jam tree 23 Decolonised pastoral 24 Location as focal point 26 Thresholds of knowing 29 ‘My plastic emotions’ or not ideas about

things 32 Affective arrays 33 Negative dialectics and a sacred kingfisher 34

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Contents

Warped empathy and radical pastoral 37 Discordant harmonies 39 Environmental empathy 40 A salutary conclusion 44

2 Gift Songs 47 The inscape of dialogical poetics: a prelude on place 49 Contextualising Burnside 51 Geography and the idea of order 53 Spatial spontaneity 53 Generative worlds; language and place 56 Urban history 57 The itinerant ‘I’ 58 Psychogeograpy and spirited materialism 62 Varieties of religious experience (1) 65 Stoical neighbourliness 65 Ecopoetic liturgy 67 Varieties of religious experience (2) 68 One enormous household: Rilkean hues 69 The situated creaturely life 71 A sanguine conclusion 75

3 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 77 Modulated uncountry: a prologue 80 Forming environmentally: the locus of labour 82 Environmental affect 84 Struggling for form 87 Spatialised struggle 89 Place-consciousness 91 Withness 93 Footholds 94 Belonging 97 Transformative poetics 97 Living bodies 98 Walking 99 An affective habitus 100 The corporealised imaginary 101 Subluminary habitus 102 Situated voices 103 A provisional conclusion 105

viii

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Contents

Conclusion 107 Poems of our climate 108 A word on history 109 A note on belonging 110 A sketch of selfhood 111 Reflections on Anthropocene personhood 113 Territory (as situatedness) 115 Estrangement (as settledness) 119 Identification (as discreteness) 120 Where next for the lyric imagination? 122

Glossary 124

Bibliography 130

Index 138

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Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the following publications in which some arguments of The Anthropocene Lyric first appeared, sometimes in a slightly different form: Aus-tralasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology; Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism; Scottish Literary Review; Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations; and Transnational Literature.

The Anthropocene Lyric is the result of four months’ work. It was drafted during a writing retreat at Kioloa Coastal Campus of the Australian National University (2013); the copy was revised during a research fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University (2014), and while I was a visiting lecturer in the Department of English, University of British Columbia (2014). I would like to thank the Australian National University, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, the Edith and Joy London Foundation, and the University of British Columbia.

This book would not have been possible without the assistance and encouragement of Sophie Ainscough, Xanthe Ashburner, Tully Barnett, Robyn Bartel, Ruth Blair, David Borthwick, John Burnside, Sally Bushell, Richard Cavell, David Cooper, Charles Dawson, Thom van Dooren, Benjamin Doyle, Sumathi Ellappan, Rachel Fensham, Henning Fjørtoft, Louisa Gairn, Debjani Ganguly, Greg Garrard, Paul Gibbard, Alan Gillis, Stephen Guy-Bray, Stephen Harris, Barbara Holloway, Greg Horsley, Graham Huggan, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Vidhya Jayaprakash, John

x

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Acknowledgements

Kinsella, James Loxley, Carol Major, Susan Manning, ‘Marx’, Freya Mathews, Timothy Morton, Lilian Pearce, Anne Pender, Elspeth Probyn, Tomas René, Kate Rigby, Deborah Bird Rose, John Ryan, Tracy Ryan, Ariel Salleh, Jane Southwood, Lee Spinks, Randall Stevenson, Stephanie Trigg, Josh Wodak and Gillen D’Arcy Wood. Special thanks to Peter Cudmore.

I remain indebted to my students at the University of Edinburgh, and to my mentors: Janet Lindsay, Ian Roberts, Gregory Beaven, Philip Shaw, and Susan Manning.

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Introduction

Abstract: Reconsidering the subject of poetry in the context of the Anthropocene discloses the contemporary lyric as an emotional mode of subject formation and place-making. The first section reveals how a new collocation of person and place invite us to consider a fresh formation in lyric poetry that assembles ‘place perception’, ‘more-than-human worlds’, and ‘Anthropocene emotion’ to rethink the age of the human in terms other than autonomy and self-determination. The second section then revisits the poetics of place within an enlarged sense of literary geography to offer the first ecocritical paradigm of Anthropocene personhood.

Keywords: Anthropocene; discreteness; ecopoetics; emotion; geography; lyricism; more-than-human; personhood; place-perception; settledness; situatedness

Bristow, Tom. The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137364753.0003.


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Affective geography: poetry, person, place

Responding to the cultural and environmental crises the term ‘Anthropocene’ shoulders, my purpose is to pose a single question: how to rethink our place on this planet? It is the responsibility of the acad-emy to challenge inherited ways of thinking, and to reshape the ways in which we conceive of the spaces we inhabit and share with others over time. The term Anthropocene marks a distinct geological epoch shaped by humankind; at the time of writing, it is unclear whether this term will define the third epoch in the Quarternary period, following the Pleistocene and Holocene, in the geologic time scale of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. It has, however, of significant interest to the arts and humanities, and the social sciences. From the perspective of the humanities, the metaphor of the Anthropocene asks us to think of the human as one part of the More-than-human world, which is to think of us not within the world but of the World; this position not only turns away from human instrumentalism but it shifts focus from the significance of human species to transcorporeality and personhood.1 Accordingly, this study draws three anchor points, namely ‘place percep-tion’, ‘more-than-human worlds’ and ‘Anthropocene emotion’. The first of these unpacks the politics of representation in the lyric, dominated by human perception and feeling looking out on a world. The second anchor point revisits ontological Dualism to highlight human and non-human interdependency, to be of the world. The third anchor, the idea of Anthropocene emotion, is less clearly defined in existing literature, but I will argue that it offers a fresh perspective to twenty-first century critical reviews of space, personhood and place. The production of space and the geographical imagination bring the unique qualities of human feelings into a new framework. Thickening our sense of time, process and scale – generic concepts with common currency in the discipline of geography – the fundamental coordinates of a progressive Anthropocene imaginary constitute an essential feedback mechanism that not only counters human exceptionalism and instrumental reason but contextu-alises human action within the long scale of evolutionary processes.

This introduction of Affect is the key to modulating the first two anchor points towards fruitful alignment; setting up the study as an appraisal of the contemporary lyric’s capacity to reanimate anthropocentric

1 Words and phrases in bold can be found in the glossary.

Introduction

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sensibility, and to gesture towards affective and sensory qualities that mediate empathy. This environmental context and its associated emo-tional contour are integral to our evolving capacity to invest experience with meaning. The poets at the centre of this study depict life that slips outside of an autobiographical frame, but that frame resonates in the poetry’s bodily action connecting with an affective and electric charge to place. The lyric moment is alert to the mutability of the observed and the observer, somewhat heightened in the context of the depleting world of the Anthropocene – a context alluded to in metaphors of human impact and presence. Glimpses of the connections between human subjectivity and the more-than-human world are wrought with a sensitivity to our predicament and yet are not overdetermined by it; a heightened con-sciousness is held close to the earth by poetic arcs resisting assimilation by political discourse. The Anthropocene Lyric responds to these literary qualities as a priority while aiming to take its place within a project that articulates a fresh turn in cultural studies, germane to the politics and discourses that orbit the inescapable reality of our shared destiny on a destitute planet.

Locating poetry in the AnthropoceneIn poetry, we are abnormally sensitive creatures; acutely and often dis-comfortingly attuned to perilinguistic wavelengths.2 The lyric registers personal, felt experience. Lyricism configures feelings and structures thought; it reflects on our capacities as humans to fulfil our potential for experiencing joy, surprise and delight while honestly admitting pain, grief and sadness into the home of our being. We are familiar with lyric poetry’s attendant limitations; in its cadences, harmonies, disjunctions and patterning we are remotely aware of song and voice as instructive modes and mediators of life in a world of potentiality, freedom and constraint.

To then contemplate the Anthropocene is to be reminded of the need to consider the human subject within the plight of biodiversity loss and species extinction, supervened by human-induced climate change. In contemplation we are mindful of the value of emotionally sensi-tive reports from the natural world and from folk histories rooted in the social traditions of the democratic formation of cultural memory.

2 Perilinguistic means ‘around language’, and refers to poetry’s capacity to evoke moods and sensory states.


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Ironically, this place-literate territory is nevertheless new ground for Anthropocene scholarship; to explore it, I turn to three volumes of poetry: John Kinsella’s Jam Tree Gully (2012), John Burnside’s Gift Songs (2007), and Alice Oswald’s A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009).

The Anthropocene lyric captures the emotions contingent upon historical relations to ask how we are located in these narrative commu-nities watermarked by planetary breakdown yet pregnant with new pos-sibilities. In the collections I have chosen to study, crisis is only implicitly evoked. More significantly, they bring forth body and mind in affective accounts of the contradictions and ethical complications in the turn of consciousness in the directions of feeling and intellect simultaneously. From here we can reconsider how the lyric’s perilinguistic bandwidth portends cognitive and intuitive possible worlds as a counterpoint to our contemporary understanding of place, which includes insight into the possibilities of placation and celebration in poetry. It is for us to take this insight to the question of the Anthropocene, our poets have but placed us on the cusp of this move. Apostrophe (turning away from the world to address an abstract idea) and appeasement (by the human, of the other ‘more-than-human’ world) are reconceived within contemporary nature poetry (sometimes transposed onto urban environments) to the extent that they establish new terms for the elegy and the ode: plaintive-ness for what has been forgotten and what can be praised, lost worlds to be lamented and remembered, and the emotional cost of such modes of expression. This ecological plaint, witness to our various modes of feeling, isolates moments of human experience and moments in the lyric with particular contemporary significance. And you are its witness.

Ecopoetics and geocriticismEcocriticism is concerned with the relationship between cultural practice (particularly literature) and physical geography. Geocriticism incorporates the study of space into the methods of literary analysis. This study keeps close with ecocriticism and yet it gestures towards the common ground ecocriticism and geocriticism share in their pursuit for a critique of our environments. The marginal contemporary impulse in twenty-first century scholarship that is ecocriticism, while more focused on the subject of ‘nature’ or ‘ecology’ than geocriticism, does not ignore disciplinary standards in hermeneutics that are clarified and expanded within geocriticism. Ecocriticism’s exegesis operates within

Introduction

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the confines of historical practices while drawing from multiple disci-plines to speak of ideas and their contexts. The goal of this study is to locate properties of texts within the moment of their making. My aim is to respect the arcs of structuralism and formalism, and the study of genre and mode; however, the resultant analysis is not reducible to any of these methods.

I am primarily concerned with contextual analysis, using texts and ideas to inform and challenge one another; this approach foments an intellectual instinct to tease out the relationship between the culture from which these texts emerge and the ways that literary language distin-guishes itself from the systems that order and represent human experi-ence. Poetry mediates between concrete reality and abstract ideas; in the Anthropocene lyric, central tenets and significant influences – mainly anti-humanism and existential phenomenology – are revisited with a view to invoke and invite the human into a fresh account of the environ-ment. Here, a few things change. Firstly, our sense of place is expanded into spatially generative accounts of human experience. These accounts critique phenomenology to sustain the import of acknowledging feel-ings and the limits to human empathy. Secondly, the humanist problem of accounting for human experience in our historical moment cannot remain ironic; thus, drawing from critical advances in the environmental humanities, literary analysis locates human experience and shows it to be part of the more-than-human world. And thirdly, the combination of these first two focal points clarifies lyrical possibilities for Anthropocene emotion.

Place perceptionThis small book has a simple underlying argument: the discipline of geography can learn from the way poetry implicitly articulates the sig-nificance of the experience of place to human emotions. This is how the lyric gives expression to the power of receiving and interpreting a sense of place through the creations of others. Geographers seek to understand the complexities behind the distribution of species, places and regions, human–land relations, and the complexities accounted for by the earth sciences (spheres and systems). I directly address that discipline-specific focal point.

The analysis of poetry in this context is thus oriented towards onto-logical concerns of our lifeworlds, but also with how poetry inhabits a


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nature of being itself. Ideas of connection and disconnection, diaspora and exile, union and division, harmony and discord – all central to a theory of place; all resident in subject, theme, spatiality, and form – are understood from a relational perspective in these three collections. It would be a cruel and short-sighted reduction to account for this aesthetic solely within the terms of identity politics, for it points to an ‘excess’ that is not protected by our politics. Sense of place, in the Anthropocene lyric, is an invocation of flawed communities that come into being not through common interests and values but, in Elizabeth Grosz’s words, ‘through the remainders they cast out, the figures they reject, the terms that they consider unassimilable, that they attempt to sacrifice, revile and expel’ (2001, p. 152).

More-than-human worldsEcopoetics, mobilised from this point onwards, is a synonym for contemporary poetry that exhibits a profound sense of selfhood as Worldliness. My approach will be to acknowledge the importance of the more-than-human world in the light of the Anthropocene: a context that is problematically defined by human centrality, power and import, which brings into relief other possible worlds through their very absence. The hubris of human existence and how we have conceived our agency has plummeted our future selves into mere shadows of what we can be. Sarah Whatmore coined the term ‘more-than-human’ as a focal alternative to the prevailing human/non-human perspective in bio (life) and geo (earth); it celebrates the ‘livingness’ of the world, in which life is technologically molten (Whatmore, 2006). It is in this space that we are required to rethink our personhood within a larger domain of life.

Lyricism is expansive in Jam Tree Gully, Gift Songs, and Sleepwalk on the Severn, and evokes a readier emotional response to place than the rhythms of music alone, appealing to intellectual intricacies and spiritual suggestions. Lyricism here is neither map nor guidebook to selfhood, nor does it delineate mind-body unity within landscapes that collapse a foreground-background distinction. The conquering gaze has been set aside. The poems under view invoke a fresh Standpoint that is keen to commute a quotidian sense of place into one that is alert to the environmental minutiae and contingencies of particular locales; and yet these micro-knowledges are harnessed by an observational Stance that is washed through with either historical or ecological context, and

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sometimes both. These contexts infer more-than-human presences in the shape of animals, birds, plants and minerals, the moon, the wind, the sun and stars. Their presence school the ‘I’ to be mindful of the ordinary as significant, as an indicator of the geological age and its cur-rent transformations. This refigured stance is suggestive of Ontopoetics, signifying an elasticised perspective of ‘individuality in the context of interconnectedness’ (Mathews, 1991, p. 3). This philosophical perspec-tive entertains an enlivened, intellectualised and Situated Knowledge of place as it is experienced, sometimes through trial and error, hardship and trenchant inquiry, and via chance and memory. When coupled with Anthropcene lyricism, place is felt as it is encountered as being lived out by others, by more than ourselves, by our situatedness in history and ecology. It is the space in which we best witness the fragility, beauty and indifference of flora and fauna, climate and season – the more-than-human world.

Anthropocene emotionThese three poets harness the capacity of the lyric as an embodied view of life conceived afresh to redress human–nature relations within a series of emotional contours, intellectual dispositions and broad environmen-tal contexts. ‘Human–nature relations’ is thus considered a false critical compound: ‘more than human worldliness’ replaces this episteme as we move towards a progressive lyricism of the Anthropocene. Place-making by humans within the more-than-human world in our historical moment is necessarily rewritten in terms of a looming darkness, of ‘imminent and unhappy endings’ where we are becoming ‘spectators of our own demise’ (Rose, 2013). Such making, however, can be coloured with human empa-thy for our earth others, which is imaginatively checked by suspended consciousness, sensitivity to presence, affective historical acuity and the expansion of the soul.

Our three collections tend to a particular aesthetic medium in which we function as humans with the greatest sympathy and felicity, where we reflect on the fallacies of security and property, and locate modes of feel-ing in which reflexive moments upon our critical faculties denote points of distrust, frustration and non-relation. Here we find ourselves drawing back from transcendent vision to realise new politics ‘in a way that holds on to the materiality of the everyday world’ (Salleh, 2005, p. 9). And this world, we find, is increasingly of our making.


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Here, human states of being present (as with others or in a place) is written out within a planetary context and yet this context is not ignorant of moments of solitude in private places – the domestic space, familial relations, and idiosyncratic and regional inflections. Situated in real activity, a focus on the emotions actually provides insight into the habi-tus, the sociological accounting of life as ‘the local connectedness of form and content ... the tangible aspect of human life ... in relation to the body and its material experience, the techniques of work, and the rhythmic enactment of ritual and symbolic performance’ (James, 1998, p. 15). More precisely, these intimate locales register life and environmental change for a planetary imaginary listening in on evolution demonstrating ‘the mutability and malleability of biology as against its permanence’ (Gibbs, 2010). We thus locate a dialogic site of speaking and listening, response and reflection, cues and action. While not the explicit theme of these poets, this theatre of the dialogic Anthropocene affords the reanimating of our social and cultural adaptation capacities in the light of ecological collapse. Our poets speak to these capacities.

A different literary geography: earth scripts

Do we think that the geographical imagination is something that should be left to geographers? Geography is the writing of place: etymologically it is ‘earth description’. Literary geo-graphies, or earth scripts – made by humans who are part of the earth – are therefore inherently self-conscious writerly descriptions of our spaces fleshed out by the more-than-human world. And these descriptions work at various scales: from a planetary imaginary that views earth within the context of the solar system to micro-ecologies in soils. Informed by (yet placed at one remove) from the insights of the earth sciences, earth scripts provide descriptions of habitat: an area, site, or space inhabited by a particular species of flora or fauna, or other types of organism. Step back from the micro-ecology to locate land and water formations; step back again and the view is of bioregions; again broaden the spatial perspective to envision continents, hemispheres and macro-regions; and again to complex interrelated earth systems before your final step arrives back at the iconic blue planet and its tidally locked moon orbiting the sun. All these different spatial scales can be written from the perspective of a multitude of timeframes; they can also be written with a combination of geo-political inflections, the

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lexis of traditional knowledge and folklore, and the terms of geography (distribution and complexity as articulated above). I am conceiving the Anthropocene lyric arise in a moment of environmental literacy regis-tering life across these scales.

Combine physical scale, Timescape, language and discipline, and earth scripts can be seen as an incredibly rich source of information. However, within the world of literature, at present, most literary geography is concerned with earth (not water), the novel (not the poem) and cultures within pre-existing named continents (neglecting indigenous communi-ties, oral cultures, and decolonised biological identities). This study is mindful of geography’s unique contribution to the earth sciences and social sciences; it can be read as a footnote to literary geographies that have argued for the destabilisation of the categories of localism, region-alism, nationalism and globalism by innovations in aesthetic forms and cultural formations. As indicated above, a new project of place-literacy is in view; an intentional critical move away from the present preoc-cupations of literary geography rethinking human belonging and place-making in the more-than-human world.

A complexified (and smaller scale) science-space-time compression is much more the creative territory of ecopoetics than a consolidated regional or continental model of place. And there is, of course, the ques-tion of the human scale in twofold: (i) how we relate to larger and smaller things than ourselves; (ii) how we conceive of biological formations more acute (micro, niche, unseen or present beyond our sense experiences) and obtuse (macro, systems-based, unfathomable or present beyond our cognitive timescapes) than that of our own corporeality and its immedi-ate material environment. Ecopoetics implicitly calls for a moment to reflect on how we imagine spaces and formations beyond the purview of the sense horizon, at pace enough to notice and acknowledge discrete entities and the emergence of our earth others. I place this imagination within the context of the Anthropocene.

Literature and spaceGeographies of literature suggest that it is possible to discern specific relations between writing and space. These can operate at a cultural and macroscopic level – mapping particular modes and genres in places – or they can operate at textual and microscopic level – taking the discipline of literary studies and its expertise regarding what might constitute


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a ‘text’ to the reading and practice of cartography. Cities can be read through recurring patterns of cultural action over time. Sophisticated emphases on the legibility of place take issue with genre and reconsider the technology of the novel as a tool to read our inhabited places. This cultural geographic work looks at particular aspects of places, such as class topography, public and private spaces (and how these are signified, understood and used) and how particular places give rise to discrete experiences. Literature has much to contribute here.

The point made by literary geographers is that richness, particularity and difference can be witnessed within the same named place; that space produces a multitude of experiences; and that places are an imagined combination or separation of co-existent spaces: heterotopologies. For example, London gives rise to a number of places that have unique socio-cultural landscapes, and each place has its unique narrative matrices: the East End, the city, zone 2, Westminster, St James and the Southbank etc. This polyphony of identities enriches and problematises our sense of the city as uniform. By comparison, ecopoetics locates singular places that have histories, present biological complexities, constraints and possibilities, which might look like a palimpsest of co-existent spaces yet they most profoundly suggest continuum – not singularity – and interdependence; the meeting and integration of communities, and dif-ferences either side of an ecotone or bioregional boundary.

More interestingly, in its tendency to survey large amounts of creative works, the academic discipline of literary geography – with its emphasis on literary modernism – clearly articulates the unforeseen, and it dem-onstrates how novels are tools and minds that read places. Are these studies geometries of fictional truths? Consider the poverty of waterside people and the degrading conditions of the Thames’ muddied streets as viewed by Dickens’ narrative; notice the frustration of movement due to the colonisation of Hackney by the London Olympics and Paralympics, as critiqued by Iain Sinclair (Bristow, 2015b). Walking through these streets is a political and cultural experience. A city such as London has multiple histories, a dense anatomical evolution and multiple phases of design and planning. Thus, mapping a collated human experience of this space, in distinct districts, over discrete time periods offers a plurality of infinite Londons, unrecognised by the heritage and commercial narra-tives of landmarks most present to us. Such mapping offers a mosaic of the urban surface while reminding us how this city has been navigated and represented, ravaged and manipulated, and thus how it has entered

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into our cultural imaginary, which informs our disposition to the place. There is a lot to consider here. Let’s begin.

After Marxist geographyThe critical left argues for an analysis of international relations in the context of imperialism across environments (for example, tropical and subtropical environments), with an emphasis on the disempowerment of indigenous populations, migration, slavery, and resource-based socio-economic models. Ecocriticism is more deft and sensitive with its critique of resources, biology, matter and mind than its forebear; and yet there is no labour without nature. The gap between The Anthropocene Lyric and the discipline of regional studies is huge. And while ecopo-etics is a long way from the geopoetics of the nation and its domestic and foreign policies, it is also rarely accessible at the scale of a region; it is too discrete. Ecopoetics is thus two steps away from a postcolonial literary geography as it has been understood thus far. However, this is not to state that ecopoetics cannot be aligned to postcolonial criticism and Marxist Geography. It is clear that ecopoetics will benefit from the spatial anaylsis of geocriticism with this historical materialist project in mind.

An updated materialism that rebukes the idea of nature as something that humans can view as external, no longer independent from us, yokes the social and national scale of cultural studies to new scales of spatial relations where human beings are transforming themselves and their lifeworld; nation states are transforming the biological and climate con-ditions of other nation states without contractual agreement. Welcome to the Anthropocene. There is an opportunity here to enfold the cri-tique of Cartesian dualism inherent to ecopoetics within an awakened Marxist geography. At present, literary studies are more closely linked to critiques of cultural and national identity as informed by history rather than by particular topographies, geologies and bioregional or meteoro-logical concerns. Coupled to these marginalised focal points in cultural studies would be a sincere engagement with new materialism and non-representational theory. Ecopoetics and geocriticism are one step ahead of literary studies in these areas.

Our mode of inquiry into models of ecosocial relationships, the sense of environment as process, and ethical frameworks including human accountability to the environment, gives rise not to static identity


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formations but to a sense of place as informed and transformed by sensi-tivity and emotion. Responsive to loss and wonder, our hermeneutics can explore questions of settlement and travel in terms such as wayfinding and transhumance; in addition to interfacing with traditional disciplines in the humanities we can extend to critical plant studies, critical animal studies and biosemiotics. Ecocriticism and cultural geography meet here, in a project that is less spatial historiography, more an inquiry into the world viewed as a mesh of environment and its inhabitants subject to the mechanisms and impacts of capitalist exploitation that underlie more-than-human spatial arrangements. Its understanding of place, people and planet does not need to stand on its own.

An Anthropocene paradigm of place-based personhoodThe Anthropocene metaphor is a prompt to envision the more-than-hu-man world beyond our conceptual frameworks and our hubristic sense of purpose. Human instrumentalism and our flawed epistemologies and dichotomies need to reason with a renewed human consciousness alive to our sciences and our modes of dwelling with others. We cannot drop the human; equally, we can no longer elevate the human species to the top of the tree of life. We can no longer consider the human as other to a world of nature that is out there as background and resource for us – a world that is external to us, confident and self-defined in its autonomy. Such worlds no longer exist for us. It is unlikely that they ever did, and yet we lived by them.

With these ideas in view, the discipline of the observation of nature within ‘new nature’ writing of the twenty-first century remains a political act that is increasingly challenged to resituate the human in places alive to our Reckoning of landscapes and spaces mindful of planetary break-down. To reaffirm the world in its complexity, and to account for our accounting of the human’s place within this world, appears to be the next challenge for contemporary poetry, too. Ethically, planetary problems might ‘come home’ to us if our sense of the household was larger than the dwelling place at which we reside; if our duty of care extended beyond our families to the planet and its inhabitants over the next millennium, we might have a more relevant sense of Oikos for the challenges raised by environmental crisis. Poetry prepares us for this challenge.

Ecology – the word, reason and thought of our household (oikos + logos) – is a discipline that informs a new cultural poetics of the second half of the twentieth century. This discipline urges an upscaling of the

Introduction

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dominant unit of (human) survival from the individual and the domestic to the social and the environmental; it points towards humans as spe-cies alongside other species but it must resist cultural homogenisation through sensitivity to difference and local nuance (biological and cul-tural), which the focus at the level of species (as with the Anthropocene) might neglect. The new ecological impulse promotes four areas of study understood in the humanities as potentially dissident sites of philosophi-cal and ethical resistance to dominant cultural modes of thinking.

Once clearly articulated and illustrated by various fields in the humanities – particularly literature, history and philosophy – these four areas of study can be taken to the question of geography to reframe anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene. They are as follows:

(i) situatedness – how the human is situated within its habitat: considering evolutionary processes of adaptation, how environments restrict and afford particular life forms and life ways, how a (less biologically informed) sense of the production of space articulates the ways humans creatively move through more-than-human spaces, and how we make places out of our individualised, community-based, globalised and more-than-human relations (and imaginaries);

(ii) settledness – how ‘home’ is defined and constructed: a question that ranges from how we feel at home in ourselves and at home in physical spaces that are interconnected to planetary systems – drawing from the amount of time and quality of experiences that we have dwelt within and encountered the more-than-human in these spaces or remained solitary; how we make emotional and territorial signposts in our personal memories and in cultural memory; how heritage industries both portend constructed identity narratives with various nuances that operate both by stealth and by imposition, and register biodiversity, ecosystem services, regional qualities of environments (and how this industry is complicit with the governance of these qualities); the degrees to which such identities and registers either fail or succeed to increase emotional literacy and ecological wisdom for local and global projects in the context of the Anthropocene;

(iii) discreteness – where (or whether) borders or divisions exists between mind and body, body and world, human and other, space and place: here, conceptual, biological and cultural formations are reviewed and deconstructed in an archaeology of human sense making (based on a compressed sense of situatedness


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and settledness taken together) that clarifies the reliance upon economies of difference and static socio-historic formulations within epistemological fallacies that precede (and are partly accountable for) the Anthropocene;

and finally

(iv) placehood – the degree to which we reflect on the other three ideas to develop a critical position on how sense experience constitutes our mental worlds, and how earth’s physical ecology is interrelated with our mental ecology: a threefold stress on individuality, culture and environment that might articulate an affective habitus.3

The interior psychological processes (personal mental worlds) and exte-rior cultural formations (interrelations) are conceived through the tech-nology of literary genres when the human figure is placed in view and measured by degrees of solitary, communal and bioregional Attunement to – and confinement by – place. Memory (personal and cultural) and linguistic and artistic developments over time embody these external factors: they produce places that act as indicators of our creative evolu-tion, the capacity to exercise critical consciousness alongside our desire to name and navigate the depleted world before us. The Anthropocene lyric oscillates between explicit and implicit modes in this very space.

These sites might be collated together and considered as intercon-nected elements within a new Anthropocene paradigm of place-based personhood. They coalesce around a single idea: the unit of survival in the bio-taxonomy of the Anthropocene, as indicated above. Environmental discourses frame survival in terms of sustainability and biodiversity; however, a new model of the mind-world dynamic, understood as para-digmatic analogue of the ‘organism plus environment’, suggests a series of units and differences that are under threat and not fully responsive to system feedback; indicating that the dominant species is no longer proportionate and relative to its home, and is out of synch with the rate of global change and acceleration. The history of ideas will understand the ecopoetic counterpoint to geography as an extension of this model.4

3 Guattari, F. (2008). The Three Ecologies (new ed.), London: Continuum.4 Ursula Heise argues that the provision of ecological security needs to become a core

component of responsible global citizenship, and thus challenges the localism of much ecocriticism concerning home places. See Heise, U. K. (2008). Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Ecopoetics, conceived within this four-part paradigm, can be neither socially conservative nor a lyrical song of the earth performed in a politi-cal vacuum. It may not be necessary to eradicate sentimentality, nostal-gia and pathetic fallacy in our age – perhaps it is time to rewire these modes! – yet the more than problematic legacy of toxic capitalism and how it might overdetermine these affective modalities requires a clear lens on how the human is located within the appearance of the world in its many manifestations. Moreover, the question of human projections – particularly issues with voice, identity and emotional control that signify an autonomous and dominant human subject – are filtered through an anti-anthropocentric lens measuring lyrical Comportment (the placing of the ‘I’ as pronoun and symbolic humanist agent) within this genre. As indicated in ecocriticism’s interest in the appearance or presence/presencing of humans within the world – significant and supercharged in an Anthropocene context – lyricism can be read in the light of the body of knowledge that we have witnessed in the arts and humanities since we first reflected on what humans saw when they looked at an image of the blue planet viewed from space. This ecological philosophy can interface with a theory of place, as suggested by the Anthropocene paradigm above. Poetry alert to these contexts refashions itself in this affective mirror. New lyrical apertures on lifeworlds temporarily bracket the oikos from historical experience as a means to reconnect feelings to historical materialist consciousness once spatialised, thus camouflaging (or ironising the veil of) Romantic subjectivity by thickening and unrav-elling human to more-than-human relations that can be appreciated methodologically (and meticulously) for new modes of signification and poetic effects that dispel dualism and evaluate agency.

Anthropocene counterpointAlice Oswald, John Kinsella and John Burnside inquire into the various ways we make connections with places, and how place informs our modes of connection to, respect for, and movement through space. These poets are concerned with interiorised subjectivity and its potential relation-ship with an external world. They are interested in the conception of this problem for it can permit a false dichotomy between nature and culture; it can establish a two-fold dualism between mind and world, human and other that underlines a binary opposition between thinking and feeling while also endorsing a Cartesian split between affect (conceived as raw


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material) and emotion (conceived as raw material ‘processed’ into a life story and the language of its social mores). Working within the lyric tra-dition, these poets make it transparent that their poems are aware of any subject position that might be viewed as separate or authoritative; they write against those very specific modes of personhood and causality. And the alternative modes are exactly what I claim as the Anthropocene lyric, for I am speaking of this as a cultural counterpoint to the political right, to eco-modernist ideology, and to human domination.

Oswald is interested in commenting on the remove from the subject-object position. Her ‘I’ is frequently located at the point where conscious-ness of a mind looking out on a world is quite easily made less reflective (less abstracted) or less different (in union or continuum with others). It is in this precise location that the poet has most fun: pointing towards potential abstraction and gesturing towards ontological change. These insights delimit her particular strategies for stepping outside of the self, for the performance of lyrical meta-consciousness and for allowing the environment to speak itself. These strategies in Oswald, Kinsella and Burnside invoke the more-than-human world and elicit Anthropocene personhood. Uniquely, Oswald explains the observation of the very Presence, Presencing of this phenomenon within the world external to the lyric, and the world of the lyric intrinsic to the quality of her collation of folk histories of river dwellers. Oswald’s unique ‘I’ is witnessed step-ping out of an individualised consciousness into a communal, historical sound map of place-based observations and experiences that inhabit a choral quality of the more-than-human bioregion.

Kinsella’s ‘I’ is the most rooted and emplaced, both physically and morally than that of either of the other poets. His poems jump to principled positions most immediately, locating a subject in the world that is seen completely, and yet ironically, for its incompleteness or brokenness; and this subject is partly composer of and composed by the scene. Kinsella’s lyrics secure us; they identify everything for us, including that which eludes us. His solid sense of a destabilised self subject to environmental change asks what it is in the human condition that can raise ecological consciousness while remaining deeply tied to the land that concerns us. Kinsella shows and then talks through this point of meta-consciousness. Here, reflective moments often transform from ethical vantage point into arrays of images that are symbolic of ecological exchanges pregnant with the implications of human action; sometimes the reflective lyric is shattered by an anarchical bottom-up

Introduction

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approach that foregrounds the array as a telescopic metaphor, its quali-ties and its mindful assemblage set in the foreground by the lyrical ‘I’. Most intriguingly, despite such convincing emplacement, Kinsella’s volume is unparalleled in its essayistic qualities: generally analytic yet exceptionally interpretative and deftly speculative. The poet’s handling of the many ways to combine these two approaches and the transitions between these two modes is dazzling, rarely producing jaggered or chequered lyricism unless this befits the moment.

Burnside has a comparatively larger sense of lyrical comportment to the world than Oswald and Kinsella, for he neither talks about it nor explains it: he takes the reader to that place in which it dwells. This is achieved by a particular presencing of the world that has diluted human subjectivity. The reader is transported to a place of witness and feeling where there is no possibility of shutting down the dramatic and tense feeling of responding to the potentiality within things. Things of the more-than-human world, underscored by the gravitas of presencing, arrive in arrays of immanence and counter illustration. Here, para-doxically micro-managed in the poetic line, things present themselves in their own terms. Place is thus configured by the foregrounding lebenswelt in Burnside’s ecopoetics. Lineation, white space and a concerted use of couplets and triplets enable the lifeworld to register in glimpses where readers are brought to the brink of wordlessness. This would ordinar-ily signify a paradox if consciousness was viewed as a state stuck at the level of scripture yet tentatively aware of a world beyond this heightened scripted consciousness. However, cracks, fissures and ellipses in language promote the site of a moving mind where things in the world reside in their own moments of presencing or within false (or flawed) human categories, as with Kinsella. Here, the lyrical frame slips from the ego to the feelings that reside within the body. This gives rise to an exterior consciousness looking at the poem, promoting empathy between reader, voice and life within the scene of witnessing.

Lyricism in these collections invokes an Anthropocene consciousness looking at the worldliness of reflective consciousness within the scene of the poem at the point of amplified silence and intellectual limits; here the project of securing a world is impossible. This breakdown questions the nature of presencing within the lyrical mode in our contemporary context. In Oswald we note a transparent, co-emergent ‘I’ at this point; in Kinsella, a crisp and critical edge syncopates our feelings; in Burnside the moment itself asks ‘to what is the nature of presencing’?


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A renewed poetics of placeWhile we are very keen to see how human subjectivity and cultural for-mations are written out at poetic altitude, we remain aware of poetry as an art form that can potentially reify ideas, make thoughts once abstract now material. We look at how poetry treats self-awareness, emotional expression, ecological literacy; we notice how this treatment is alert to the impacts of environmental management (for example, from small-scale husbandry to intensive farming). In so doing we notice historically constructed literary canons, libraries, dominant modes of thinking; normative values and clusters of populations that give rise to a wide range of lifestyles that are all unrealities or imagined communities in their own ways. To put this quite simply: poetry is a human act, and as readers interested in the state of the planet currently under the sway of human influence more than any other species, we are keen to trace the impact of language on the environment; to keep our attention strong on the cost of syntax in the age of attention deficits. This keenness is acute in the humanities, particularly as we feel that our sense of place and our respect for places and their inhabitants is in part drawn from our ideas, images and words for places – in addition to the environment and ecolo-gies themselves. Content thus with this ongoing dilemma settled into the animating background of our poetic worlds, we can enter into language again, anew, awakened, alert to the Anthropocene.

The following chapters show how the poems are always question-ing the moment of sensory perception in affective and existential light attending the historical moment. We might name this poetic compres-sion historico-ecophenomenology, or we might choose to unpack the liter-ary imagining of emotional standpoints in the more-than-human world. Taken together, these collections illustrate the ways that these three poets orbit contemporary ecological ethics while bringing to bear their own unique lyrical techniques to engage modes of dwelling within landscape as a counterpoint to normative descriptions of the earth’s places.

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1Jam Tree Gully

Abstract: I argue that emphases on personal, felt experiences in John Kinsella’s Jam Tree Gully enact the simultaneous writing of habitat and pained husbandry in the WA landscape; it is a strategy that delimits the ethical grounds from which we can think of our limited pacts with others. This entails observing Kinsella’s relationship between ideas and things, referents in the landscape scene of domesticity and community, before gesturing towards a renewed sense of empathy and pragmatism for the Anthropocene.

Keywords: empathy; habitat; husbandry; John Kinsella; pragmatism



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Pastoral in the specific case of Australia is twofold – a construct to recreate European, specifically English, rural power structures, the reconfiguring of ‘home’ in an alien landscape. Such landscape-usage comes out of a politics of oppression and degradation of indigeneity. A new pastoral must come out of this that re-examines what constitutes the rural space and how that is mediated. (Kinsella and Stewart, 2003, p. 12)

The internationally renowned ecological poet, John Kinsella, polarises the academic community and his public. His work is a political project fusing ethics and poetics, drawing reader and critic into heated debates and the emotional terrains of environmental crisis. His works are unrelenting in their pursuit for an honest literary witness of landscape in the aftermath of colonial practices and in the context of neo-colonial policies. To enter into the intellectual terrain of Kinsella’s world, more anarchic than recalcitrant, is to make a commitment to confronting the complexities of writing in our age, simultaneously critiquing and reach-ing out to the community at large.

Jam Tree Gully is the first volume in a trilogy that records the dif-ficulties of ethically settling a piece of land in the fragile bioregion of Western Australia, part of the Southwest Australian savannah ecoregion.1 The conflict between urban attitudes and bush culture, distilled into the incommensurable values of environmentalism and agrarian development, provides a suitable political backdrop and aes-thetic foreground to Kinsella’s exploration of pastoral. The collection invokes a diaristic precision of attention to the micro, but with equal interests in global cultural contexts and an individuated perceiving consciousness, it is warped by a particular paranoia: that of repeating past (European) human practices – literary and agricultural – and of the present impact of our words and deeds in the context of habitats modified by climate change, invasion ecologies and blindness to indigenous cultures.

1 At the time of writing, Jam Tree Gully 2 and 3 were separate volumes emerging as Firebreaks; Jam Tree Gully 4, a parallel piece to the trilogy (rather than an ending) was in the process of composition. Poems cited in this chapter are from volume 1 unless otherwise stated. References to unpublished material are made with thanks to John Kinsella.

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Kinsella meditates on the question of how to be involved in all that is around us while allowing the world its own expression. The col-lection’s merit lies in its emphasis on witnessing the location, which is inscribed through an ethical distance and an emotional modality ‘in situ’. Planetary and local simultaneously, much like the geographic location; the volume is a site for all these questions and paradoxes to play out.

Affective geography: a preface

The physical location ‘Jam Tree Gully’ is not immediately present in the collection. Humans taking leave of the city, crossing its borders into an elsewhere, delimit the location of concern in space. As with classical pastoral, home does not begin to exist without a rupture to one’s conception of settlement, without journeying and movement. The dwelling place comes into being through the arrival of a family withdrawing from urban surroundings and purposively and delicately integrating themselves into an environment that comes into view before them, slowly. Wind blows through the valley at night; fire lights the day, the figures are set in vibrant, flickering chiaroscuro. A moody and at times paranoiac pen and ink landscape unhurriedly coloured by an emergent poetics of identity eventually develops into a series of short lyrics delimited by a sustained poetic voice of the observing surveyor of the land.

To be in place, we learn, is to be in dialogue with the space one inhabits and to be sensitive to time past and time future. This is to be engaged in the fullest of senses; it is to be occupied. The poem’s eye in every line of this collection is occupied with its work, as if pastoral (literature and husbandry) are at one equal practices and yet inappropriate and perhaps even unethical. The genre is European in heritage; Jam Tree Gully’s expansive agricultural space is dry, dusty and deadly owing to the continuing clearing of native forests that began in the nineteenth century. The land and its conditions subse-quently occupy stanzas within a confrontationally blunt politics of engagement. In one sense the land decolonises the (inherited) liter-ary space by pressing upwards from the soil of Jam Tree Gully; from its inhabitants, flora and fauna, the properties of climate, and the relations between things. All these invite new ways of considering


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the question of location and common ground. This decolonised sense of ‘occupation’ is shot through with conflicted emotions as the politics of territorialisation and property ownership loom in every poem.2

* * *I want to be sensitive to the gully’s cultural history and its particular capacities to afford a home to the Ryan and Kinsella family, which brings to light daily pragmatic challenges of settling their block of land under increasing ecological pressure. The location speaks explicitly of destroyed landscapes, the loss of sacred sites, toxic pastoral and climate change. The first section of this chapter argues that the emphasis on personal, felt experience in Jam Tree Gully enacts the making of habitat underscored with the song of environmental destruction coupled with a pained hus-bandry in the WA landscape. Subjects speak of their joy and terror as they contribute to the tales about the space, its buildings, the flora and fauna; they harness the sweeping views that drop into the gully and the breezes that carry mellifluent birdcalls and the estrangement of fire. In the next section that is attentive to global (international) and local (WA) relations, Kinsella’s mode of engagement with landscape is discussed in terms of ecology and emotion which combine into a vitalised geometry that fleshes out the experience of place.

I move on to argue that an emphasis on the properties and relations of things in discrete points in space (animals, birds, people, objects in the environment) betokens an affective geography that clarifies degrees of involvement with others in place. I use this as a platform to look at Kinsella’s relationship between ideas and things, referents in the land-scape scene of domestic husbandry constituting a climate-sensitive autoethnography that stabilises an atmospheric sense of subjective place (Bristow, 2013).

The chapter closes with a renewed sense of empathy and pragmatism for the Anthropocene. I suggest that there is something more entrancing than local detail in Kinsella’s Anthropocene expression of a more-than-human world; location and craftwork register as one and the same,

2 See Kinsella, J. (2013c). ‘Property Is Theft’ Doesn’t Belong to Proudhon, in J. Kinsella, & G. Collier (Eds.), Spatial Relations: Essays, Reviews, Commentaries, and Choreography (Vol. 2, pp. 383–385), Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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delimiting ethical grounds from which we can evaluate our limited pacts with others.3

Attributes and affects: minority geographiesGeography, conceived as a product of experience, is a qualitative con-struct that denotes location as a multivalent locus for the ways in which people feel and understand the places in which they live and act. Jam Tree Gully creates the space of experience in the same ways that attention to landscape permits the construct (‘land-scape’) to be viewed from the bottom–up: a position that is sensitive to minute formations: insects, nests, footholds, cloud formations, cracks in the infrastructure; sensitive to unstable and mixed emotions alongside chinks in language speaking out from hidden crevices and from the margins. There is an epic gravitas even down to the most discrete detail in Jam Tree Gully; it fixes one’s attention on every last inflection, enjambment, half rhyme and title. There is a world in each grain of dust, each beat of the line, every intake of breath and each bead of sweat.

The world of the jam treeAunt Kay’s face got red in the light from jamwood logs. The wood smelled like raspberry jam when it lay on the hearth, and like toast when it was burning (Stow, 2009, p. 56)

Jam trees, Acacia acuminata, are named for their smell, reminiscent of berries when burning. The non-human other, a genus of shrubs, defines the sensory location for Jam Tree Gully. They, not human his-tory, are its central characteristic. And yet the descriptive name taken from a property of something only evident under certain conditions (the emission of the smell of raspberries under heat) metonym-ically invokes climate change and, by extension, human practice. Furthermore, this topnym is a potential symbol of things to come: the ever-present threat of fire in the dry landscape, which is an absolute pressure within the wheatbelt. In Jam Tree Gully, Kinsella’s focus on nature suggests human presence.

3 This combination is duly detailed across a number of Kinsella’s volumes in Mengham, R., & Phillips, G. (Eds.), (2000). Fairly Obsessive: Essays on the Works of John Kinsella, Perth: Centre for Studies in Australian Literature.


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The symbolic world within the jam tree is a world that has heralded devastation since the first European pastoralists projected their fallible sense of space onto the location. The conditions that lie in the wake of colonialism and contemporary bush clearing (for farming, leisure and real estate) subtend the short-sighted and disconnected situational eth-ics of the dwellers in the domain. The tempo of Kinsella’s lyrical ‘I’ is deeply committed to moral fibre; his poetics is acutely aligned to the phenomenon of firestorms, owing to the microclimates of ill-conceived husbandry over time. The politics of custodianship in this light entails ‘being part of a mantra of witness and empowerment’ (Kinsella, 2010, p. 3). The collection directly answers the problem of those ‘glimpses of the incidental and discounted dimensions of imperialism’, as Tom Griffiths calls them, that we come across in our research into the history of land use in Australia (Griffiths, 1997). How might these glimpses take us back to the nature of economies, the arena of habitat, competition; do we need a sense of the countryside as ‘environment’ and the sense of nature as ‘ecology’ as provided by ecocriticism, here?4 And if so, can these refinements in literacy help us speak of bonds, connection, disconnection and loss; do they infer or embody emotion, place? These compelling questions colour the anarchical ethos of Kinsella’s project that elects broad surveying of the domain over narrow accountability.

Decolonised pastoral

The situated microknowledge that is Jam Tree Gully is linked to the ques-tion of the task of preserving what little life exists in the site without repeating the impact of colonial history through a practical husbandry. Kinsella’s interpretation of pastoral remarks upon the translation of spatial dynamics from its European forebears (control, order, cultural determinism) to the Australian context (destruction, dispossession, exclusion). The displacement and relocation of class conflict in the white imaginary – the settlement of WA – is further troubled by the presence of indigenous peoples in place of occupation and settlement. In this light, a new world pastoral of the bottom–up, decolonised by a minority mode

4 See Gifford, T. (2013). Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral, and Post-Pastoral, in L. Westling (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment (pp. 17–30), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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can create fresh dialogue, as Kinsella notes: ‘an exchange, a discourse between differing voices and points of view within the landscape picture’ (Kinsella, 2008, pp. 131–132).

This imaginary extends to the landscape-scale view of Jam Tree Gully and to each precise and local event within the domestic dwelling space and its immediate environment – the neighbours and the community. Here questions of ownership, control and care vibrate, toxically. At times they reach fever pitch that knowingly comes close to cultural breakdown and personal fragmentation or schizophrenia. The line at times is very much aware of this cultural condition: ‘See, that’s it, there’s no/room for imagination when/things are so on edge, prospects so extreme’ (‘The Immolation of Imagination’ 14–17).

The pastoral’s microknowledge of biological phenomena (tree, flower, bird, algae on watertank) preserve the space of the speaker’s subjectivity. As with Oswald and Burnside, in Kinsella’s aesthetic we are invited into understanding how the poetry speaks of examples of subjectivity and how these examples can come into being, both in the world and in the space of the poem. Place writes up the human here; the poem reaches out to us. Such implicit readerly sensitivity in Jam Tree Gully often trig-gers the inclusive interpersonal pronoun ‘we’.

It’s a month since we’ve been hereand dandelions have confirmed a rampantoccupation: in lieu of us, as vanguard,eyes to the eyes of our boots. (‘Higher Laws’ 1–4)

For all the emphasis on place, Jam Tree Gully is an exegesis of personhood. And yet events in the text are responses to spatial stimuli; they foreground referents and ecological contexts that herald a literary-material tropism. Kinsella’s referents are always-already active agents. In this poem, the non-native plant is equal to the human subject at least in terms of survey-ing the scene – but do they see eye-to-eye, one is expected to ask? Human hubris, thus derailed from overseer to displaced personhood sketched out horizontally not vertically, invokes a sense of freedom that comes from the unpacking of security (to be fixed in place) and embracing the various moments that reside in these spaces. This complex ground turns human subjects into objects for contemplation and reflection.

One of these turnings in the mind, the phenomenological moment entertaining and ruminating over the object in view, only comprehends images rather than securing the meaning of an image on the way to


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unifying or consolidating a pictorial array. Kinsella is grasping at things, encompassing objects within an open process that is held close by the poetic view of the domain. Here, the decolonised poetics of witness and acknowledgement works well with such open processes, for it does not have to register a secure and finished story. Always: the focus on what is and what inheres in things. Never: metanarrative, plot develop-ment, argument, a single determining event, inherited form. Here, the homogenous regional landscape is betrayed and the self is imagined in relational terms, not autonomous terms.

Location as focal point

I write poetry of ‘in situ’ and also ‘at a distance’, but ... this is a complex equa-tion and no binaries; they are both elements of the ‘cloud’ that makes up ‘International Regionalism’. And I am not simply co-opting a techno-fetish by saying ‘cloud’, though I might be ironizing it. In essence, the ecologies I construct around the lens to biosphere collapse, the ‘damage done’ ... are silhouetted through the costs of technologizing. (Kinsella, 2014)5

The Jam Tree Gully trilogy documents Kinsella’s project in self-reliance, undertaken on the edge of the Avon Valley, at the northwestern tip of the Darling Ranges, overlooking the Victoria Plains wheatlands, in southwestern Australia. The focus is on selfhood, region, ecosystem or particularised angles on flora and fauna. Here selfhood is political consciousness, and thus consciously beyond nature. Place poetry is seen inscribing itself in between the gaps caused by the breakdown between humans and terrain; it is felt negotiating the fetishisation of nature, har-mony, an ‘interactive’ self.

Oswald takes time to show you the perspective of the wood from the outside and the inside; her maps of the river are drawn from deeply affective relationships expressed through the language of people meet-ing each other in spaces defined by the presence of the moon. Burnside brings you into the poetic consciousness that details cultural breakdown while holding onto material and ecological relations within a sense of

5 It is unfortunate that there is not room in this study to outline Kinsella’s International Regionalism. For more information see Kinsella, J. (1998). International Regionalism and Poetryetc. Retrieved 23 May 2014 from http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/international.html; Kinsella, J. (2007). Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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a continuum between things. Kinsella’s voice is concerned with real referents, how things either fit in with others or can be seen aligning themselves to the (ecological) affordance that unfolds in the world: ‘“the complimentarity” of the animal and the environment’ (Gibson, 1979, p. 127). This concern clarifies dwelling as struggle and exchange. It is life impacting upon life; and it is also about language written in the face of disaster. The net result is a composed neurosis imagining ‘that in the moment of unbearable loss there is a supervening ethics that is not inimical to expression’ (Hughes-D’Aeth, 2012, p. 22).

Kinsella’s witnessing of unfolding facts is not simply a reduction to things themselves absent of transcendence; it is a showing up of things in immanent situations and ecological contexts that reminds us more completely of how ‘we fail as historians in the very act of attempting to salvage what has happened from the gut of consequence’ (ibid., 23). These acts suggest that poetry might do better.

The biospherekeeps the particles of the deadclose to prayers, indifference, non-belief. Atmosphere preventsthem being lost, escaping, dilutingin the vacuum, the slow gravitationalurge to find another planetary home. (‘Reading’ (1) 20–26)

The poem reads the potential for fire that is caused by the clearance of the bush for the leisure of noise-polluting scramble bikers and the potential danger that can be sparked into life by their combustion engines running over the desperately dry terrain. It speaks in abstraction of the currents of human presence and the implication of our technologies. It is a deeply contemplative version of the contamination metaphor that conjures up the ghosts of displaced (and later enslaved) aboriginal communities, which in turn speaks of degrees of cultural alienation for aboriginals and for the Kinsella family (American, Australian, Irish heritage).

Alienation is replayed much later in the collection within a reflective moment on the sub-symbolic character of affect: ‘An immense sadness/flooded over me and ‘the local’ meant something/outside geography, outside words’ (‘The Qualities of Sadness’ 36–38). The pastoral space as ‘other’ constructed by the ultimate metonym for power, the city, is always-already under threat by the very force that required its imagin-ing; here, this utopian space is clearly dropped as an alternative space


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to the polluted, war-ridden urban space, for it cannot exist alone: a new planet is required in these dark times. In this context, the disconnec-tion or lack of ‘common ground’ (39) between the voice of the poem – a clear ethical outsider to common practice in the area – and an alcoholic farmer clarifies that sharing a valley with neighbours does not neces-sarily lead to neighbourliness. This sadness (manifest in the emotional contours of first person lyricism) signifies an extension from colonialism to planetary breakdown.

In this poem, fire is indistinguishable from its bio-cultural context – climate change. To conserve trees is to encourage cloud formations, and to negate further despoliation of the already overly dry environment. Fire wardens dismiss this ecological attitude and reject any calls for conservation. A ‘real emptiness’ (5) reflects the inheritance of colonial land clearance, ‘open space joins open space/and you can see it all spread productively from space’ (9–10):

accruals on a planet getting hotter day by day,with lengthening fire seasons that erasecalendars and equinoxes and cities like Londonor Hanoi or Baghdad or Nagasaki or Hiroshima or Dresden:each street planned with urban attitudes,each flame risen above the scorched multitudes. (‘Urban Attitudes in the Bush?’ 11–16)

Kinsella’s lyrical personhood is bitter. We are invited to be angry with our failures. Pain is often close by any thought on place, which in this poem extends outwards to extreme human suffering. In such light it is something of an emotionless platitude to argue that the way we impose changeable perceptual grids on the places we encounter transforms space into a site of meaning for our projections that might disconnect us from deep time and recent history. We delete places; turn them empty. Like fire trails, our lines of poetry invoke the plough lines and the wake of our failed future-proofed husbandry of space.

The topography of Western Australia now dominates Kinsella’s writing to the point that location is a complex and nuanced literary-critical idea of central importance. Jam Tree Gully takes in the space of the relatively nearby coastal town, Albany, the Avon River, Bindoon, Bullsbrook and Irishtown. References are made to ‘Coondle’ (a placename given by the local Australian aboriginal people) and the Toodyay stone alongside references to the impact of war games (p. 120) and a former ‘convict

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training depot’ (p. 135). Such expansive localism is not international but historical. Punctuation provided by toponym dramatises the collection’s conjoining of the microcosmic world of the Kinsella settlement in the land of the Bullardong Nyungar people in Western Australia to colonial-ism and its aftermath.

For Kinsella, an acute emphasis on the exceptionalism of a region, in the political and cultural sense, can be negated by a democratic expansiveness – or internationalist parallel – within a voice generated by geographical specificity that is geared towards clarifying the ecological crisis. This thrust from ‘the bush’ or Australian ‘country’ refuses to voice a riposte to the identity politics of toxic late capitalism. He writes: ‘Our nation is just a personification of the Australian bureaucracy and its inextricable drive towards a universal cliché of exclusiveness’ (Kinsella, 2007, pp. 114–115). Kinsella’s lyricism delves beneath any corporate gloss; it aims to get at the heart of being a subject in each particular Australian location, with WA as one case in point.

Thresholds of knowing

enough parables of cause and effect, grand impacts. (‘Beans and Jam Tree Gully’)

Kinsella appears to derail any focus on outcomes of cultural processes; the performance and enactments of culture that lead to positions is his critical counterpoint to the idea of a universal body of scientific knowledge. The world is filtered by human subjects’ situated and partial perspectives; political contexts frame our sense of place as bounded spaces that contain recognisable territories. Emotion is triggered in the processes of relating these local emergences to the over-determined space.

I have drawn attention to Kinsella’s sense of community as one where ‘boundaries are more flexible’ (Kinsella, 1998). This flexibility extends to the line between pain and joy, emotional self-reflection and externalised apostrophe, often owing to a consideration of non-human others. In ‘Eagle Affirmation’, the poem’s voice speaks of how the act of sighting a pair of eagles ‘counteracts/bitterness against all the damage’ (5–6) witnessed in the locale. The elegance, indifference and strength of the soaring bird are tonic to the ‘agony’ (10) felt by the loss of one wattle tree. This is not simple cause and effect; the emotion is not brought out


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by the observation. Here, a hinge that renders evident the entangle-ment of subject and object is not the loss of a single tree in the whole of Australia; it is the knowingness of our actions that impinge on the survival of non-human animals. Yet the bird’s damage, the killing of its prey, is as ‘traumatic’ (22) as other destructive events in the gully. So pain everywhere but glory in the continuing struggle of things. Emotion is not directly cognitive in this sense; it is not drawn out from one event wrestled free of its context. Thus, it is the boundary between human emotions and animal pragmatism that the poem resets. And yet this wider lacuna than cognition is reset and amplified in terms of affective human experience alone; the ‘I’ ‘find[s] it hard to breathe to feed myself/to get past the loss’ (17–18). How might this anthropocentrism help us in the Anthropocene? Part of this answer lies in the poem’s integration of the feelings of two individuals, no lone subject, by allusion to another poem in the collection.

‘Eagle Affirmation’ reworks ‘Eagles at Sunset Stock Epithet’; here the figures in the landscape become ‘oversensitised’ (14) after imagining the thermal uplift of the eagle as a movement akin to walking up a difficult slope. A view of a pair of birds, paralleled in a human couple walking comes close to a model of empathy that gestures to a reconfiguration of pathetic fallacy; however, the humans are read in terms of the birds and thus offer a reverse attribution of seeing the self in the other. Moreover, the final disposition and overriding sense of the poem remains one that is triggered by the human encounter with ‘nature’ to expose an experience–affect combination, an individual and collective emotion. And to avoid stepping fully into the world of metaphor, stock epithet or translation, Kinsella conjoins two poems at an angle to the world that enables the reader to grip and purchase on the occasion of witnessing eagles in flight, which always points back to geography and observation to articulate an assured and vulnerable confidence in the pursuits of homemaking. It speaks to broader experience than the delimiting of the subject in terms of psychology and identity to be equated with the ‘I’ of the poem.

At once, the dwelling place is vulnerable – the pull of the ‘massive’ (4) eagles’ wings disrupts the tin sheeting that is the roof of the house – and yet without taking the position of victim, or prey, the speaker steps back to measure the boundaries between each agent and attribute of the site entangled in this space: eagle and roof, climate and wattle tree, human and eagle. This aggregate informs a multivalent sense of location wherein

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space is not reduced to something that can be identified with accuracy or precision – nor can it be looked at through a hole. More poetically:

a region is not a pinpoint and a different compassworks in my head, having magnetics for alldirections and all pointing to one spotI know and observe as closely as possible; (11–14)

The eye of the poem is at stake here. Analogous to human-centeredness, the poetic eye locates the heart and mind of Jam Tree Gully. The place invokes the ways in which people can be at home: with the self; secure in a stable emotional state; the position from which one can measure inti-macy with things across space and time. Later in the collection, ‘Settling House’ has it like this: ‘The house/is contingent on location, its weather, the conditions/of its time’ (15–17). Seeing, feeling and a sense of degrees of varying comfort and discomfort, either taken alone or together, can inform what is meant by settlement in the lyric that orbits the volume’s emotional core and historical consciousness. In ‘Eagle Affirmation’ the energy and eye of the poem is conceived as something psychologically generative (or obsessive) and internal, and it is paradoxically depend-ent on the external world of temperature and pressure (magnetism). Is this not a mind at work simply responding to restrictive parameters, the alienation driven by the cultural milieu that views the poet as a bour-geois antagonist? The domain of experience and self-expression beyond cultural norms is set by property lines in Jam Tree Gully. This complex boundary marker refers to the significant environmental pressures of the gully that give rise to emotional modalities; this marker reconceives the enclosure of space and the imagination to delimit how material and artistic freedoms prevail, albeit with such difficulty in Jam Tree Gully.

Spatial relations, therefore, detail modes of freedom in the gully. Here, the flight of eagles and the state of agony, of ordeal; and also the willing-ness to care, to observe ‘as closely as possible’: emotion combines with witness, orienting oneself or the eye to non-static space with sensitive attention to things, and acknowledging that which cannot be conceived visually. This is a form of wayfinding for the poet and poem – as it is for the eagles who are seen ‘keeping their sharp/and scrupulous eyes honed’ (19–20). We witness not empathy but its intellectual parallel (the imagination) transcending loss and bitterness, to be with others. To be placed in this manner does not necessitate parochialism or attention to a poetic otherworldliness. The emphasis is realist; the politics are beyond


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sympathy; the poem exhibits openness to movement – the site of empa-thy. It is to destabilise the will to settlement. It is a decolonised pastoral counterpoint to normative values of private property.

‘My plastic emotions’ or not ideas about things

Poetry is the paradox of language turned against its own declared purpose, that of nailing down the human dream.6

Jam Tree Gully indicates that spatial relations are continually open to renegotiation and carry the burden of their history. They strike so easily against the innate contingency of how the world happens and is recorded: ‘I watched two blue/butterflies tango around each other in as precise/a way as I am capable of detecting: within/my threshold it looked like pure choreography’ (‘Jam Tree Gully Sonnets with Incidental Rhymes’ 2: 4–7).

Kinsella is interested in setting things up for our contemplation as much as he is interested in our intellectual and emotional connections to the ways that things occur in spaces that are conditioned over time. This is where he is closest to Burnside – a move first rehearsed in the prologue that slowly enters the terrain, finding a home and then turning to observe animals. Metaphorically, sense-oriented disposition is equal to political comportment, emotional variation, lyrical point of view in the collec-tion. A landscape-scale visual sweep of the horizon will ordinarily snag on an ecological problem, or socio-political site of interest that triggers affect and despatches the lyric to zoom in on an acute space or object: a sheep bone is discovered ‘In following the waterway across the hill, /York gum saplings holding out against/the erosive sidewash induced by downpours’ (‘Sheep Leg’ 1–3); ‘from highest point of hillside/from high-est branch of tallest York gum; /gunfire pocks distantly’ (‘Evening’ 6–8). Framing events in space anchored by vantage point can suggest distance and intimacy simultaneously in Jam Tree Gully; however, the frame most often propels lyricism forward via the concrete specificity of things, whether turned painterly on the hop and of the moment, or poetically in reflection.

6 Paterson, D. (2004, 9 November). The Dark Art of Poetry: T.S. Eliot Lecture, Retrieved 23 May 2014 from Don Paterson – Official Website: http://www.donpaterson.com/arspoetica.htm.

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Affective arrays‘Single-lined Photos’, ‘A Jam Tree Gully Sheaf ’, ‘A Set of Images Makes the Day’, ‘Four Scenes’ and ‘On the Great Red Storm’ are exercises in imagism, montage, time-lapse empiricism and impressionism. In Jam Tree Gully each image is individuated and located within an assemblage that shows each in relationship with the others. Such assemblages allow objects in view to appear as ‘things’, or ‘entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 351). Furthermore, these arrays enact the phenomenon, psychological magnification, ‘connecting one affect-laden scene with another affect-laden scene’, which suggests that his poetics works at the level of recollecting and remembering our sense of self and the question of Being, rather than being wholly captivated within an ethical situation or a sensory environment.7

It is worth reminding ourselves of Kinsella’s interest in the transla-tion of the spatial dynamics of the pastoral from Europe to WA, here, which suggests restriction and enframing as part of the politics of representation. He writes: ‘The page is a field of vision for me, a place of occupation. It is the territorialised environment. I am interested in it only insofar as it implies something outside, something beyond the frame’ (Kinsella, 2007, p. 50). The arrays and sets of images all work towards an emblematic phrase of the collection: ‘repulsion and attraction/woven high-tensile’ (‘Orb Weaver Spider’ 7–8). This is something far deeper than cartographic representation of space. While the poem ‘Arrangements’ marks out a sense of place as a func-tioning site or self-perpetuating corpora wherein it is not possible to extract single factors for all are part of a system of larger relations or chains of interaction, the five poems signaled out (above) presup-pose a depth to the field of action that is a foothold for observation rather than responsibility. This speaks to multinaturalism rather than multiculturalism.

Once this representational mode is in view, the Kinsella reader can evaluate the poetic merit. Here we receive significant disclosure of our

7 See Tomkins, S. S. (1995). Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins (Virginia Demos ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Smith, M. (2009). Remembering What Is Left in Our Encounters with Other Animals, in M. Smith, J. Davidson, L. Cameron, & L. Bondi (Eds.), Emotion, Place and Culture, Farnham: Ashgate.


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entanglement in the world with others. It seems to indicate access to the inexplicable. As T. S. Eliot puts it:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (Eliot, 1997)

For Kinsella, the poem can be a ‘panopticon’ that brings into view objec-tive correlatives; sets and situations are ‘movements from liminal zone to liminal zone, rather than from object to object’; the move is internal, imaginative and emotional ‘from the de-signified within the image, to the de-signified within the image’ (Kinsella, 2007, p. 69). Things are within space, and it is the focus on space (zone) that moves the thinker. Movement of the eye across the page marries with movement of person through landscape; movement of lyric from region to global political context. Moreover, the poem’s eye – its reflective stance born of such spatial arrangements and points of observation – becomes the subject of the poem and invokes internal movement: emotion (or emotionlessness) over insight (or knowledge).

Negative dialectics and a sacred kingfisherIt is never we who affirm or deny something of a thing; it is the thing itself that affirms or denies something of itself in us (Bennett, 2004)

The technicity of Jam Tree Gully records the terrain of Anthropocene emotional presence – how we feel while impinging on the space of others. This terrain is subject to negative dialectics, which ‘enhance feel-ings of guilt, suffering, and a hauting sense of loss’; the poet as negative dialectician ‘knows how far he remains from the object of this thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely’ (Bennett, 2004, pp. 362–363). In Kinsella, there is no hope for reconciliation with what the human is denied; there is only the possibility of imagining connections in sites of loss through composed relations. Kinsella writes: ‘Poetry joins the fragments. The more fragmented it is itself, the more it fills the spaces ... If we do not recognise this we have fetishized our souls’ (2007, p. 58). I take one case in point.

‘Sacred Kingfisher and Trough Filled with Water Pumped from Deep Underground’ registers the disturbed ground in the failed dialogue between subject and object. The title of the poem signifies Kinsella’s

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interest in the non-identity between concept and thing, which is regis-tered in the mute resistance of the bird in the poem. A refusal to sit inside human frameworks and respond to human desire in this poem portends the multiple modalities of agency in Jam Tree Gully as a continuum of power differentially expressed by all life in the domain.

This power relation symbolised by the failed dialogue entails nature as something foreign to us. Moreover, a resistance to an ‘exchange’ where human and nature are in ‘dialogue with each other’ is central to the avoid-ance of ‘A give and take that’s really just a take-away fast-food version of nature’ (Kinsella, 2013d, p. 164). It invites a sense of failure in the lyric to represent as a means to rethink power relations while diluting human hubris. Feeling more-than-human is not easy. There is an ironic fore-grounding of an opportunity loss in the lyric; sadness or loss of dialogue between humans and creatures is further marked in a neutral unhomeli-ness or discomfort. The lyrical record spells distance and silence. The misprision of naive pastoral or sentimentalism is there to place critical distance between human and non-human, to mark a respectful failing to harmonise and idealise the more-than-human relation.

A quiet and detached mode separates itself from the poem’s anxiety: it instances how a person can stand beside the self (from the position of kingfisher, for example) and go quietly into a space. This is where we are not wholly involved in nature, but merely pragmatically involved with the way things are, or at least to acknowledge that we are involved with the way things appears to us. This foreshadows my reading of Burnside’s exploration of the gap between the ways things are and how they appear to mind.

With the record heat I filled one of the threeconcrete troughs – mainly for kangaroosbut also for birds and anything else that passesby. This morning I saw a sacred kingfisherin an overhanging branch, eyeing the water.The sacred kingfisher saw me and remained.That’s unusual – they are mostly cautious.I over-invest the ‘sacred’ in their name – namegiving, name evoking statistics from thosewho’ve probably not even seen the bird. A smallbird with a large-beak that could inflict a lotof damage on whatever it targets. Proportionaland relative. Its colours are flashy and stunning.What part do I play in filling the trough, once


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for sheep and horses? How much choiceto come and go does the sacred kingfisherhave? Would it be here if the trough was empty?The valley was quiet in the broadest sense.I did not know how much noise was withinthe bird’s head. I thought of Thoreauthinking of Alexander the Great carryingthe Iliad in a special-casket. Which nowmakes me think of a coffin. Water-troughslook like coffins, like caskets. I expectedthe sacred kingfisher to swoop as if the shallowwater held nourishment. It was dead waterfrom deep in the earth. The sacred kingfisherstayed in the branch, seeing the troughfor the coffin it was. The bird looked at methen looked back to the lifeless surfaceof the water. Still ... so still. (‘Sacred Kingfisher and Trough Filled with Water Pumped from Deep Underground’)

The WA wheatbelt is an epiphenomenon of the late-nineteenth-century gold rush when Australian governments helped people settle with gener-ous terms as the remaining country was recessed. The last great clear-ance of land (the expansion of wheatbelt) occurred in the 1960s near Esperance (over 600 km from the York area). York Gums and Jam Trees remain. Here, standpipes are still in use at water stations; the amount of water taken is logged on a notebook dangling from a rope on the tank. People carry out this exercise as second nature. On a daily basis, people measure water. In WA, as in most of Australia, water signifies survival. The premeditated move (almost to the point of ritual) to water the ani-mals is neither driven by an urban middle-class sense of ‘connectedness’ nor harmony; it is one of wisdom and care. Connectedness, to Kinsella, ‘is a fetishization of belong-ing and exchange wherein “country” has been relegated to the position of referent within a discourse on beauty and ugliness (the non-sustainable)’ (2009, p. 148). There is little beauty or ugliness here; Jam Tree Gully is the physical site that gives rise to rela-tions and the consequence of the impacts of interactions.

‘Record heat’ and ‘concrete troughs’ work well to set the scene in ‘Sacred Kingfisher’ that moves to the ‘I’ noticing a bird that is ‘eyeing the water’ itself. In this scene of dual witness, the human ‘I’ fails to account for the bird (the noise inside the bird’s head is imagined but unmeasured) and its own expectations are unmet (the kingfisher is less cautious than

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anticipated; it does not swoop to the trough). Both ideas ethically signal distance and difference between the two agents (as discussed earlier). The bird observes its ‘other’ and the surface of the water drawn from the depths of the aquifer; it remains, in place, still – physically in the environment and temporally sustained in our mind. The bird signifies a position in relation to other possible positions.

The topographical sketch is often hard-edged, angular and dry in Jam Tree Gully. Water does not appear to signify life. Encounters with animals seem to utter themselves onto the page as observations of material events and properties indifferent to the cultural frame. The ‘I’ is erased temporarily and what remains is stillness, flatline zero activ-ity. Much like Oswald’s ellipses and silences, this poetic space is laid out for generative processes, where the mind can roll on from what has been presented to it thus far. It is for the imagination to conceive of ways to measure degrees of felicity between the world and us, between word and thing. It is for us to embrace the sanctity of the mismatch, the gaps and differences between things. Knowing ourselves through places might be necessary in the present climate; it is the most ancient and human attribute. However, clearly at this moment of low activity and silence ‘what remains for Kinsella is the possibility of communion with place as it is figured in the poem itself ’ (Reed, 2010) (cf. Manes, 1996). It cannot be put any better than that. In this poem, the pos-sibility is there but it is not played out. We are left in a space vacant of contact in one sense, rich in relations in another. All that happens is a strict reflexive reckoning of the moment in which the poem imprints itself on the reader’s imagination; the image of the bird melds into our memory. Like the image of the owl in Oswald’s account of the ‘mother’ during Sleepwalk’s final phase of the moon, a symbol of prehistoric life adapted to the human scene (an understated anguished cry from the Anthropocene), the kingfisher is all we have to keep our patience intact and to consider our meekness.

Warped empathy and radical pastoralWherever I sat, there might I live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. (Thoreau, Walden, ‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived For’)

Jam Tree Gully removes the eye of the poem from the domain of liberty and places it directly into the discourse of environmental consciousness. This transference from liberty to an acute vision enacts the pastoral as


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a movement away from concepts of freedom and autonomy to activ-ist thinking about being and being in ecology, the latter instancing a Dualism. This transference from idea to observation emphasised by spa-tial dynamics is ‘the realm of happening’ in Jam Tree Gully. Here, ‘radical pastoral’ translates idyll from idealised rusticity to a mode ‘reflective of a corruption of nature’ (Kinsella, 2007, p. 6). The lyrical mode tries to outline the potential for a corruption of self in relation to the corrupted space. The contemporary shift from genre to mode indicates limited pos-sibility for empathising with place, and feeling with others in a shared place.

There is calm and joy in Jam Tree Gully; there is agitation; there is emo-tional sincerity; there is insistent awakening to our plundering of space, both throughout history and in the very moment of the poem. This combination of emotion and critical distance composes its own pastoral modulation, which ‘is not pastoral in aesthetic terms’, that is, an art form confident in its relation to European models, but a mode of writing ‘that offers consciousness, even paranoia, that such a pastoral should exist’ (Kinsella, 2007, p. 135). This unqualified and simplistic sense of traditional pastoral must be destroyed in Kinsella’s ‘mediation of nature through interference and control’ because it is historical in a particular sense of territorial appropriation, that is, colonial, capitalist (Kinsella, 2008, p. 132). Moreover, any possible reunification of mind with nature will have to come to terms with this part-reactionary, part-proactive cul-tural (and personal) paranoia. A state of mind characterised by various emotional states (feeling persecuted, harbouring jealousy; openness to pain and joy) is also an exaggeration of self-importance that is worked into a system. To Kinsella, such ‘literary’ paranoia invokes the irrel-evance of historical cultural forms in the context of the colonial centre’s despoliation of these distant and different lands. It refuses to hook the self – or lyrical ‘I’ – into a secure sense of propriety, prospect or property. It thus examines the solitary figure in terms of the local moment that attends to regional geography and planetary systems. There is no nation; there is only history. And it is this historical situation that conditions the human, the birds, insects, mammals, plants. While human and the non-human are not equal in terms of power, they are levelled by emotions that pass through more-than-human experiences.

To follow Kinsella closely for a moment: to consider nature as an ‘equal other’ is to be blind to human privilege, to suggest an equality that is only sustainable as an illusion or delusion for human progress ‘does not offer

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the reality of an equal other’; moreover, ecopoetry that attends to harmony and unity within an ethos of responsibility ‘is about acts of responsibility from a position of human perceptions (or self-denials) of superiority’ (Kinsella, 2009, p. 146). Questions of authenticity and belonging are per-haps more honest when they delineate heritage and despoliation, signs that are imposed or laid on the land (Kinsella, 2007, p. 4).

Discordant harmoniesDiscord, the result of the breakdown of empathy, sustains emotional distance between neighbours in the region, setting up an interest-ing proposition in a forthcoming extension to the volume in view: ‘Objective relations pulse across the anticipatory valley’ (‘Refrain 1 (D & G Infractions)’ 10, from Jam Tree Gully 3). Things are often yet to come in Jam Tree Gully; fire, for example, is kept at a visual distance but its threat is ever present and of great concern to the human figure tending the block. This prosaic, detached formulation of spatialised anxiety and fear that conflates people and place (the anticipatory valley) is satirical in tone. It comes after an intriguing insight into birdlife:

Birds sing warnings all the time, having mapped it generationally.An important passing-down. They make their own selections,adapt as they see fit. Rhythmic cosmologies parry refrainsas if it can all be separated off: and the one birdnot appearing in the same feathers everywhere seems to affirmthis; (5–10)

Here, what is clarified as ‘the cosmic tones of “space-time” and pulse pulse’ (18–19) has come from an initial reading of human-to-human relations. The view from the subject’s house over to his neighbour’s is wrapped in sadness for it has noticed a change. Trees have been felled. Loss pulsates through the gully. Another act of clearance leads the lyri-cism away from society and the divination of objects in the landscape, and away from reading the signs of humans: we are firmly anchored to the way of the birds in these lines.

The word ‘affirm’ hangs onto the line ending and brings the reader to think of evidence, observation and accounting. Affirmation, as with the poem ‘Eagle Affirmation’ qualifies the loss and negativity of the collection for its uplifting sense of the possibility and endurance of the more-than-human way of life. An evolving empiricism is inspirited. Birds denote movement and change. The gesture to the interpretation of


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bird behaviour and patterns of behaviour is sullied, pragmatically so, by the sense of adaptation to the dynamic environment by the language of the poem’s speaker. This critique of judgment in turn manifests in new, or at least different, beings (birds change feathers). Another tonic to a neurotic desire for control on behalf of the human surveyor of the scene is laid out a few lines later in the poem figuring the neurological cavity of birds within a negation of ‘a desire to harmonise, to reach into all’ (22). This is a metaphor of a certain will to power entailing an imagined cul-tural homogeneity and the fallacy of environmental unity. Harmony lies elsewhere in Kinsella. In Jam Tree Gully it is as if only furrows of idealism are made for our emotions to seed.

Environmental empathyHeat-buckling asphalt and climatic conditions turning hill grass orange signify pressures leading to exclamations of environmental affect: ‘that [world] has remodelled my plastic emotions’ (9). Emotion is a deep or strong feeling that is derived from circumstance, or mood, or relation-ships with others; Jam Tree Gully is the total sum of the lyric’s accounting of relations, mood and circumstance. Throughout history, emotion ‘has been seen as a form of behaviour, or as an aspect of bodily physiology’ central to ‘role identities’ in public spaces ‘through their common affec-tive representation and quality’ (May & Powell, 2008, p. 244). A focus on the spaces through which emotion is enacted clarifies ‘the spatial mediation and articulation of emotions’, that is, intersubjectivity and relationality, social process embedded in our everyday lives. Emotions are the relational consequences of human-to-human and more-than-human interactions; their location and embedding relates to other positionings in the social order and in the environment (Anderson & Smith, 2001).8 The human impact on location and its impact on humans circumscribes these identities and social positions from the deep sense of otherness that is witnessed in the observations of non-human life. The binary inherent in the terms otherness and the non-human cannot be collapsed completely but can be bridged to a limited extent by empathy.

There are two parts to empathy: the ability to understand the other, and the ability to share the feelings of the other. We bring ourselves to emotions, but how do we do this when the other is in fact part of us, that

8 See also Smith et al. (2009). especially Richard C. Powell: Spaces of Play: Recording Emotional Practices in High Arctic Environmental Sciences, pp. 115–132.

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there is no ‘nature’ external to us, no ‘non-human’ out there, only the more-than-human world which includes us, deeply and fundamentally? While the lyric in Jam Tree Gully 1, 2 and 3 tenses up to speak of an under-standing (albeit conflicted) of the human need to make a space one’s own (the house at Jam Tree), it relaxes when it reads the non-human in the very same space. Inspiration is often drawn from birds as if the lyric could share in the mode of communication in which they reside. Understanding is one thing, sharing quite another. Jam Tree Gully’s poetic mode offers a moment for the mind to exercise its ability to draw from something that is beyond itself. Perhaps even imagine the non-human feeling in ways not unlike our own ways. This leads us towards the para-dox of empathy for the more-than-human world; it also suggests new versions of pathetic fallacy for the Anthropocene.

The ideal of taking but not owning something – to share the space among people, plants and animals – transforms lines of poetry that ardently bemoan into lines that displace social interaction for a dif-ferent identity-situated self. This discrete empathic mode speaks of a ‘wider district’ of being – allowing the poem’s eye to share and savour the landscape animated by birds. In one example, ringneck parrots make a colourful descent from hilltop to gully to ‘glimmer’ the ‘collat-ing topography’ (Jam Tree Gully ‘A Jam Tree Gully Sheaf ’ ‘The Wider District’ 1–5). In Kinsella there is always a counterpoint to Romantic continuity between human and world. Here, being distends space; consequentially, space is easier to read or feel; and from here, one can just begin to imagine how birds feel in flight. Space is brought into startling view by movement, by difference. On this occasion, emotion is underwritten by a collective movement that combines space into cir-cumstance – the temporary flash in the sky of birdlife. Thus in Jam Tree Gully 3, circumstance – noting the neighbour’s changes to the land – is wrestling with an alternative mood – the feeling of a degree of com-monality, a metaphoric ‘district’ of expansive identification within an animated space. This conflicted, spatialised emotion speaks centrally to the concern of my enquiry: how we offer sensitive reports from our social and psychological situations to articulate the significance of the experience of place. This affective mode is understated in Jam Tree Gully, and yet it modulates above sustained reflections on encounters throughout Jam Tree Gully 2 and 3. The collection under view is thus an initial attempt at working out a spatial poetics of emotional environ-ments to be developed in the trilogy.


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We are informed that ‘Space collects around all of us, a membrane/we press against with lesser and greater certainty’ (‘Empathy of Space: A Satire?’ 14–15, from Jam Tree Gully 3). The poem compresses and overlaps two events: the agony of a night-time wood collector navigating through a soundscape that puts him on edge (the noise of an annual festival’s technology-driven leisure pursuits figured as a force of destruction of the hillsides in the domain); and a night bird dashing itself against a house window and the subsequent search for the injured party: both metaphors of Anthropocene impact and desperate ethical responses to the moment. Here, unlike the antiphonal modes of empathy in ‘Refrain 1’, this poem discloses a thirdspace of potential but failed inter-affectivity:

A crisis of kookaburras plugginginto the deadwood extensions of the great eucalypt above the house,fully-charged and sabotaging copyright and greed through sharp,expeditious beaks. That’s at the time of wood-collecting,in the spaces of activity following all events. (32)

In Kinsella the emphasis is to see the conditions for empathy in poetry rather than lyricism embody empathy. We think of the ‘spaces of activity’ of the writer and bird; how the tree affords their unrelated and quite separate tasks, yet places these tasks into view. The poem enacts relationality. This in itself is to articulate that life is resident in not living alone. It is a standpoint from which empathy might arise; where breakdown finds a niche.

‘Empathy of Space’ closes with an admission of the need to write ‘in the high/pH psychic trauma, the carbon dioxide breakdown of landscape’ (70–71), rather than end on a point of disconnection or solitude. This is to claim the poem’s ability to operate at altitude, perhaps like the birds on the wing. More than take in the atmosphere of place and infuse a sense of space with an acknowledgement of others, the scene’s emotional input is extended into the toxic effects of climate change upon inhabit-ants of the locale. Lyricism here is alert to the intrusion of that which is ordinarily absent; what lies beyond the frame of the page (Kinsella); what is rejected by communities (Grosz). It keeps this presencing of the other (the non-human and the global environmental context) close to the human. This politics of representation is keenly in view so that it might only transparently construct another cultural layer of representation or mediation above this sub-symbolic realm that lyricism – a technology of personal feeling – is attending to. The path to belonging that denies superficial commonality and points towards relational subjectivity in

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‘Empathy of Space’ is an internal path that intercepts a humorous and yet painful irony: the most pertinent membrane, or that which is most accessible, is one’s own, whether destructive agent (bird or human) or poet. The poem reaches out to the environment and comes back to human trauma. The pendulum swings between nature as external thing and human-constructed space, a movement which transfixes the lyri-cal ‘I’ at the centre of the frame and confuses the capacity for empathy, dependant as it is on an ‘other’. The view thus comes back to us.

Landscape throughout Jam Tree Gully configures empathy as a mode of reckoning the breakdown between language and world. In a standout poem of the collection, it does not bring things together but emphasises distance between lyric and climate change, mind and place, emotion and environment.

But I won’t leave you bereftof satisfaction: not far from here, down where

rail follows the logic of the brook, I ‘watchthe passage of morning cars with the same feelingthat I do the rising of the sun ... ’, and catchthe transferral of crop to port, step in feeding

the rich and poor of the entire world. (‘Language Generates Nothing as Whole Trees Fall’ 11–17)

The intertext from the ‘Sounds’ chapter of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1984) is to underline both the shadow cast over landscape by the polluting industry of capital enterprise and the sonic sensitivity of the lyrical I, which in Kinsella’s poem is ‘so alive/to the sound of damage and sunlight’ (23–24). This clear-cut harnessing and restriction of emotional comportment clearly marks the movement of resources across the WA landscape finding its intellectual partner in the North American text. The pastoral’s insistence on rules of engagement with the rural world is part of the control mechanism that tames the ‘natural’, and orders labour and its benefits. As Kinsella has written, ‘The place of labour has to be made aesthetic, to be given a beauty to cover up the truth of hardship. That labour has divisions within itself: of ethnicity, of religion, of local reputation. The radical pastoral considers the model to be constantly altering, for relationships within that model to be shifting’ (Kinsella, 2007, p. 5). As we see, Oswald’s lyricism meets Kinsella’s requirement.

In Jam Tree Gully, the intertextual move appears to register com-monality between American and Australian, and yet there is empathic


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complexity in the shift from ‘feeling’ to ‘feeding’, caring shifts to greed, openness to desire. Ultimately, there is no one human scene; there is similarity and difference together. The metaphor of empathy and the analogue between the two texts ultimately breaks down; the poem is a gift but it leaves us wanting. In the twenty-first-century version there is more destruction than Thoreau could imagine; more suffering from climate change, less stable land, more mouths to feed. Less feeling, more feeding.

A salutary conclusion

Unsentimental melancholy in Jam Tree Gully portends that the only tryst between humans and non-humans is the one existential commonality: death. Tony Hughes-D’Aeth has captured this most convincingly: ‘Kinsella’s poetry moves along the asymptote between living and dying ... The effect is to render unsolvable but also indismissible the conundrum of whether we are the epiphenomenon of life trying to die or death trying to live’ (Hughes-D’Aeth, 2012, p. 25). It is a conundrum that we are entitled to consider in our own time; the Anthropocene mobilises a sense of urgency to this challenge. Kinsella will not provide advice here.

Historically, emotions have been viewed as a terrain alien to ration-alisation and yet also integral to everyday life for they are tools of ‘com-munication, commitment and cooperation with others’ (May & Powell, 2008, p. 245). Kinsella’s sense of cooperation is informed by his reading of multiple agents in place, and the overlapping of agents has clarified margins, minority positions and difficult spaces for ethics. As with Burnside, in Kinsella we are carried to a place of intellectual nourish-ment by looking towards the end of things while measuring our role in these endings. The knowledge of our limited capacity for empathy and art’s limited capacity of emancipation is useful for such hard times as the Anthropocene. If offering nothing else, art is actively measuring our role in the ending of things. Trees fall; Species fail. Words record and imagine fallings and failings.

To refer back to the model of Anthropocene personhood for a closing anecdote, in July 2013, during composition of Jam Tree Gully 3, Kinsella posted the poem ‘Graphology Heuristics 87: The Breakdown of Empathy – Non Sequiturs’ on the Internet (Kinsella, 2013a). While directly con-fronting the ignorance and lack of irony in the use of the phrase ‘boat

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people’ to speak of asylum seekers within the Australian media of the past decade, Kinsella points to an idea of difference: how some things change and some things do not. This sense of difference between things underlines the politics of empathy in this poem speaking of other dehumanising processes as it draws to its close: ‘the ore ships passing hulks and wrecks, /sticking to trade routes, buoyant on/Plimsoll’s blood, drops in the ocean’ (15–18). In this postcolonial space where indigenous Australians, European colonialists and convicts, and today’s global eco-nomic and environmental diasporas arrive(d) by boat, it is impossible for governments to argue for any meaningful difference between these groups that have sought a home. It is not an ethical priority to argue that human equity and openness are constant during the moment in history when it is impossible to ignore the manifestations of continued bigotry and hatred of difference. Kinsella’s poem draws out the irony to note that it is equally as untimely to think of eternity and the constancy of beauty as it is to attempt empathic relations without acknowledging and respecting difference. It is thus oddly relevant to quote John Keats, to show the impossibility of thinking in ways that have been thought before, to hold up: ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever’ (‘Endymion’ 1). The Englishman’s use of heroic couplets to elaborate on the Greek myth is as irrelevant to Kinsella’s sense of despoiled landscape as classical pastoral, Barron Field and D. H. Lawrence. Kinsella understands that lyricism will keep no ‘bower quiet’ (4) in this damaged state of the Anthropocene. It is a damaged state, inherited by us over thousands of years, while we have not equally shared the land with our human and non-human others. In Australia, the government fails to distribute the wealth that is generated from the land; we are only equals in that we share the earth’s destiny that is clearly in sight owing to our plundering its resources. It is equally true that some folk have contributed more significantly to our damaged state than others, and some folk are suffering more heavily than others. Some are already on the move.

If lyricism opens out onto space during these negative reflections, it does so with ‘past perceptions’ of a golden age fallen and irretrievable:

light chargestrees and birdsextracts its needs,its plangent definitionfrom their blurring

and precision. (‘In This Damaged State’ 22–28)


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Nature, and attention to it, is no healer. The non-human world is deline-ated by artistic light that ultimately ‘extracts its need’ from the environ-ment: and it is here that the Anthropocene metaphor of domination is inflected by the desire to communicate, to generate images and trigger affect. The inescapable anthropocentrism denies equality and harmony to the space of the poem, which fills with the resounding waves of mournful tones (plangent) that trump language for precision. And to sing in the Anthropocene is to work through such tones, to locate them in emotional environments and thus settle the human back into the multivalent and incongruous contours of the more-than-human world that is an amalgam of difference, otherness and interdependence. In the lyric we choose to do this from the perspective of the human to extend our understanding of the limits to empathy. That move is to be energised by the hyphenated internal–external sense of things, and by the world beyond the frame; to be enworlded by presences irreducible to logic, only felt by subtle poiesis. Jam Tree Gully reminds us that such ‘ancient/modernism’ (16–17) is to be the keynote of our times.

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2Gift Songs

Abstract: Burnside’s engagement with a modernist aesthetics of order in his poetics of place leads into a thesis on world-making that animates and renews our feeling for the earth. I focus on the way that mutability is essential, in Gift Songs, for a humanist intelligibility of our habitus, before turning to Burnside’s poetic translation of the varieties of religious experience. Lyricism here transcends speciesist personhood to invite a cool and fresh consideration of the planet’s nuances over time.

Keywords: habitus; John Burnside; mutability; poetics of place



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and nothing is ever as true as the darkness of home: the porch-lights we know by name, the pea-fields and crossroads; deer-run and spawn-pool, birdwalk and dead man’s curve, the wide night running away

(‘Ny-Hellesund’ 6 ‘Going Back’)

Acclaimed and respected by his peers, the recipient of prestigious awards, John Burnside remains something of an enigma among the critical com-munity. Stirring beneath the surface of his elegant and accessible verse are deeply nested connections, complexities and subtleties in the service of an inclusive ethical consciousness. The idea of being open to the world in its expression as cued by our bodily involvement is subject to the intellectual colouring of this privileged strategy, connecting his works to numerous philosophical, spiritual and literary histories. Nevertheless, reading him is no quest; there is no goal other than attuning to varieties of somatic and semantic experiences as they present themselves in local arcs.

I have elected to centre on the closing section of Gift Songs (2007) to show how modernism – particularly his unravelling of T. S. Eliot – col-ours Burnside’s ongoing engagement with Wallace Stevens. Then, with a view to resisting hierarchised influences and to foregounding radical non-duality and emergent phenomenology (an antidote to Cartesian dualism), I place the craft of Rainer Maria Rilke inside my argument. This method triangulates ideas of human experience and places Gift Songs in a number of contexts with specific relevance to Burnside’s oeuvre on the one hand, and Anthropocene poetics on the other.

Eliot represents a compromised version of modernism; his poetics of depersonalisation, from which Burnside draws in Gift Songs, is emblem-atic both of high aesthetics and of Christian self-sacrifice; the one is a liberal trope, the other conservative, thus ordinarily antithetical to the other. Equally, Stevens’s variant of modernism allows Burnside to revel in the world of the imagination and ideas. Alert to Stevens’s phenomeno-logical fallibilism, Burnside’s contemplation of craft in relation to mate-rial reality endorses historical emplacement and finds him turning once more to Eliot for a measure of metaphysical sincerity. Relating Burnside then to Rilke makes for something of a wild card, and I choose to run

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the risk of placing him inside an already complex dialogue to draw out a sense of creatureliness. This interjection implicitly argues for both the relevance of post-Romantic criticism and its poetics of concern, and to show how there are continuities between Anthropocene poetics and pre-Anthropocene thinking.

In summary, Burnside’s phenomenologically modulated lexis of mutability – a post-secular translation of what ‘is’ for ‘how’ things are – entails feeling for how animals, plants, humans are coming to be. This is an emphasis not on the properties of the world – as with Kinsella – but the world in its emergence, its making. To shape this exploration I visit Burnside’s intentionally crafted sense of the world’s presence in four dis-tinct ways. The first section of this chapter reads Gift Songs alongside two poetic forebears, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens; here, the pull towards life’s vicissitudes and the interjection of a renewed sense of time is viewed as essential for a planetary imaginary and humanist intelligibility of our shared habitus. The second section turns to a sense of place to consider how we can revisit ideas of construction and estrangement (of/from the world) by language as part of the problem brought to mind when we have two potentially opposed forms of earthscripts: one dealing with our creation of the world; the other, the world’s arising. The latter of these is looked at in two sections both titled ‘varieties of religious experience’ wherein Burnside’s multiple Anthropocene perspectives invite us to contemplate the habitus as shared destiny. The first of these considers an enlightened spiritual comportment, the second considers life viewed through the perception of creatureliness.

The inscape of dialogical poetics: a prelude on place

Peppered with epigraphs, subtitles and intertextual allusions, John Burnside’s corpus is infused with an eclectic range of theories and styles that enfold his work into the history of ideas without ever hold-ing strictly to any singular paradigm. The use of these ‘others’ within a collection may seem obsessive or even appropriative; such positions, however, might understate the admiration, respect and craft fellowship Burnside has for the writers he cites. In a concerted effort to bring the relevance of these writers to our particular historical moment, these forced and explicit moves inform the reception and interpretation


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of a text seeking an inclusive ‘brotherhood’, slipping easily across the Anthropocene boundary.

In terms of theological rumination on the question of existence, spe-cifically selected meta-textual foreshadowing betokens a fast and loose acceptance of the casuistries of the intellect, which, while various and multivalent, paradoxically enable the poems to return to a common tongue – to turn attention back home. Most often speaking of song and memory, and the relations between history and the present, felt at their most precise in thickly sensuous moments of transcendental insight, Burnside’s lyrical intertextuality can be seen inscribing the traces of an oral culture and material history; the texture of the poet’s voice shifts from that of wanderer to educator, from solitary individual to community member. Anthropocene personhood, in this context, details the haunting immediacy of the depleting lifeworld while simul-taneously configuring the subject as an environmental non-indigene: at once native to these transparently constructed imaginative worlds and yet alien to the measures we must undertake to fit into the real world.

Oswald’s lyrics encourage listening to the environment. Burnside’s and Kinsella’s poetry predominantly speak from the human perspective with a view to enlightening the reader about the material conditions of landscapes; their modes of lyrical transport encourage being with things in our dwelling places. This might be considered as something other than anthropocentric ‘agency’; one such term might be ‘active intentionality’.1 Inducing a state of listenership in a reader is no small thing; it comes as a result of combining the facticity of the world of our experience and our imagined human relationships within it, held within a view that this way of thinking can draw from and lead to common knowledge. This triggers our inner ear, our meta-reflective conscious-ness; it kindles the subsymbolic realm of emotions. We empathise from here.

This factual–imaginary compound is born of the ontic and the noume-nal in Anthropocene lyricism; earthscripts of loss and of surprise found in a contemplative state induced by the reduction and/or concentration of stimulation. In post-Romantic terms this registers complicity between listener and author; taken to its full capacity in Gift Songs it engenders an adaptational advantage collapsing subject–object relations.

1 See Dualism.

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Last day of the harbour:rain, and the lull of gospel

clouding the sweet hiatusof home and kirk(‘For a Free Church’ 4: 1–4)

Although resonant with a tradition of balladry and melancholy, land-scape here is not the broken, deserted village of the eighteenth-century graveyard poets. It is a world of potential, only currently at rest within the given view. In Gift Songs such earthly movements are raised to the sky; these lines from the section ‘Wanderlust’ follow a moment of prayer in a delicate octet working through feelings during moments of discov-ery; they denote precipitation interrupting the visual field and thus cast a reductive intellectual dichotomy into a spatialised relation (the hiatus is ‘of ’ both these places). Places are not fixed into categories; they change owing to a witness of ‘the still to come, the gracile revelation’ hovering ‘between the looked-for and the given’ (‘De corporis resurrectione’ 59–60). Gift Songs remains committed to this very space or stillness; it is an emptiness backlit by the intellectual gravity that Burnside brings to its occasion.

Contextualising BurnsideGift Songs begins with a series of responses to St Augustine of Hippo, through which the poetry incubates a theory of the perception of life. The first poem, ‘De corporis resurrectione’, looks at the arrival of snowdrops while contemplating how we understand ‘the gradual dead ... finding a visible form’ (8; 10). Sensible forms determine corporeal creatures; in Augustine’s understanding of the resurrection, however, sense percep-tion is inescapably limited. Burnside draws on this limitation to convey the intangible and to listen to our capacity for noticing the enduring qualities and processes of the Earth’s systems. This is where the role of Parousia and nature lie in his project:

how the earth calls out for every death,contriving apples, mole-runs, tiny birds

alive inside the gold japonicaand waiting for the moment to arrive

when song begins; the blacktransformed to green. (37–42)


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Regeneration is always ‘alive’ and ‘waiting’ in Gift Songs. The cultural work of the collection can be viewed as an extension of Burnside’s craft in the dwelling trilogy (the three collections preceding Gift Songs: The Asylum Dance (2000), The Light Trap (2002), The Good Neighbour (2005)). Notably, in Gift Songs cultural place-making speaks of human feelings that are aligned to the liminal space between emotional quietude and responses to sense experience. It is an evaluation of human capacities in a pursuit for that which is ‘almost taking form as frequency/like static, or the fuzz of radio’ (53–54). The relationship between world and word emerges into a concern acutely anchored to ecological observation in the contemplation of ‘the quiet, local forms/of history’ (‘History’ 49–50) in The Light Trap. As an intellectual extension to and lyrical revisiting of the concerns of The Light Trap, Gift Songs indirectly sets new ground for the elegy by working through a rich sense of loss, of vacancy – emptiness, lack of understanding, which appears to address a representational and ethical problem in one move. And this is where Burnside’s metaphysics of presence makes itself felt: ‘where the nothing that happens in time/is the one thing we have/for keeps: /the seep of music through the bone; /a wavelength of owls, where everything is static’ (‘De corporis resurrectione’ 84–88). Rather than writing of things that are, Burnside writes of what is to come; this perceptual loss in Gift Songs speaks of what can be spiritu-ally gained.

For James McGonigal, Burnside’s poetry places wandering subjects between ‘temporal gaps’ opened up by speech, where one can ‘learn to inhabit silence and white space, unpeopled or snowed-in places’ (1993, p. 65). This aesthetic destabilises our grounds of knowledge; it chal-lenges our linear models of history to account for: ‘the shapes we have scarcely noticed, bearing us on/to all we have yet to become/to the blank of a future’ (‘Ama et fac quod vis’ 60–62). The poetic articulation of the world both undecided and ‘evermore about to be’ is an intentional misrepresentation of the world in a fixed state. Burnside’s lyrics are alive to a renewed examination of the complexity and the grace of life in our historical moment. And this difficult integrity takes on a new hue in Gift Songs, which this chapter seeks to clarify. It is at once an amplification of The Light Trap’s neo-Romantic sensitivity and a fresh mobilisation of quasi-religious comportment, which both transmutes the raw material of Burnside’s earlier poetry – nature, folksong and myth – into the intuition of the soul and partly disappears in the materialist thrust into dwelling

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spaces.2 It is only after working through these seemingly opposed ideas that Burnside’s corpus has moved on to consider how the future of the lyrical imagination might be configured.

Geography and the idea of order

I want to begin by focusing on Burnside’s poetics of place, which plays with a sense of order; then I broaden this theme into a thesis on world-making or on poetry as a tool that animates and renews our feeling for the earth. Unlike Oswald and Kinsella, Burnside does not demonstrate how the lyrical imagination embodies planetary consciousness in the age of the Anthropocene. Lyricism here enacts a more local view transcend-ing speciesist personhood to invite a cool and fresh consideration of the planet’s nuances over various timescapes, its movements interfacing with local human ecologies.

Spatial spontaneityThe lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, As the night descended, tilting in the air, Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night(Wallace Stevens, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’)

The four quartets in Gift Songs traverse Scotland, Norway, France; they represent a decentred territoriality. More generally, too, Burnside’s work repeatedly forges rhizomatic connections between east coast lowland Scotland and America. The Light Trap is embalmed in Stevensian con-templation; Gift Songs moves on into new territory and yet its focus on port towns, fusing Fife and Florida, brings Stevens to mind once more.

‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ (Stevens, 1936) enacts a sense of order-ing. The lines play out the mental arranging of a spilled array of abstract definite articles: ‘the fishing boats’, ‘the night’, ‘the air’ and ‘the sea’. The scene of things at large in space is one that is composed, mastered; it is fixing, homemaking, yet imprecise. Such ironic reflexivity on human

2 For more on this contextual aspect, see Bristow, T. (2011). Materialism as Cultural Ecology in John Burnside’s ‘Four Quartets’, Scottish Literary Review, 3 (2), 149–170.


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skill tempers hubristic formulations of the world in Stevens while also revelling in our capacity for creativity in light of our response to, yet at a distance from, the world. It is not Stevens’s night that is enchanting; the masts of the fishing boats at anchor there create, deepen and enchant it. The use of enchanting as a participle rather than an adjective in the poem echoes the lights mastering the night; both moments invoke a subject open to arrangement and deepening. A gap between this very world of becoming and the final lines we are reading bring us to the blessed rage of the poet as creator, the maker and poet, the craftsperson. It is for us to turn this conflict into a metaphor for the problem of human action and technology, and thus connect the work to the Anthropocene.

Burnside’s Orphic lyric learns from an epigrammatic propensity found in Stevens: ‘And what we said of it became/A part of what it is’ (‘A Postcard from the Volcano’ (Stevens, 1936, pp. 15–16)). This is where writing does not name, fix nor resolve, but offers itself as a journey, as a critical invention that deforms literature’s limits. Burnside’s poetry traces a path to be followed in inspiration; it takes this as its subject matter while alluding to Stevens.

but looking always worked towards a word:trading the limits of speechfor the unsaid presence,the way the birdthat vanished through the leavesis true forever now, being unseen (‘Taxonomy’ 25–27)

Writing guides us, transports us and arrests us; however, it can lull us unto a false sense of security, too. As Jay Bernard has observed, ‘Burnside strives to depict the meaning of words, rather than their physical refer-ence’; conveying our constant state of puzzlement when attempting to ‘define the indefinite’ (Bernard, 2007). Eliot conceived of the role of poetry as the transformation of phenomena and relationships into a world of symbols to which we give meaning and attach value: ‘We had the expe-rience but missed the meaning, /An approach to the meaning restores the experience/In a different form’ (Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’ 2: 45–47 (Four Quartets, 1943)). Burnside takes this approach as the subject of his poetry; in its lack of meaning, or final arrival at meaning, the emphasis on process has emotional consequences. Living in an undescribed world is difficult; we like to know how things feel. Without description our problems and suffering vanish, are purged of commonality, and we feel

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cut off from the world; we lack affective reference to things; we are alone when things are not properly named. This loneliness, I want to argue, is a form of freedom in Burnside. This freedom comes from contemplating how we might fit into the world – at the core of which is the desire to relate and care, and in Gift Songs how we might simply exist:

Give me a little lesswith every dawn:colour, a breath of wind,the perfection of shadows,

till what I find, I findbecause it’s there,gold in the seams of my handsand the night light falling. (‘For a Free Church’ 3: 1–8)

This prayer is some distance from the ironical ordering of the night by things in the environment that Burnside’s reformulations of Stevens delineate.

In Gift Songs, the geography of belonging is made more vibrant by enduring the provisional and by celebrating the gap between the named and unnamed. Here we become attuned to the ongoing alternation between life and death amongst environments and species. In these moments we connect to what Heidegger means by ‘ereignis’: the ‘always-already operative empowering of the essential togetherness of disclosive human comportment and of the entities qua accessible’: that is, human openness to the unfolding world in all its precise and rich elements and qualities (Sheehan, 1993, p. 82). Stevens appears to be aware of this during the moment that he is ordering the world for his lines of poetry. Engagement with and distance from this poetic act is a way of securing ourselves, fixing things to our grammar and logic.

For Burnside, this is the first step to an ecology of mind, a state of being that enfolds us within a larger canvas of the way of things. And this is where Burnside’s four quartets most directly draw from Eliot. Their sense of becoming is modulated by the quest for a language appropriate to the world’s brevity and depth, and yet––more akin to Stevens – they appear happy in any failure during this quest. Attempting to fuse human to world via word itself is important. It is a path we choose; a request for a common reference point (like God). For Eliot, the path speaks of access to the real. For Stevens, without relying on the validity of the empiri-cal reality it is a communion in itself ‘in which being there together is


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enough’ (‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’ (Stevens, 1936, p. 18)). However, Gift Songs ends with an extensive contemplation of loss within the parameters set up for Burnside by Eliot. While the Modernist adopted a Christian view of the world that dramatically inscribes mean-ing within our relationship to time, and loss, and the fall, Burnside is working out a connection to Stevens via Eliot, eliciting the event of the intelligibility of loss and change as sensitivity to the fact that there is hap-pening in the world; and what is happening in our historical moment is increasingly destructive. This post-secular alternation between life and death is grounded by lyrical comportment leading to materialist empha-ses in the post-industrial scenes of the quartets.

Generative worlds; language and placeNo one invents an absence:cadmium yellow, duckweed, the capercaillie– see how the hand we would name restrains itselftill all our stories end in monochrome;(John Burnside ‘For a Free Church’ 2: 13–16)

The incongruity between representation and reality is a condition that poetry is alert to. Stevens has named the willed response to this condi-tion as ‘the maker’s rage to order words of the sea’ (‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ (Stevens, 1936, p. 53)), knowing that any song of the earth and of sky and of sea is the singer’s song in reality, no other’s. ‘Makar’ is the Scots term for poet. Burnside’s poetic intentionality as makar encourages one to feel out a sense of being with things; his craft is always gesturing beyond anthropocentric agency in its recourse to parousia.3

Burnside’s view of place transformed into poetry is like ‘a country relearned and forgotten’ (Gift Songs, ‘Le Croisic’ 5: ‘Peninsula’ 46). As things become part of our second nature, our critical literacy for them is lost. The world in which we perform sinks deeply into our culture both leading towards ideology or myth and transforming how we feel, intuitively and instinctively. A self-reflexive concern for constructing

3 For fuller accounts of Heideggerian poetics, see Guignon, C. (2001). Being as Appearing: Retrieving the Greek Experience of Phusis, in G. Fried, & R. Polt (Eds.), A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven: Yale University Press; Rorty, R. (1993). Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language, in C. B. Guignon (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (2nd ed., pp. 337–357), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Mathews, F. (2009). Introduction: Invitation to Ontopoetics, Philosophy Activism Nature, 6, 1–7.

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the world in (human) language is amplified in the Anthropocene as it symbolises human impact upon and transformation of the world. The Anthropocene lyric registers life in both diachronic and synchronic senses, present to our minds in a state before the next wave of interac-tion, dialogue, composition, learning and forgetting. The plasticity of Anthropocene emotion is indicated here: our feelings of connection with the earth are ruptured by observations of a world in suspension that presents meaning to our sense faculties in the moment, yet they are haunted by a consciousness of a larger wave of historical pulses moving through things. This state views the world tacitly, feels the world through ‘ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds’ (Stevens, 1936, p. 56). These legacies continue to impact upon pastoral, l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e, lyric poetry and the ecopoem in contemporary America and Britain. They are useful to keep in mind when turning to Burnside’s writing on place and his quietude and uncertainty in moments such as those drawing from Augustine’s sense of holding fast to our being in time, loving and doing as you will; acknowledging and accepting that ‘What we intend/and what we allow to happen/is anyone’s guess’ (‘Ama et fac quod vis’ 10–12).

Urban history

The first of the four quartets in Gift Songs opens with a walking figure that is considering these very post-Romantic concerns and coordinates for the site of lyric:

I’m walking through the windless innertown,– breeze-blocks, mongrels, smashed glass, chantiers –walking towards the sky, and the smell of the tide

and reading the names from a map, rue Lumiere,impasse de Toutes Aides,impasse de l’Ocean.

Somewhere a bell is ringing,though whether it comes from the churchor out to sea

I cannot tell;when evening falls, the water bleeds awaytowards a rose horizon where the boats

go out to fishing grounds and otherport-towns much like this (‘St Nazaire’ 1: 13–26)


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Walking is a free expression of autonomy. It offers the poet a means to give expression to subjectivity that appears limited and yet is imagina-tively open to tracing itself anew within the matrix of the spatial dynam-ics of the locale.

Here, it is clear that the poem is foregrounding uncertainty (‘Somewhere’; ‘I cannot tell’) while suggesting relations between objects in place. These triplets are amalgams of the walker in the space of breakdown: ‘smashed glass’ ‘mongrels’ and ‘chantier’ (shipyard and building site). While the site is alive to the footsteps of the poem’s voice, the movement through the scene is ultimately conditioned by the environmental conditions (the oncoming dusk and urban decay). The final move is democratic; there are other spaces ‘much like this’. Such an appeal to spatial commonality might seem ignorant of local flavours and yet it lends itself to abstractions wherein the experience is not for an elect few. Burnside is leading us towards his version of negative capability. Moreover, the abstract watermark, supported by uncertainty, tricks the mind to shift focus from the appearance of things to their positioning in time. As a product of the poem’s anima-tion of space, time becomes the ground from which we begin to map the commonplace: the holy turned unholy; the transcendent turned immanent. Paradoxically, the abstraction leads to material focus in the quartet, ‘Saint-Nazaire’.

The itinerant ‘I’On the bridge to the small Moroccan quarter of the commune Saint-Nazaire, Burnside finds a sign of approximately two and a half metres square, which reads: ‘wandering at night amongst lights that are dis-persing a narrative’ (my translation from the French); it is a significant architectural moment for any flâneur, and something that the line could dwell on. However, the site-specific work of art is moved through at speed to keep the subject position in motion in the quartet that takes its name from the place – the line is perhaps already over-determined by the urban environment. Motion, however, is not to be equated with complete freedom as it is coloured by the installation; pedestrians are written into a narrative that precedes its readers. This issue is amplified at night, for the lights condition where the walker can go.

There is a strange illustration of the human figure within a light-defin-ing space that clearly marks out a world appearing to mind, the ordinary freighted with metaphysical significance.

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On the bridge to Petit Maroc,a legend: vaguer LA NUITDANS DES LUMIERES NARRATIVES,an invocation, maybe, or a prayer,but, really, all there is is what it says:the wind in my eyesand the cold making light of the air,as I wander from lamp to lamp, to the edge of the night,and stand out on the quai des Maréeslooking outto the ocean. (38–46)4

The following is at stake: the extent to which humans generate space, and how our spaces configure us. The poem instances the capacity of urban lighting to illuminate but nonetheless to shroud the space; it points forwards to the closing line of ‘An Essay Concerning Light’: ‘hiding the source itself, in its drowned familiar’ (Burnside, 2009). As with Stevens’s mastering lights (discussed earlier), there is something more to ‘all there is’ in this poem; there is the question of how to conceive of and then make our entrance into what ‘is’; whether these two acts are separate at all is another question.

The legend refers to a bright blue public art installation alive at night, partly secured to generate tourist interest in an urban estuary area with its docklands and former submarine base. While natural light ordinarily transforms earth and sea to provide a source of narrative material for any visitor, the poem speaks of the place as redefined by the body and the binding force of scripture as instanced by the signage – literally lyricism inscribed in the material read as one passes through the space. The poem has become entangled in a literary space where the imagination is engaged in the course of traverse. We are reminded that the Anthropocene begs the question whether we can escape our human constructions.

The generative sense of world-making exemplified by the sign’s rela-tion to the pedestrian is interwoven with the need to register the body and the felt world of the walker in the poem. We are given a sense of the wind, and the cold, indicating temporal, climatic conditions that are conditioned by factors far beyond this scene; they have the potential to

4 Burnside deletes the quotation marks that are present on ‘Nuit De Docks’ conceptualised by the urban renewal artist, Yann Kersalé. The work significantly transformed the space at night.


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trigger emotions. Earlier in the collection this tactile texture to the poem came from the haptic world: ‘that cold and salty pact/the body makes with things unlike itself ’ (‘Ama et fac quod vis’). In these moments, Burnside’s lyricism of the corporeal ‘I’ locates an interactive space albeit framed by an imaginative condition which gestures towards the commonplace of this experience: its unholiness.5 However, there is something metaphysi-cal in the way that the poem outlines how place and self are constructed through exchanges across such impersonal public monuments that have meaning to us individually and to systems of language that gesture towards something other than themselves.

‘Making light of the air’ is a pun on thinking of space (and our oxygen) as insignificant, while also remarking on the act of making, of think-ing on poetry and of urban planning reclaiming space. Furthermore, it reminds us of the birds of ‘Ny-Hellesund’ which are ‘becoming the air’ and exist ‘for nothing’ (see below) – that is to say, to exist for nothing, the value of the birds is not immediately, or even at length, evident (which is not to say that they are without value). While he is working out a sense of freedom within the spaces of partly coerced comprehension and the spaces that invite contemplation of the world yet to be, Burnside appropriates text from the art installation. Already examples of narra-tive reification, these lines ironise a collective narrative promoting the experiential modes of connection once placed in the poem. This sense of connection as literary and real is established through the emphasis on walking and how walking generates a recomposed scene to all resi-dents and all tourists; this has curious effects. To keep with the signage is to stay within the constructed world; to keep with the elements is to remain within the unfolding world, which in Burnside’s four quartets is linked to eternity. Both worlds operate within a single accumulation of sense impressions and bodily knowledge wherein it seems that a suc-cessful response to one code will result in a failed response to the other. Epistemological reflection is neither exploited nor mobilised for lyri-cism. Thus, this moment qualifies what I have alluded to as indifference to what is presented before the self. How might Anthropocene ethics arise out of this scene?

5 For Henri Lefebvre, cities are situations: ‘a present and immediate reality, a practico-material and architectural fact’ to be made distinct from ‘the urban, a social reality made up of rela-tions which are to be conceived of, constructed or reconstructed by thought’; Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writings on Cities, (E. Kofman, & E. Lebas, Eds.) Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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The poem and the figure move on (unmoved), neutrally, standing out in the affective field of the landscape composition; yet not unlike an Edward Hopper figure, vacant and fixed in place like the quay ‘looking out/to the ocean’. This is ‘going in’ to place with the slightest or most transparent footprints as a means to register the human within an array of various forms of life and the conditions for life. Here, personhood is indebted to withness (see Oswald, in the following sections); unrealised potential for emotion and empathy are accented as grounds of being over individuation. I read this quietness as a mode of being within place, of simply being there as one part of the scene – neither constructing nor receiving the attributes of the scene, merely acting or positing oneself within the space that is held in stillness with an implicit intuitive feeling of a larger plane of immanence and dynamism haunting the moment. There is earnestness about this disposition to be within the array of such complex presencing; something non-egotistical, too: a wandering figure, understated as a part of the geography, merely being. This is a place involving the human but not reduced to human understanding or concerns. Like Stevens’s world, it is one of composure: of scene, of self.

With this sense of composure in mind, the lyric that replays the energy fields evident in the world keeps the verb and the present parti-ciple alive. It offers up the communion of poetry as a form of dissidence. In Gift Songs poiesis (making) maps ‘the gradual dead/drifting between the trees like gusts of wind’ (‘De corporis ressurectione’ 8–9); a moment from the collection’s first page signifies broad timescapes deconstruct-ing finitude and animating a sense of place as if these were one thing in conversation with (and thus enworlded by) the invisible and defining properties of our world. Gift Songs speaks to the variety of ways of find-ing ourselves as part of the more-than-human world; locating the ways that we bring ourselves to the world. We can find ourselves in emotional spaces conducive to embracing the world in its openness; we can be alienated by both the heterogeneity and multivalency of our spaces and experiences. Our intellectual and spiritual openness is framed only by a new poetics of an expansive self-actualisation where the world is not reduced to a product of the human imagination; it merely is.6 While

6 See Mathews, F. (1991). The Ecological Self, London: Routledge; Mathews, F. (2009). Introduction: Invitation to Ontopoetics, Philosophy Activism Nature, 6, 1–7.; Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology, Ayelsbury: Intertext; Shepard, P. (1978). Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Consciousness, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.


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such ecological selfhood portends the dissolving of human subjectiv-ity into the fabric of life, this disposition leads to disquietude when the context of the Anthropocene casts its shadow.

Psychogeograpy and spirited materialismIn its kinship with humanity, poetry has been the tool by which we behave and confront behaviour, memorise and challenge those memories (Kinsella, 2013b, p. 95)

The quartets are a significant moment in Burnside’s post-secular work with urban hues, taking the intellectual and spatial foreground within this particular embodied economy of resistance to transcendence as a move towards spirited materialism. While contemplating the common misconception that urban environments are disconnected from the ‘nat-ural’, Burnside has stated that he wants to refocus on authenticity, that is, life and the reality of the commonplace. ‘Poetry is one of the means by which we can purify things by stripping off all these social elements ... in a constant search for the authentic, but not outside the common, lived experience’ (Dosa, 2003, p. 14).

Twenty years before Gift Songs, Burnside’s Common Knowledge (1991) took its title from a passage in Karl Marx’s introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right where the same plea for authenticity can be heard in Marx’s exposition of man and religion. Marx claims that a criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism, and that philosophy is to be in the service of history:

To unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. (Marx, 1970, pp. 132–133)

Authenticity is keenly marked out in Gift Songs’s emphasis on territory brought to bear via geographical literacy; this literacy reconfigures loca-tion as an attunement to estrangement. This runs against an environ-mental emphasis on connected, relational beings realising harmony and concordance in the world; conversely, there is no harmony, no exchange between agents, only derealisation; the literary mode that alters percep-tion or experience of things rendering them unreal. This alteration confronts everyday life, felt as a force that is expansively communal:

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I am defined by my relationships with what surrounds me, which may include landscape, or the means of production specific to my locality, but is also the realm of others, of similarity and difference, and what we accept as common knowledge. (‘Poetry and a Sense of Place’ 13)

It is easy for history to slip into heritage; easy for our former quaysides, historical agricultural communities and contemporary light industries to fall to the waste of global capital and the empty gesture of memorial for the sake of memorial. It is a little more difficult to realise a critique of these processes as the unmasking of self-estrangement.

chiffchaff and warblersparley from shade to shade,becoming the airin a song that exists for nothing(‘Ny-Hellesund’ 6: 4–7)

The lyric poem, for Burnside, ‘is the point of intersection between space and a specific moment or moments’; in effect, the lyric can ‘act as a detailed map, not only of topological (and meteorological), features, but also of any response to those features’ (Burnside, 1996). There is a world freighted in Burnside’s ‘nothing’. The intellectual preoccupation of subject–object relations (vis-à-vis receiving and constructing worlds) and the theme of decomposition speak to ideas of order in both Eliot and Stevens. For Burnside they enable the concerns for locale ‘to set up a kind of metaphysical space, which is essentially empty, a region of potential in which anything can happen’ (‘Poetry and a Sense of Place’ 2). Placing the potential of the world back into shared spaces is one form of unmasking (mentioned earlier). In ‘Ny-Hellesund’ lineation enables us to imagine both the conference of warblers and the warblers themselves slipping into air; in the same manner as song slipping into world, the image is of a present continuum of fading cadences.

The ‘windless inner town’ only slightly contrasts with the public square outside the Catholic church of Saint-Nazaire with which the poem opens. There, the wind disturbs leaves, they ‘swirl around’ (‘Saint-Nazaire’ 7) and yet this is not a broad expanse of free play: it is one of ‘wynds’ (1); ‘narrow streets and ‘nooks’ (5). Iain Galbraith has noted that Burnside’s poetry considers how humans ‘have frequently lost their way, forfeited any “natural” dwelling place in the world’; and that poetry ‘can help us find a way out of the narrow, calamitous place to which ecological neglect


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has brought us’ (Galbraith, 2013, p. 565). With restriction in mind, in this poem we are aware that the leaves are ‘plane leaves’ (1) in a world of ‘abandoned/hair salons’ (5–6) and ‘broken alleyways’ (7). Is this a desperate site in which we are lost? Wynd is from wynden: to proceed, to go; and in Scots it is the name for a path, pronounced similarly to ‘mind’. Thus, no animating spirit (wind) turning the space into a site of action, only ‘plane leaves’ moving through difficult spaces that move us towards the critical mindscape that heralds a static world for our own imagina-tive colouring. I have clarified that Anthropocene ethics are at stake in the way that the poem composes a scene for the human to enter.

As we find later, a fully integrated and cognitively confident subject does not enter the scene; self-possession is absent, too. So what kind of keeping with the human is this? All that we have is self-estrangement that comes from the derealisation of ‘place’.

the earth, the grassand what the body offers of itselfto any journey, any secret thingthat passes in the dark and flits awaynot self, but history: not self, but place. (‘Ny-Hellesund’ 1: 17–21)

While not as discreet as with Oswald, lineation here is telling. This final single sense unit is heavily punctuated and denotes a broken con-tinuum from self to place. Staccato to the eye, fluid to the mind; it is like the closing line to The Light Trap that fuses woman, blackbird and man as three in one, and the one in three (‘A Theory of Everything’). Here in Gift Songs identity is firmly rooted in materialism animated by a spirited sense of loss pointing towards our capacity to connect to pat-terns in life that are not picked up by human geography but are cradled by the spaces that we inhabit.

The focus of presences in the landscape inherent to ‘Saint-Nazaire’ terminates at the signatures of human construction and indifference to nature’s symbolism; it extends the neutrality or stoicism of the ‘plane leaves’ tumbling around in narrow corridors. We have to allow time for these discrete objects and animating forces to accumulate in the mind. All this poetic architecture and ordering is underlined by the impasse: a situation in which no progress is possible. And yet something is achieved in this poem, a state of being that owns itself in its unfinished openness, not unlike Oswald’s rivers and moons. I would like to think of this as Anthropocene indifference to the ‘I’.

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Varieties of religious experience (1)

we have tried to imagine the gaps we will leave being filled with the brilliance of others(‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ 10: 4–6)

Gift Songs has three primary concerns: how we figure ourselves within the landscape scene; how our learning and our vision bring us towards a sense of Earth’s continuance without us; and what we learn from observing animals. It is too crude to map these in terms of ‘geography’, ‘spirit’ and creatureliness’, for there is too often a deep sense of place and loss that runs through these coordinates. We have considered the first of these ideas in depth; it is time to speak of the other two. A combination of the eternal and the creaturely is most clearly reg-istered during a soulful moment of recollection of Scottish folksong in the Breton landscape: ‘that animal sense I share, in the nerve and the bone/of something urgent’, which in itself has only become clear through the pull to ‘the fog/and becoming home’ (‘Le Croisic’ 3: 20–21, 17–18). Elsewhere, Burnside has it as ‘our bodies skilled and warming to a loss/as total and incomplete/as a blackbird’s singing’ (The Light Trap, ‘Blackbird’ 2: 28–30). While The Light Trap never captures things outside of processes (the circle of life and death that is the circle of poetic light in which all things fall), Gift Songs alludes to a sense of returning home to ourselves, as human species, through this pull and very urgency, this warming. Such loss and warming has distinct Anthropocene undertones.

Stoical neighbourlinessBurnside’s Selected Poems drew a line under the first wave that resisted an enclosure of the imagination, yet settled into unsentimental, indi-vidualistic, almost solipsistic verse. This first wave drew broadly from northern hemisphere mythology yet failed to enfold human subjectiv-ity into the lifeworld in the manner that the expansive and heightened imagination of the wider community realises in the dwelling trilogy. There, Burnside sustains folk-oriented lyricism, yet looks more broadly to other animals, discrete ecologies and historical crises in the golden hues of The Light Trap. Gift Songs is his first subsequent collection. James McGonigal clarifies a new aspect in the dwelling trilogy: ‘To Burnside’s


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earlier intellectualist categorisation of the lineaments of a spiritual world impinging on our own, and putting its materiality under question, is added the force of the human will facing out what is shameful or painful in the past, or in the present’ (McGonigal, 2006, p. 241).

Running alongside relational selfhood in the trilogy, which has crystallised Burnside’s outlook and stabilised his voice, is the poet’s disconnection from aspects of Catholicism’s ‘ideology of sanctity’.7 This disconnection is somewhat developed by Gift Songs’s removal from a transcendentalist sense of self-healing in nature through an emphasis on the indifference of world to humans;8 yet this does not speak of cruelty. For McGonigal, Burnside’s lyricism in both these modes speaks of a ‘radi-cal hunger for alternatives to ... politicized transnational capitalism’ and ‘the reticence and caution of traditional religious structures in response to it’ (McGonigal, 2006, p. 235). This relates Burnside to Emerson with significant interest for our reading of Gift Songs.

Regarding Emerson, Lawrence Buell emphasises the literary qual-ity of Unitarian sermonising and the examination of inspiration as ‘distrust of structured spiritual development’ (Buell, 1973, p. 277; 179). In Emerson’s new testament (Emerson, 1971) – the call for an original relation between man and environment as a means to fix disunity within man himself – two attributes are particularly germane to Burnside: we find a world of guaranteed meaning being brought under acute scrutiny, while the idea that knowledge is humanly inscribed is brought into relief. Emerson is Burnside’s earliest American mentor; the reaction against Neoclassical artificiality in the then new poetry of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) is his touchstone (Bristow, 2008, pp. 54–125). I shall return to Emerson shortly. For now, it is worth spending a little time to consider how the Romantic prob-lematic of creator versus free channel in the artist is given heightened linguistic and symbolic edge in this new epistemological aesthetic, for it bears heavily on Stevens, Eliot and Rilke. It is the legacy of such thinking pressing upon and through the grammatical, conceptual and categorical constraints that overtly influences Burnside’s poetic apparatus, recalling Emerson’s discovery of a ‘double-consciousness’ (Emerson, 1971, p. 213), and the lives and understanding of the soul (James, 1985).

7 ‘Recuscant Grace’ as mentioned earlier.8 The second ‘response’ to St Augustine of Hippo speaks of St Paul’s God as ‘no respecter of

persons’ (‘Ama et fac quod vis’ 2).

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William James writes, as Carrette points out, that ‘religious emotion feels something, a presence or as if something were true. It is the feel-ing of a reality that, according to James, gives “a new sphere of power”’ (Carrette, 2005). In the endurance of pain and hardship without com-plaint, as evident in the stoical tenor of Gift Songs, the shift from the dwelling trilogy’s attention to events and consequences to a new politics of indifference seems less germane to the question of the Anthropocene. This quietude, however, relinquishes human power and self-assertion. Burnside’s understated maxims delicately animate sensitivity to a world that is not ours, whether it is of our making or otherwise. Kinsella’s lyric – the fusion of political vision and subjective feeling – more urgently impels ethical orientation in relation to the environment. Burnside is less focused on property and indigenous displacement; his concern is for the conditions of possibility for the ethical orientation toward the dispossession of the self. This is first registered in The Asylum Dance in the epigraph to ‘Settlements’: ‘God answers our prayers by refusing them’; this particular breakdown is replayed in the Good Neighbour in the epigraph to ‘Steiner undir Steinahlithum’: ‘Nature offers no home’ and it is picked up again in Gift Songs in the God of St Paul ‘who is/“no respecter of persons”’ (‘Ama et fac quod cis’ 2: 1–2). These phrases oper-ate within a meshwork of irony, belief, polemic and subtle humour that colours Burnside’s quietude.

Ecopoetic liturgyIn the responses to Augustine, lyricism is no longer challenged with illuminating the unity of ecological interactions; it is concerned with simplicity of feeling:

we go for months with phantoms in our headstill, filling a bath, or fetching the laundry in,we see ourselves again, at home, illumined,folding a sheet, or pouring a glass of milk,bright in the here and now, and unencumbered. (‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ 11: 18–22)

The closing lines to this section sit under the title ‘Lares’, Roman guard-ians of the hearth; the final word signifies freedom. ‘Illumined’ and ‘bright’ work alongside the ‘bath’, ‘laundry’ and ‘milk’; Burnside’s quo-tidian threaded with gold ignited an ecological mind in The Light Trap, but this poem speaks of a lack of burden and a freedom that was not


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possible in the dwelling trilogy. The term ‘unencumbered’ reminds us of ‘Unuberwachte’, used in Rilke’s fourth elegy (1987, 1989), meaning to be free without the burden of supervision and where one is healed in ‘timeless/stillness’ (17–18). This existential state of mind relinquishes goal orientation and utilitarianism where things have purpose for the present while blind to their implications for the future. There is something akin to an Anthropocene critique here. However, in the poetic realm the self can enter into the ‘boundless/unfathomable’ (36–37), which is entrance into the other that is now part of the self. It is nothing more than the emergent more-than-human world, a cousin to Burnside’s ecologically attuned self (after Emerson), born of the lightness of deconstructed settlement.

Varieties of religious experience (2)

and, slowlyfrom the stockyards in the town,

the scent of beasts arrives;the biblical;

rudderless gazesturned to a farmer’s sky. (‘For a Free Church’ 4: 7–12)

Questions of perception as a mode of involvement and participation with the more-than-human world in Gift Songs’s four quartets are prefaced in the opening poem of the division titled ‘Gift Songs’ that follows on from ‘Responses to Augustine of Hippo’. This poem has 11 sections, and it is named ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ after William James’s seminal study of human nature (1902). The context for Burnside’s turning to James is the latter’s sustained interest in emotions, psychology and the discourses emerging as phenomenology sanitised of its antecedents.

Augustine of Hippo was an enthusiastic student of Plato, the Neoplatonists and the Bible. Coleridge’s understanding of Neoplatonism influenced Emerson’s sense of reason and understanding; they are dif-ferentiated in terms of faith (inward vision) and reason (rationalism), respectively. This dualism is transcended when perception is aligned with judgement: an emphasis ‘upon [a] beneficent, all-pervasive, and self-regulatory moral law’ (Milder, 2007, p. 103). This moral law is deduced

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and inferred through nature, both biologically and metaphorically, by Emerson. While Kinsella might look to such self-reliance as a means to avoid a fallacy of connectedness or Romantic sense of continuity with nature, Burnside endeavours to locate the ‘wider self ’ that qualifies Emerson’s solipsistic man as a law unto himself (James, 1985, p. 405). The cosmic soul operating outside the individual is read by Emerson as an illimitable ‘universal’ mind of which man is a temporal incarnation (‘History’, 1841). As the deep background power that resists possession, it abolishes time and space, and offers the site in which ‘the subject and the object are one’ (Emerson, 1980, p. 160). Emerson’s temporal incarnation of the non-contingent relates to James’s uniform religious deliverance consisting of ‘uneasiness’ and its ‘solution’ (James, 1985, p. 400).9 This provides an almost Arminianist qualification to the ego, the Copernican astronomy overriding the Ptolemaic world as mere resource for the education of the private individual (Milder, 2007, p. 111) offering man as part of the stream whose source is hidden. Again, we might remind ourselves of the closing line of ‘An Essay Concerning Light’ (Burnside, 2009): ‘hiding the source itself, in its drowned familiar’. Not to look for the source is to deny the need for roots, for origin; it is to think of history as the incorporation of our actions and the site of our bodily becoming. Burnside’s historical sensibility learns from a number of theorists and poets, all pointing to a loss of ego or selfhood, and disconnection from roots to speak of becoming in its fullness.

One enormous household: Rilkean huesOn Heidegger’s reading of Rilke’s poetry, animals present back to the humans the notion of a submerged humanism in the recesses of the heart, the potential of which is to be gained via the loss of self. In abstraction, such sovereignty speaks directly to Stevens and Eliot. Heidegger argues that humans need the animal’s face (Antlits) to connect to the open (the boundless world of unrealised potential that delivers freedom to human consciousness). In Heidegger’s ‘What Are Poets For?’ (1946) the need for the non-rational is motioned less than the idea of being brought into relation with God via human distinction to creatures. It is here – in an

9 Independently of Carl Lange, James discovered that ‘perception triggers visceral changes that are then appraised cognitively and labeled as emotions’; Nathanson, D. L. (1996). Introduction, in D. L. Nathanson (Ed.), Knowing Feeling: Affect, Script and Psychotherapy, New York: W.W. Norton.


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intuitive realm – that ‘nature’ in Heidegger’s Rilke is not divisional, as it ‘is not contrasted to history’. Rather, it is life, not in the biological sense, but as physis: ‘Being in the sense of all beings as a whole’.10 Burnside aims his lyric of impersonality and indifference at this sense of being, while aware that ‘the animal’s relation to its environment is not a mechanical relation but one of stimulation, disinhibition, involvement, of the kind of close immersion in nature of which we can have only an inkling’ (Smith, Davidson, Cameron, & Bondi, 2009, p. 29).

Heidegger’s distinction between ‘world poor’ animals and ‘world forming’ humans is made to argue through the point that humans are not absorbed into the environment. Thus they can view the world as a site of possibility; perceive environments from a distance, from outside. This seems to reinstate a Cartesian dualism that phenomenology wished to destroy. The distinction between ‘weltbildend’ (world forming) and ‘weltarm’ (world poor) for Heidegger does not place animals beneath humans in a hierarchy of species, but it places an enormous sadness within the latter animal realm: weltos is burdened by something intense as viewed from the perspective of the human (Heidegger’s human) (Heidegger, 1995, p. 273).

Rilke appears to suggest that a disorienting consciousness of time (and therefore change and history) means that humans are ‘forever tak-ing leave’ (Rilke, 1989, 4: 73), that we have moved some distance away from first things and that home or origin is something only now quite distant. Gift Songs redresses that epistemological flaw in suggesting another model of ‘happening’ (as mentioned earlier). Respite from a sense of mourning and sense of loss comes where there is no ‘World’, or to Rilke’s post-Romantic imagination, no ‘pure/unseparated elements which one breathes/without desire and endlessly knows’ (4: 16–19). It is to be located and offered life from within a continuum of the world’s unfolding. It is not necessary to conflate the human animal with the non-human animal here.

Holding these thoughts and feelings together is an ideal that the prag-matic ecopoet would like to realise but feels compelled to speak of it as an impossibility. As a spiritual impulse or measure for our actions and thoughts – ideal, Romanticised, human-centred – it is a useful starting

10 Heidegger, M. (1962). On the Way to Language, (P. D. Hertz, Trans.) London: Harper Row. Scholars in critical animal studies disregard Heidegger’s work on animals for its sense of a rigid hierarchy between the species.

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point for our discussion of human relations with the more-than-human world. Rilke’s creaturely comportment is at play in the world. I under-stand this as disinterestedness – what I am indicating as the neutral indifference of ‘nature’ is something Burnside attempts to magnetise his poetry to via intellectual quietude in Gift Songs.

The situated creaturely lifeOur blood does not forewarn usLike migratory birds(‘The Fourth Elegy’ (Rilke, 1989))

Burnside lines up five subjects: an arctic fox, rock pipits, the northern sea duck (eider), a working dog (‘collie’) and Central American coyotes; each is settled into their own space lying adjacent to the others in the series ‘Five Animals’; all are threaded with the three imaginative impulses identified earlier.

and the Arctic foxcame silently out of the distance,half-way to summer already, the silvery furthreaded with auburnand brown, the face

indifferent, although it caught my eyeand watched, for a minute– scenting me,sounding me out – (1: ‘Arctic Fox’ 6–14)

When they sing from the harbour wall, amongstthe soured lines and ten-fathom creels,it sounds like an apprenticeship for something moreauspicious – fulmar, say,for whom this salt-sweet air is neitherfate, nor home; (2: ‘Rock Pipits’ 1–7)

my house the unsettled reflectionof what I have made

from off-cuts and leftover shingleto house the birds. (3: ‘Eider House’ 5–8)

the intricate sweetness of oil,the declensions of rain,


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a pocket of mildew and hairin the mole drain, flushed from its cover,the animal that dips beneath the sickle,wed to the map of the grassand unable to run. (4: ‘Collie’ 20–26)the voices calling from the present tense,restoring me to where the mind leaves off,the nothing of the self, the here and now. (5: ‘Coyotes (Sonora)’ 19–22)

Poems two and three speak of the Lowlands of Scotland, but framed by the wildlife of Norway and Meixco’s northwest (the latter registered in a dream); this array instances another decentred habitus speaking to our observational selves when connecting to the terrain of others, as visitors (i.e., not property owners). Herein lies Burnside’s own triangulation of his materials: Stevensian reflexivity, ‘my house the unsettled reflection/of what I have made’; Eliotian depersonalisation, ‘the nothing of the self ’; and Rilkean sensitivity and openness, ‘like an apprenticeship for some-thing more/auspicious’; all captured by an otherness: ‘the voices calling from the present tense ... the here and now’.

The opening poem is honest about being unaccustomed to ‘the rule of the tundra’ (‘Arctic Fox’ 20) and yet this lack of geographically specific habitual behaviour enables the ‘logic of the wilderness’ (21) to come forth to the poem’s eye. Vision is imagined here as the space of empti-ness that is filled with the chance that something might happen, such as this encounter.

The second poem works towards realisation by revisiting Burnside’s preoccupation with ‘betweenness’ as a state of mind and being. The rarely seen, inconspicuous, Eurasian rock pipit is less favourable (conducive to success in these conditions) than the arctic and British Isles seabird, but both are dropped from view (and sound) for the melodious song of the mistle thrush: ‘beneath a wind-glazed kirk, the mistle thrush/recalls itself ’ (‘Rock Pipits’ 9–10). The subterranean world is given representation; so too the repetition of things. Neither of these are clearly in view as things in and of themselves. The bird (heard from a range of up to two kilome-tres), shifts the poem into the auditory imagination and thus enriches the phenomenological palette, pushing the mind to do some work, asking: ‘why would they dream of rebirth, who are/intent on nothing’ (12–13).

The failed analogy, or parallel, between human and non-human senses of finality, and its escape, is redressed in the next two poems: first by the

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human’s movement that animalises the waking state – ‘[I] come and go/in a dream of feathers’ (‘Eider House’ 1–2); and then through the echo of this wavering, by a dog, ‘havering back and forth/while the pheasants scatter’ (‘Collie’ 11–12). Each species has its own labour to perform and follows its instincts in its own way in each of these poems. This consist-ency might be what Burnside is trying to foreground as a way of drawing these discrete species together and yet leaving them in their own space. This arrangement, a technique similar to Kinsella’s, reflects back onto the human as a controlling observer and pattern seeker. It also speaks of non-species-based consanguinity.

The Eider are read in the skyway while the poem attempts to tune in to other things. Huge distances and the sensitivity of blind men as objects of attunement invites the poem to account for a ‘warmth’, a presence in the world that the poet creates an exaggerated space for: ‘ – a rumour of flight, /a gift from the legible world –’ (‘Eider’ 25–26). This quest details the impulse to look for and read signs in the world; it also indicates sen-sitivity to presences beyond our immediate ken. I have looked at these in terms of connections to Eliot and Stevens; the portent of those presences clearly lies deeply within the imagination’s intuitive world from which it works, as performed by the poem. This space musters up the rock pipit as a species that is doubled or twinned elsewhere, present in another ver-sion of themselves wandering in the mountains like a human figure that is written out in the strangest of ways: ‘almost smoke/between the river and a sky of bone’ (‘Rock Pipits’ 18–19). Such mythical ornamentation of the intangible world that lies in proximity to familiar elements is very much the Burnsidean imaginative space that is refined in Gift Songs.11

Much like the chance meeting with the fox, the observation of the world of the collie (‘Collie’ 20–26) is dependent on a stalled tractor in the road slowing things down. Here the poem’s opening, gripped by the stasis of the Kinaldy road, is shot through with the changing forms of Fife’s weathered landscape in the present moment that is opened up to contain the findings – or catch – of the eastern coastal region of the North Atlantic: ‘Sunshine at Spalefields crossing; /small rain at Beley bridge; /gilthead hanging from the silvered dark/in the tanks of the fisheries lab’ (1–4). Weather, material conditions and poetic vision: all these are brought to bear upon the compulsion to speak of place as a

11 See Brown, A. (2011). Finding the Lit Space: Reality, Imagination, and the Commonplace, in the Poetry of John Burnside, Agenda, 45 (4), 101–111.


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grounding from which we view things in time. It is another version of husbandry within Burnside’s human geography that is tied to a history of dwelling practices. This sense-making – as signalled by the ‘lab’ that portends all creatures can be examined under certain light, and in cer-tain ways – is given its most creaturely inflection in the final poem that points to the human: ‘why, when they call, do I want to hurry outside’ (‘Coyotes (Sonora)’ 3). It is hard to distinguish between the modulations of call and response, placation and the desire for communion here; it is also unnecessary. And yet there is concern for the artificiality of the poem set against the intuitive response of the writer.

The examination of the self ’s need to answer, respond or simply see what is felt by the animal is reflected upon, part rationalised and yet given up: ‘still I hurry on, towards some/epicentre, where the angel waits, /real or implied, to make its annunciation’ (9–11). And here, the series ‘Five Animals’ has become hooked to the awakening metaphor, a clearly secular epiphany drawing from theological iconography to offer a glimpse into a flickering world while stabilising the transient within our cultural imaginary and heritage. Such freezing of time within the poem is something that I have connected to Burnside’s resistance to settlement and fixed frames of thought. The move to the familiar that is reanimated by the vague (‘some’) or indistinct (‘real or implied’) feels like the awakening of an additional sense faculty to readers of Burnside, especially those readers who are prepared to read across shades of meaning and modes of understanding; those prepared to note when colours, symbols, sounds and imagery are drawn up from archival depths and collide like the orchestrated layering of fireworks in vast skies.

In Gift Songs, Burnside’s artificial realm remains tethered to a religious lexis that indicates an event of the embodied soul, an advent of inter-connection and the more-than-human in terms of physis (all beings as a whole, quoted earlier): ‘one enormous household, beasts and angels/simmering like rain against the skin’ (‘Retractiones’ 35–36). This world is possessed by presencing; it is ‘locked in the work of appearing’ (‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ 11: 15). Appearance is the makar’s gift: the very act of reifying verse is an act of co-creation between poet and environ-ment, and not the former’s imposition upon the latter – a perception that is indebted to Heidegger’s analysis of craft:

Not only handcraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiesis. Physis

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also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiesis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. (Heidegger, 1977, p. 10)

Our Anthropocene consciousness has framed such acts of enworlding – the simultaneity of human creative acts and environmental change – as its most intriguing and yet precarious subject. Burnside’s poetry illumi-nates the cultural heritage that lies within this very frame.

A sanguine conclusion

There is no end, but addition: the trailingConsequences of further days and hours,While emotion takes to itself the emotionlessYears of living among the breakageOf what was believed in as the most reliableAnd therefore the fittest for renunciation –(T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’ 2: 7–12)

The coolness and classicism of the ‘ I’ wandering across France, Norway and Scotland in the four quartets suggests that personhood is confident and open to change, happy to be where ‘identity is less fixed, more open to possibility’ (Burnside, 1996, p. 3) as suggested by the stroll across the bridge in ‘Saint-Nazaire’. This moment, already written out as a narrative of walking, speaks of the body letting go of long-held assumptions of the self; it disposes of the need to realise the self as a subject changing with space – the walking figure is ideal here, as the perception of land-scape attributes changes as one walks through them. More specifically in this quartet, it locates a shift in self-realisation into the larger field of a new quarter of cultural identity (at Petit Maroc). This self might appear disinterested and washed out in a space that is empty, yet the space and the self are both clearly dynamic. I claim the latter as a mode of Anthropocene personhood; it is comparable to the ‘I’ of Sleepwalk and the dispossessed surveyor of Jam Tree Gully as they are all nervous centres of experience that denote the seat of emotions while aiming to qualify the scale of impact, performance and influence of humans on space and their perception of space. Burnside’s version of this relies upon a line of literary examination of the world present before us. His consistent criti-cal concern for the interdependency of noumenon and phenomenon in poetry suggests an interdependency configured by local, oral history, striated and ruptured by the technologies of globalism or of capitalism.


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In Gift Songs, as with The Light Trap, an extensive philosophical outlook on this relationship itself is the record, site and affordance for past and future relations as indicated in the very moment of reckoning in which we are temporally thrown.

This is a momentary law of the Anthropocene lyric that entails a body in space:

Points in space do not stand out as objective positions in relation to the objective position occupied by or body; they mark, in our vicinity, the vary-ing range of our aims and gestures. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 166)The sentient subject does not posit things as objects but enters into a sym-pathetic relation with them, makes them his own and finds them in his momentary law (248).

Unlike the ecopoem of The Light Trap, and the violence of Burnside’s earlier poetry, there is not a desire in any of the four quartets to com-municate a deep connection with biological life; there is simply nothing other than a materialist orientation into what exists before the spatially enlightened subject. The ego-free poem promotes a suspension of this world in consciousness while simultaneously pointing towards the eras-ure of the human subject as much as this is impossible at the moment of intellectual suspension (dependant as this is upon a mind). In Burnside, this gesture is aimed at leaving the world at play in its own terms while registering the body in place; to place mind into view in terms of the terrain it must negotiate without transgressing its limits or enfolding it into the psychoanalysis of the subject.

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3A Sleepwalk on the Severn

Abstract: Perception of placehood is subject to the changeability of the moon in A Sleepwalk on the Severn; my critical analysis of human encounters as ecopoetic extensions to sensory exploration finds them inescapably tinged by moonlit flux. Oswald’s Anthropocene lyric navigates a perilinguistic channel that interconnects human and non-human affect. I argue that her mapping of the movement of emotions across people, planet and place is a mode of signifying the ways that subjectivity and environment call into being our enworldedness.

Keywords: affect; Alice Oswald; enworldedness; moon; placehood



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Alice Oswald entered the British poetry scene with a captivating and original collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996). Over nearly 20 years, a number of critics have noted Oswald’s originality – located nevertheless in a sense of British tradition – and her contribution to ecopoetics. Oswald is alert to the politics of the Anthropocene, keen to place the human subject as a listening self; her pursuit of an environ-mental aesthetic seems intuitive, her poetics bodily. While clearly the spellbinding work of an eminent craft practitioner, her body of work seems modest set beside the other two poets in this study; altogether less driven.

Oswald’s home in Devon, the geography of the southwest of England, encourages a deep engagement with place, folk history and oral cul-ture; she fashions these materials into poetry. An attention to voice and dialect, of people, flora, fauna, water, wind and moon offers a sophisticated and sensitive terrain for the critic seeking to understand the contracts by which the landscape’s moods and the poet’s subjects are signatories. Oswald’s listening self attunes not to the speaking of humans but to the elusive affective dimensions of water. A preliminary analysis understands Oswald’s poetics of immersion as a site in which to register the ways humans are made aware of and touched by nature, and the ways and character of nature itself: its purposiveness, pains and pleasures.

A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009) is Oswald’s second book-length poem centred on a river and its more-than-human community. The first, Dart (2002), is a sound map, or sonic census of the community that works along the river: water purifiers, stonewallers, fisherman and so on. The poem gives voice to a variety of actors without privilege; are all speaking subjects that mark particular sounds relevant to their con-nection to the river in their specific place, and relevant to the rhythms and sounds of the river where they work. Language and location com-bine to provide an accumulative voice that is the river’s own. Similar in approach, Sleepwalk is structured around five phases of the moon and nine characters walking a stretch of the River Severn’s estuary. The interaction of these elements is articulated by voices of the moon and the wind, in addition to a poet-figure observing all interactions and developments in the locale. The text looks and feels like a play; it is dramatic, emotionally literate, scene-centred and character driven. The lyric’s emphasis on the influence of the moon on the water and its temporary inhabitants speaks directly to human experience while

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curiously giving voice to the feelings of the moon and the wind. Much like Dart, this poem sings of an evolving subjectivity, particularly that of the moon, and how this might be witnessed in the emergent qualities of place. The changing environment affects the human subjects; a focus on the emotions helps to map change. Here, Anthropocene personhood is threaded by pained moonhood, shorthand for the planetary forces impacting upon the social and natural worlds. Thus a sense of a deplet-ing environment is jettisoned for an inquiry both into how we develop literacy for planetary affect (from the perspective of a discrete location/region), and into the correspondences between emotional terrains and the ways that language and story respond to represent people who are embedded within the environment. It is at once a bioregional biography and a geography of affect.

* * *This chapter shows how ecopoetry derives from the inhabitation of alive and breathing places and how its reference to placehood posits the poem itself as a horizon of experience in which life entails. In the first two sections, as a measure of place attachment and Anthropocene person-hood, the lyric poem is understood as a channel for transporting private emotion and privatised emotions that relate to our planetary condition. Subsequently, place-consciousness understands the depths of being in an environment as something coterminous with an encompassing energy field, animating and plastic, partly constituting and constituted by the accumulated, spatial formation of the text.

An emphasis on transformative worlds and affective relations with space in the third and fourth sections stresses the influence of moon upon subjects who are ‘forming environmentally’ as a mode of signify-ing the ways that subjectivity and environment, equally, can be rendered manifest in world and in poem. Despite the River Severn acting as the primary index to cultural formations during distinct phases of the moon, the notion of settlement is highly contingent and provisional owing to fluid-somatic registers – or characters – under pressure from two semi-otic presences: an immense biological engine (the moon/earth dynamic) and a biological-neural network (the collective nervous system of the characters and environment in the poem) which are countersunk into the glow of reawakened individualism. This glow registers self-in-world over time; this self, by extension, calls into being the more-than-human world.


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Modulated uncountry: a prologue

I am trying to enquire of the landscape itself what it feels about itself rather than bring in advertising skills. There’s a whole range of words that people use about landscape. Pastoral? Idyll? I can’t stand them. (Oswald, cited in Bunting, 2012)

The Severn estuary is among the world’s natural wonders: wind, moon and water combine to create an unusually wide tidal range and the spec-tacular phenomenon of the Severn bore, a wave that surges upriver at high tide from Sharpness to Gloucester, a transit approximately 18 miles on the river. This detail is hidden in the poetry; Oswald draws out this environment’s unique phenomenological impact on its flora, fauna and human inhabitants.

Oswald’s poems are sound maps. However, while Dart convenes a sonic census undertaken during a walk from the source of the river to the sea mouth (a distance covering more than 30 miles), Sleepwalk details repeated visits to the same location on foot, the Severn estuary under different phases of the moon.1 Emotional accounts of experience can be located where poetic voice signals itself as either an exemplifica-tion of the world’s creativity, or in tension with planetary, regional or ecological processes of identity formation. My intention is to bring these ideas into focus as I look at the ecopoetic canvas and living atmosphere that these voices both construct and play out upon. I look at the poem’s prologue to capture a few ideas at play in this exciting and rewarding long poem.

The anonymous voice of the prologue suggests that to be ‘moodswung’ is only to be ‘settled’ in an ‘uncountry’.

Flat stone sometimes lit sometimes notOne among many moodswung creaturesThat have settled in this beautifulUncountry of an Estuary (3: 1–4)

1 ‘Sonic census’ rather than ‘soundscape’, acknowledging Tim Ingold’s forthright critique of the concept ‘soundscape’ and its reliance on a metaphor from landscape studies for describ-ing auditory space Ingold, T. (2007). Against Soundscape, in A. Carlyle (Ed.), Autumn Leaves: Sound and Environment in Artistic Practice (pp. 10–13), Paris: Double Entendre. The concept sustains a geography of sound, the mapping of voices in space. I raise this issue when addressing Burnside’s sense (in ‘Rock Pipits’, above) of the capacity of the auditory imagination to affectively enrich the immediate perceptual environment.


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Rather than a metaphor for lack of feeling or movement, the stone is moving; it incites a sense of the ‘beautiful’. To be part of an ‘uncountry’ in Sleepwalk is to be unfixed in the same manner that Oswald began to extrapolate in her first collection of rough spaces. In The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), the moon claims that she ‘inhabit[s] one of the jagged disassembled islands’ (‘The Moon Addresses Her Reflection’ 3); such a country is subject to modulations, ‘slabs of light’ (Sleepwalk 3: 11), where ‘the house of the sea/Can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour’ (7–8). Here, the stone is a creature in that it is alive to the play – animated flash – of moonlight. Things and energy enact the world; relations detail such enactments and set parameters and conditions for actions.

There is something else. In Sleepwalk, the opening quatrain (quoted earlier) attends to abstract temporality and environmental affect, quali-fied without any reference to acute particularity within the site that gives the poem its name. The estuary of the River Severn terminates Britain’s longest river, defining coastlines of south Wales and southwest England.2 To be ‘settled’ here is to be liminal, to be a physical (yet mov-ing) border between nations; to be secure of one’s self only as one can be secure about anything from within a flickering perception limited by the waxing and waning moon; by nature seeking to draw itself out of only temporally qualified rigid ontologies like that of the protruding stone.Unfixed identity is indicated in the deftly understated phenom-enological irony in Sleepwalk’s first line, with an echo of the modifying ‘sometimes’ – the only definitive adverb for this place. A little more exposition would inform us that we are perambulating along the mouth of a river with the second highest tidal range in the world, most recently drawn into environmental debates for its capacity to generate electricity by harnessing tidal power; yet the reader is offered only ‘the reedy layby of a vacancy’ and ‘a barren mudsite’ (3: 6; 10). Thus, empti-ness and silent space in Sleepwalk are intentionally ambiguous lyrical motifs pulling experiencing subjects into place without recourse to bioregional detail. We might ask how this move away from geography to a poetics of potential (unrealised spaces and beings) can enable us

2 Place names in the poem, notably ‘Waveridge Sand’, near Purton (5) and ‘Newnham-on-Severn’ (19) locate the Dream Secretary travelling in a southeasterly direction before returning to where the poem begins. Mention of Passage Lane ferry terminal (19) informs us that the poem crosses the river, quite possibly at a location where the river is narrow and yet cartographically as wide as the river mouth – at the last turn of river before widening to the estuary, thus passing through ‘The Noose’.


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to ethically reposition the human within planetary becoming. It might not be a question for ethics alone.

Forming environmentally: the locus of labour

She gives upSoft little sigh with no mouth ... This is not I (24: 5–6, 8)

For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the embedding of self into the world is the necessary condition for consciousness of and contact with the lifeworld: ‘the presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh, that I “am of the world” and that I am not it’ (1968, p. 127). This phenomenological perspective saves the ‘I’ from appropriating the world while also resisting a conflation with the world, to lose identity. I shall think of this as forming environmentally.

Sleepwalk’s textual spaces generate modes of consciousness and sub-jectivity via a spatialised meshwork, or the allusion to pastoral sites of dialogue, shared green spaces of encounter. These scenes are explicitly structured and organised by form in the first half of the poem, which foregrounds the meeting of disparate subjects and processes within a locale. This peculiar duality can be understood as the combination of the ‘textuality of space and spatiality of text’ (Thacker, 2005–2006, pp. 62–65). Sleepwalk is distinct for its spatialised ecopoetic registers oper-ating across three columns (left margin, poem proper, right margin), which lend themselves to the idea that subjectivity can be read off the page as an element of a communal and environmental psychology. Thus, attention to the layout of voice and space is important here.

In the first half of the poem, each page has three columns: the central column holds the lyric poem proper and promotes geographic determi-nants of human experience in the terrain; the left column indicates voice or identity (proto-registers of an emergent self); the right column moni-tors the phase of the moon.3 Sleepwalk encourages its readers to examine the dynamics between form and content in this array of representational forms that highlights the use of space in the text and the ways that space

3 A comparative example of meta-structural poetics that underline a phenomenology of transformation can be found in Hillman, B. (2001). Cascadia, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Oswald uses marginalia quite differently in ‘Five Fables of a Length of Flesh’ in Woods etc (2005).


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profoundly impacts upon form. I argue that Oswald has disclosed her structure as a means to present this textual situation, which has been hand-ily defined as ‘an almost sculptural attempt to fix and deliver language onto the surfaces and inter-connectivity of the situational’ (Whatley, 2009).

At any moment in the text, voice can be read as a cluster or knot of speaking and feeling agents, sometimes person (speaking) and world (the mood of the moon, the wind, etc.). The columns, conceived thus, herald subjectivity while acting as a fluid semantic structuring device, pinpointing subject positions and environmental moment. Turning to the first example of this on page five is instructive here (Bristow, 2015a).

The right column indicates ‘New Moon’; half way down the page, the left column denotes ‘Birdwatcher’ followed by ‘Fisherman’; the central lyrical space opens with three italicised paragraphs (the notebook entry of the Dream Secretary), followed by two entries for the Birdwatcher (his voice, the notebook), then four entries for the Fisherman (two represent-ing his voice, which is split by the recording of events and underlined by an exclamation: ‘Shhh!’ (5: 22) – both are actions of the Dream Secretary). An increasing involvement and presence of the poet-figure to the point of interruption is most obvious in this opening page. One is brought into a moment where spatial disturbance and lyrical influence are simultane-ously presented to mind and ear. Moreover, scene and interaction are thrust into the shared perceptual foreground of the moment of the mid-dle column. Within a few lines we read an encounter in a place that is ‘almost dark’ (2), cut through by the Birdwatcher’s ‘wobbling light’ from a bicycle. Not only does the soundscape contain bird calls from humans, a confessional disclosure by the Fisherman and exasperated questions from both male figures, it gravitates towards the interruption of the Dream Secretary. The scene is alive with a parliament of the more-than-human, a cacophony where the secretary ironically screams for quiet. This is one of the many complex points of contact in the poem.

Oswald’s transparent foregrounding of the architectonics of the poem’s ecopoetic fabric ‘does not imply giving meaning to form, but forming environmentally’ (Manning, 2009, p. 73). I see these formations as one version of history. The minor key of the moon and wind’s emotional state bequeaths a fading, insecure and fragile state of becoming, which draws from ‘the dark medium of mime, or silence’, which has been likened to a strain of theatre by the poet Sean Borodale. Oswald’s con-temporary, and key influence upon the psychogeographic elements in the text, he considers this hybrid form as a ‘field ... which takes on a live


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correspondence with the world and draws rawly on its conscious and unconscious elements’ (Borodale, 2009). The page at first appears as a unified environment deconstructed into a theatre of operations; however, closer attention to the emotional qualities instructs us to read a field of forces passing through entities that are dramatically open to change (as affective subjects) in this formally assembled space.

Our relationship to place is offered an initial point of clarification by the naming of people in the estuary community by vocation rather than pronoun; we meet ‘vicar’, ‘fisherman’ and others to help us work a way through the watery domain in the dark. Responses to the river-scape’s orientation of manual labour are less strong in Sleepwalk than in Dart; however, both poems speak through the river and its characters at work in the community. Sleepwalk moves from an early indication of the operational environment (signalled by the left margin denoting subject registers defined by vocation, rank, labour or trade) in the first half of the poem, towards the perceptual environment in the latter half. Characterisation and mood before the second new moon (‘Moon reborn’) is narrow compared with the subjects who dwell in the open space of individual registers; this structural grammar onlaps Dart’s poetic census of life-in-place.4 Furthermore, in Sleepwalk the perceptual emphasis in the second movement of the poem, largely signalled by the effects of the moon/earth dynamic, extends beyond census to generate a transgression of accountability and mapping.

Environmental affectI have to force myself to look out from the flower’s point of view at these great walloping humans coming down the path, and try, just try, and feel it from their point of view because it’s a different world to them, a fascinating hard one (Oswald, cited in Bunting, 2012)

Sleepwalk invites us to consider that nature is capable of manifesting itself as an emotional activity. This realisation of our environment is figured in the geographical account in Sleepwalk as something much more than

4 There are 28 character types in Dart (walker, chambermaid, naturalist, eel watcher, fisher-man, bailiff, dead tinners, forester, waternymph, canoeists, town boys, tin-extractor, miller, swimmer, water abstractor, dreamer, dairy worker, sewage worker, stonewaller, boatbuilder, salmon netsman, poacher, oyster gatherers, ferryman, naval cadet, rememberer, former pilots, seal watcher); in Sleepwalk 10 characters populate the text (birdwatcher, fisherman, articled clerk, sailor, vicar, parish clerk, mother, epileptic, dream secretary, moon wind).


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seeing human experience embedded in some significant background, a context through which human emotions arise. Sleepwalk is about the moon and the poet-figure (the Dream Secretary) seen ‘struggling along’ (11; 15; 19; 25), finding themselves equally within the flux of life. Moreover, the wind is figured as ‘very emotional changeable’ (6), a ‘restless neurotic’ (12), ‘very downhearted desperate’ (16) and ‘glum with monotonous flute music’ (23), only happier with the other figures once transformed under the new moon, becoming ‘very excitable with flute’ (26) in the second half of the poem. While this emotional framework might look like a series of anthropocentric projections of states upon the world – although not coterminous with anthropogenic impact on the environment – the overall feeling of the poem is an ability to acknowledge multiple senses of nature’s life, character and mood. The affective register heightens our respect for processes, powers and things of ‘nature’; moreover, the emotionally inanimate being turned into an affective autobiographical animate being places fresh light on the ways in which we conceive of our agency in the more-than-human world. Are the emotions (of our Earth others) too often put to one side?

The hurrying of the moon over the river (that ‘is not river at all’ Oswald, 3: 18) is likened to a ‘Muscular unsolid stillness’ (4: 2). While originally lulled into calm lyricism by sibilance, there is something violent, unsteady and restless in this poem. It keeps us on our toes. The river is on edge as it is working through the linguistically domesticated sense of place. Sleepwalk’s lyricism derives from such rooted soundings where change-ability portends an indefinable place within the already named Severn estuary, which we learn is defined by the moon’s cyclical energies:

most close in kindTo the mighty angels of purgatoryWho come solar-powered into darknessUsing no other sails than their shining wings (3: 21–24)

The prologue will lead to another event in the poem proper: the moon-enlightened entrance into epic darkness. For now, the poem inhabits a space of its own making, the phenomenological frame of a sleepwalker. The sleepwalker attunes to the moon’s dynamics and transience; she whisperingly sounds the wind among the wetland reeds. The poem is an account of these verbal contracts; it is in direct dialogue with swans, weeds, crabs and ‘mudswarms’ (14). Mudswarms is useful: think of the poem as a conversation with multiple arrays of agency caught in nets of


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witnessing, notably the witnessing that has the relaxed gaze, wider self and the dream state of a sleepwalker. Jane Bennett has written of dis-tributed agency as a ‘swarm of vitality at play’ (Bennett, 2010, pp. 31–32). The compound ‘solar-powered’ is not ironic; it draws attention to how each discrete life form is never one thing on its own, is dependant upon planetary forces.

In Dart, Oswald examined the extent to which the lyrical first-person pronoun can register a truly situated ecological mind by closing the anthropocentric and, to use Derrida’s neologism, phallogocentric gaze, instead resting silently, ‘contracted to an eye quiet world’ (6). Conversely, Sleepwalk continually presents an array of environmental personhood within a context (and scene) of change, rather than Dart’s confluent subjectivity. Owing to a deliberate structure in the first half of the poem, Sleepwalk assists our training to witness subtle differences over time (dur-ing the moon’s phases), which complements the historical pay-off – the ability to track change – from the focus on emotions. Sleepwalk is thus content to raise its voice within a site of temporality and pluralism. The poem addresses its community – those things gathered in the space of the poem – while drawing from a synthesised lexis of epic biblical tones and pragmatic environmentalism.

Dart spoke directly to us: ‘I am only as wide/as a word’s aperture/but listen! if you listen/I will move you a few known sounds/in a constant irregular pattern’ (21). Sleepwalk draws out a historical calculus from par-ticular social needs and relationships to register instability: ‘This endless wavering in whose engine/I too am living’ (4: 2–3). Both poems promote – or embody – an enactive world of ongoing processes of constitution by many things distributed through space. Thus co-creation in Oswald trumps the hubris of the narrowly defined Anthropocene. This lexical and conceptual elasticity is paralleled in Sleepwalk’s lines leaping through rhythms to culminate with ‘shining wings’ (see the quote). Rather than taking further imaginative flight here, this moment refers back to the first direct addressee of the poem on the fifth line (swans ‘pitching’ their wings), thus enacting a gracefully reflexive moment, a gesture to circularity and entanglement, a sweep that foregrounds an arc of insight and reflection. For the text to refer back to itself here is to refer back to the Severn estuary and the meandering river settling into a space. While quite obvious, almost simple, the poetic consciousness of the line takes on a particular quality here, for the move instances a loop that conflates angel and swan: a mythical dimension that is in debt to a structural


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repetition (lunar phases), which in turn denies any syntactically isolated marker to signify on its own. This wavering local moment is a micro-cosm of the poem.

In Dart this quality instanced polyphony, which was heightened in the close of the poem where the accumulative score of voices (gathered along the river’s progression from source to sea) fell into a plural identity of many rivers, or ultimate accumulation, the sea. This musical texture is underdeveloped in Sleepwalk for the poem is more visually alluring, bringing characters into shared spaces and repeating visits to peopled spaces, preferring dialogue to simultaneity. There is a sincere attempt in Sleepwalk, as there was in Dart, to use structural repetition to correlate literary settings and material environments.5 The diachronic emphasis brings together planet and place, moon and sleepwalker with a similar communal result to the synchronic fusion of multiple voices in Dart. Thus, like its predecessor, Sleepwalk encourages the reader to enjoy the-matic analogues raised by the dynamics between form and content while also offering sensitivity to the ways that space and geography profoundly impact upon formally assembled texts.

Struggling for formWhere the river Dart meets the sea at the foot of Totnes weir, we are exposed to a series of five 12-line stanzas before we hear from Dart’s Dairy Worker who reminds us that water was once used to cool milk. The move to bring the poem towards a georgic memorial of recently lost industry refers back in poetic form as far as the late-fourteenth-century Middle English ‘Pearl’ poem. Here significance (stanza forma-tion) and quiet (parenthesis) draws from the ‘pain of flying’ of seagulls (27: 21). It is beyond visual and auditory imaginations. This pull from the natural world enables the last of the stanzas to foreground the lyri-cal ‘I’ reflecting on the process of seeing itself (‘the river’s dream self ’ 28: 21) navigate through sleep to ‘float a world up like a cork/out of its body’s liquid dark’ (28: 23–24). It is not a heady moment but a buoy-ant freefall into imaginative play and analogy. The description of water here is much like the night in Sleepwalk: watery, opaque and potentially sinister. Each object and each assemblage of objects within place (an

5 Sleepwalk draws from local history, colonial history and Graeco-Roman mythology; the etymology of Dart invokes the old Devonian name for ‘oak’ and consequently there is a more pronounced score of English folk mythology present in the text.


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environment) come into being in Sleepwalk like this action of the cork in Dart; however, enduring indicators of pain and struggle qualify the sinister atmosphere for they invoke birthing while primarily embody-ing emotional states. All this speaks to identity formation from within a corporeal imaginary.

Syntax in Dart takes the emotional world into the ecological: the cries of the seagulls as they lift on the wing (‘pain’) are slipped into an account of all things struggling for form, via simile:

Like in a waterfall one small twig caughtcatches a stick, a straw, a sack, a meshof leaves, a fragile wickerwork of floodbrash,I saw all things catch and reticulateinto this dreaming of the Dartthat sinks like a feather falls, not quitein full possession of its weight (25–31)

‘Fragile wickerwork of floodbrash’ runs backwards to meet ‘waterfall’ while rushing on to couple with ‘feather falls’ and ‘full’, in a similar manner to ‘stick’ ‘straw’ and ‘sack’ marry and mingle in the soundscape. Oswald needs to do no more than place things side by side, to allow things to operate like paratactic clauses through free association and half rhyme. Herein lies spontaneity: syntactically unmarked, semanti-cally connected. Furthermore, to ‘catch and reticulate’ is to play out and revisit, circle back on oneself, push forwards, much like a river. From an arbitrary middle point of the poem, these two aspects demonstrate how the world pulls and pushes, and within this recurring process (evident in many planetary patterns but particularly noticeable in water) these lines perform how things intercept and hold, and to mark something out as a network, respectively. To embrace this orderly chaos is to lose possession of the fixed self and to drop the idea of the human as the sole creator of worlds.

This is exactly what an accumulative voice achieves in Dart; and Oswald’s semiotic chains rework the theme in Sleepwalk. Pain, thus understood here, is not a hurried alarm call but a cue for others within a protocol that is mindful of the huge effort required to perform such ‘fragile wickerwork’. Sleepwalk’s repetition and reticulation bonds the reader to the estuary where it is hard to realise a secured form in such complexity. The seagulls perhaps realise their identity by pulling away from earth’s gravity, ‘to be in possession of their weight’, which is impos-sible for the moon; their pain highlights bonding at another level.


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Emotional states refer to levels of inclusion and exclusion. They signify ‘the capacity of the individual to position themselves’ and ‘how they are accommodated within cultural views with respect to belonging’; placing oneself among others and in spaces brings to mind the multiple perspec-tives and values that interpret subject positions: ‘For example a cry of pain can be interpreted as a plea of help if the subject position is dependent; the same cry as protest or reprimand, if the position is dominant’ (May & Powell, 2008, p. 45). The work of the moon enacts the commingling of ener-gies, things and space: a tapestry of environment forming. In Sleepwalk the moon is constantly lamenting its tiring efforts; it seems to think the effort is about finding itself, blind to the fruits and consequences of its labour. The pull from the seagulls, pained as it might be, is to lock into one’s labour, the effort required to participate in the forces of the environment at large.

Spatialised struggleA precise toponym and locale for most of the poem, Waveridge Sand is a signifier of changeability and loyalty at crossed purposes: sand and water in constant dialogue and competitive presencing, which acutely deline-ates the estuary’s more-than-human world. And yet a commonplace, physical continuum of struggle, the topos is a bricolage of signifiers that collide and accumulate to indicate the difficulty of each human char-acter’s situation, particularly if they desire rest or stillness as a moment to gather the self if their neurosis cannot process anything but stable identity (Bristow, 2015a).

This negative somnambulism refracted in the anxiety of moon and in silences and darkness promotes a phenomenological shift from person to planet in the cultural geography of the poet-figure throughout the whole of Sleepwalk:

There are stars, slowly coming closer with their torches. Notice something more than mere evening. Notice the white skirt of the Full Moon just under a cloud’s edge. Beginning to wobble, jostling the reeds. She’s asleep I think. (16)

Uncertainty suggests that the speaker remains open about the state of that which she observes. Herein lies an open self, happy to write out an account of what is emerging; the ecopoetic mode, to bring oneself to the occasion, speaks of a useful receptivity in a landscape clearly subject to drastic change. While the stars and moon move and impact on the envi-ronment, they also hold close to human technology; however, these lines


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clearly speak of the non-human dimension of humans, as they bring the scene into view. Jane Bennett has spoken of this creative mode:

To ‘render manifest’ is both to receive and to participate in the shape given to that which is received. What is manifest arrives through humans but not entirely because of them: we bring something of ourselves to the experience, and so it is not pure or unmediated. But a receptive mood with a moment of naïveté is a useful counter to the tendency (prevalent in sociological and anthropological studies of material culture) to conclude the biography of an object by showing how it, like everything, is socially constituted. To pursue an ecology of things is sometimes to resist that punch line, to elide its truth, for it inclines thinking and perception too much toward the primacy of humans and ‘the subject’. (Bennett, 2004, p. 358)

Oswald’s accounts of human subjects undermine their individualised primacy. As elements within the environmental array unfolding within the lunar calendar, humans respond to other forms of light and gaze than their own privatised, isolated enlightenment. This wider enlighten-ment is well represented by the chorus, the only communal subject. It is an interesting group, for the chorus extends the moon’s ruminations, understanding the night as a ‘half out snail’ that ‘half feels the moonbrail’ (14: 2). A symbol of a community of beings, the chorus provides space for the ‘I’ to locate itself among others proceeding by somnambulant sound images: ‘dreamsight, moonstinct’ (14: 16). Insight and instinct are warped and dehumanised by the darkening terrain underpinned by the dreaming state and the effects of the lunar cycle. Without reducing this to psychoanalytical and biological affect, emotional dispositions grow from here. A double sense of movement – physical and emotional – sug-gests something new here.

This ontological nuance is illustrated throughout Oswald’s oeuvre via compact metaphors and impressionistic similes, often through the combining of noun and epithet. In Sleepwalk, water does not have a ‘fea-ture’ but a ‘counterlight’ or ‘insight’ (18: 12). It is not an object statically floating in space; it is animated. This animation is not only conducive to articulating feelings, it is a voice in itself: a contour to the text that can read through the indistinct environment.

Something needs to be said to describe my moonlightAlmost frost but softer almost ash but wholerMade almost of water which has strictly speakingNo feature but a kind of counterlight call it insight


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Like in woods when they jostle their hooded shapesTheir heads congealed together having murdered each otherThere are moon-beings sounds-beings such as deer and half deerPassing through there whose eyes can pierce through thingsI was like that: visible invisible visible invisible (18: 9–17)

Like the canopy of woods, whose heads are ‘murdered’ through their commingling in the wind, this voice locates ‘moon-beings’, or ‘sound-beings’ like ‘half-deer’ – a world where selfhood or ego is decapitated, as it were. The irreducible fraction resulting from the action that divides any number by its double – the half – suggests not only a liminal self, but also an incomplete and creaturely self. For Kym Martindale, this is the friction within the whole of the estuary: ‘the shifting mud banks and tides’ with the ‘shape-shifting phenomenon, the moon’ (2013, p. 160). Personhood lives under the sign of potential, the ‘not yet’, resisting the danger of closure and wholeness, pointing to excess.

The poem ‘River’ (Oswald, 2005) clarifies that a person who is not a fully autonomous and defined self is thus less capable or desirous of owning things in either an instrumental or reductive way. Such an ‘I’ invokes ‘the earth’s eye/looking through the earth’s bones/[which] carries the moon carries the sun but keeps nothing’ (12–14). To keep nothing is to remain free from the constraints of property, undefined by one’s labours to date. While capable of reading the phenomenological state of others, the ‘I’ oscillates between states of visibility and invisibility, pro-grammed as it is by the phases of the moon, which constitutes ‘moon-hood’ (Sleepwalk 18: 19). In one sense, selves are ‘half ’ of what they might be ordinarily, and yet they are expanded into persons led by planetary forces juggling between pattern and process. For now, I consider this model of personhood as an indicator of variability – instanced as it is by ‘endless wavering’ (4: 3).

Place-consciousness

Literary studies can contribute to environmental psychology by work-ing through questions of involvement in specific geographies. ‘Place consciousness and bonding’, Lawrence Buell argues, ‘involves not just orientation in space but temporal orientation also’ (2005, p. 72). Our relationship with a place over time provides a story for the self to draw together past, present and future – for example, a space we inhabited as


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children and return to as adults: the railway tracks behind the house, the landscapes of adolescence; or the space of our involvement on a weekly basis: the football ground, the church. Space, then, becomes a place of our private and sustained reckoning, processes that delineate nothing socially normative other than a sense of multiplicity. That is to say, our sense of place is related to our sense of affective being, which is consti-tuted by the many selves expressed by a person during the course of one life. These selves pass by us while we are in transit.

Conversely, the lyrical self is rarely divided like this; however, it offers a singleness of eye from which we witness the calamitous division of the world and the emergence of protean selves. Moreover, subjective experi-ence of a particular location as a ‘place’ will not only be further affected by degrees of place-based personhood – ‘how rooted or peripheral [our] previous life has been’ – but also by ‘what kinds of surrounding [we are] conditioned to feel as familiar or strange, and so forth’ (ibid., 73). While Dart coursed through a palimpsest of serial place histories invoked by multiple experiences of place, Sleepwalk constructs these experiences as a struggle and bond between subjectivity and space. This construction leans upon the poem’s structure and the animating force of the sleepwalk-ers; the combination of these elements demonstrates how ‘place’ itself changes; it is ‘eventmental ... something in process’ (Casey, 1997, cited in Buell, 2005).

With respect to identity arising from place-consciousness, Sleepwalk is wracked with disquiet, anxiety and discomfort, subjects ‘struggling’ in space (5: 4; 11: 5; 30: 2). The struggle indicates how the subject feels within ongoing identity formations; these subject positions are offered succinct intellectual release from the quandary of how to emote in language once the environment at large is realised as a location of personhood (after ‘new moon’). This might detail how ongoing processes are less damaging to a sense of self (consider Oswald’s figuration of ‘moonhood’ quoted). This situatedness validates how exercising a responsive lyrical voice might not entail a narrow sense of security with ourselves. Lyricism can be read as offering such qualified relief from neoliberal identity formation and the privatising of environmental morality. It details the larger relation between moon and earth; the dynamics within the hydro-logical cycle and the ‘huge repeating mechanism’ (3: 4) in which human scale (and perception) is dwarfed by the lunar cycle and its impact on things in space, alongside the space itself. The poet-figure – or Dream Secretary – placed in the central column of the poem with a notebook in


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hand captures these shifts in consciousness. I want to focus now on how these developments are achieved in the text.

WithnessSleepwalk is a dynamic text, underpinned by voices that are born from a non-duality of musical cognition (reader) and cue (poem); herein lies a sense of new identity within diluted versions of pre-stabilised subjectiv-ity. In Sleepwalk this parallel site of subject formation and lyrical aperture gestures to the emergence (of things) within a qualified loss of narrowly defined personhood. It promotes fluidity of reference over static framing, an idea particularly pronounced in the second half of the poem (‘new moon’) that signifies changes in personhood.

John Shotter adduces the concept of ‘flowforms’ to argue for a world of becoming, one that is perceived within the process of life. Here, potential for growth in relation to the living organisms that surround it enables a focus on intermingling to give rise to a disposition that sees ‘with’ things:

[It is] a form of reflective interaction that involves our coming into living contact with the living (or moving) being of an other or otherness if it is a meeting with another person, then we come into contact with their utter-ances, their bodily expressions, their words, their ‘works’. (Shotter, 2005)

Underpinned by the river as a flowform in Dart and Sleepwalk, this knowledge-based feedback loop embodies what might be called ‘seeing with things’. Rather than assist upon this as a strategy, which might be anthropocentric, the human eye of the poem informs our sense of place beyond definable and recognised territory that geography has under-stood as a form of bounded space. This is because the human eye is interpolated into a subject position with a relational voice by the poetic structure of the text (its columnal registers). Oswald’s poetics works through a sense of connectivity consonant with affect theory:

It might be more accurate to liken humans to schools of fish briefly sta-bilized by particular spaces, temporary solidifications which pulse with particular affects ... providing myriad opportunities to forge new reflexes. Thus, concentrating on affect requires a cartographic imagination in order to map out the movement between corporeal states of being which is simul-taneously a change in connectivity. (Thrift, 2009, pp. 89–90)

For example, in the first few pages of Dart we are taken ‘onto’ a salmon discovery: finding its ‘current’ within Iceland, the Faroes and to the Dart


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where ‘three-sea-winter’ fish manage to leap a climb between Holne and Dartmeet of a ‘thousand feet’ (8: 18–25). Later we learn that the migrat-ing fish are known to get caught in Greenland and that they rub sea lice off their bellies in Sharpham (41: 13, 26). In between these two geoloca-tions, we are offered a number of named varieties of water: ‘Glico of the Running Streams /and Spio of the Boulders-Encaved-In-The-River’s/Edges’ (17: 20–22). Musicality offers imagined analogues to the physical environment and conjures a world triggered to life by naming. Sounds are forms of connectivity and primary modes of contact points (connecting speaker and listener) in Oswald’s sonic census of life. In addition to the enjoyment of material-based dialects, the play of sounds, and the move towards understanding environmental particularities, there is a shift in the function of place names. They do not denote a geographical location; they embody knowledge of the process of life (and responses to life) over and above its generic constituents.6 This knowledge is not named in the lines referring to salmon, as these fish pass through a place; however, with respect to the recurring water within locations of the Dart, the naming of place via sound and function is not quite a move ‘into the fish dimension’ of swimmers (Dart, 22) – a modification to human comportment – but it is withness thinking. For Oswald, such thinking is to be involved in the place through working (writing) and to be susceptible, receptive, exposed and corporeal. ‘Withness thinking’, alluded to as a ‘foothold’ on the environment, starts to make sense of the geographer’s map figured as an abstract representation of ‘a huge rain-coloured wilderness’ (1) and ‘a huge sphagnum kind of wilderness’ (2). The map makes some sense; it certainly helps us locate the relationship between precipitation and plants, to locate world in its otherness to representational stasis devoid of atmosphere, empty of place. Maps require life.

FootholdsAn earlier consideration of pain and struggle looked at the different degrees of possibility for loosening from one’s circumstance. The seagulls can break free from their pedestrian earthbound existence; the

6 Oswald (2000, pp. 36–37) has written of water as ‘a movement continually bringing itself to light’ and the poetic challenge of ‘naming a river every three seconds according to what lies at hand’, which brought her to this point: ‘my poems are nothing more than a series of extended names spoken together; a kind of complex onomatopeia, or “naming through listening.”’


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moon cannot slip free in space; it can only dissolve into the shadows of space. And yet the moon’s presence dominates. It is the captivating power that is a function of subjective and intersubjective connotations and memories, which are shot through with affect that has accumu-lated over time around individuals’ ideas of work, identity and place. These ideas are subject to each person’s bodily location in the estuary, how they fit into the place, how they are positioned in the scene, how they are affected by the moon. For Bennett (2010, p. 350), the body’s experience shapes the eye’s experience. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty, she points out that scenes of physical encounter entail ‘[the] disclosure of an imminent or incipient significance in the living body [which] extends to the whole sensible world’; moreover, the experience of the body configures the ‘gaze’ of the subject, to the extent that it will dis-cover in all other objects ‘the miracle of expression’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 230; 225). In Oswald, this seems not to be the case with the moon and the wind, which strictly lack bodies; but this is true for the characters in the estuary space.

Jam Tree Gully and Gift Songs pay significant attention to the figure of the walker. Largely, in Dart and Sleepwalk, being alert to and embedded within the more-than-human world begins with a focus on the foot: a metonym for the lower extremity of the leg on which we walk and through which we are connected to earth; a metaphor for the imprint of human action in space – and of course a poet’s term of art.

This is ordinary surface stuff with a shoe stickingout of the mud with a leg in it. Or is that a heronstanding out of bounds on the reservoir Wall.Which’ll soon be twenty-foot underwater. (Sleepwalk 6: 27–7: 1–3)

The Fisherman has his foot stuck in the wet mud; the passing moon wit-nesses this brief moment of stasis, of entanglement (withness). Simple. Dart opens with a walker ‘clomping’ along, informing us that what he loves ‘is one foot in front of another’ (2: 5, 12). Straightforward. In Woods etc. ‘footfall’ means to be ‘steady’ and is a remark upon the subject’s atten-tion that is turned towards ‘feet’ that ‘kept time with the sun’s imaginary/changing position’ (1: 9–10); some pages later, the ‘feather-footed winds’ are seen going in ‘gym shoes’ (‘Excursion to the Planet Mercury’ 37, 29). Humorous. In Sleepwalk, when the moon is partly asleep, the Dream Secretary notes how the moon ‘extricates her foot and begins to rise’ as the sea comes in, and the chorus remarks that ‘it’s lovely to stroll out/On


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a moon-walk sleepwatching on your feet’ (Sleepwalk 13: 20; 14: 13–14). It is a dazzling amalgam of foot–moon–sun–wind to invoke a dreamworld of withness: an attention to what will be, and how one remains aligned to patterns in the world during a particular state; bodily mindfulness that attends to floating subjectivity and temporality rather than future possible worlds.

Oswald’s insistent metaphor of a ‘foothold’ (Sleepwalk 6; 3; 30; 33) deconstructs a subject’s knowledge of the world as always-already closely circumscribed. Micro-knowledges, once amplified through ecopoetic reg-isters of worldliness, articulate fresh coordinates for each subject. These include feelings, responsiveness to situations, degrees of attunement to soundscape and alertness to changes in landscape. Moreover, with various modes and comportments in view, lyricism turns to the once conceived ‘other’. Specific local moments – clauses, gaps, silences, parentheses – afford landscape presences their disclosure.7 In Oswald’s shorter lyric sequences, this mode of presencing that releases the animated world into view impacts upon how we consider time, process and scale, which leads to a planetary imaginary (from the circumscribed standpoint), which in turn dilutes anthropocentrism and promotes withness thinking.

The slowly rising moon, ‘trying to lift [its] body off its hook’ (9: 16) sustains Sleepwalk’s extended metaphor of struggling; as with many moments that speak of struggle and competing forms in the environ-ment, this voice might be speaking of itself in an equivalent manner to free indirect discourse in narrative. However, when referring to itself as a subject in the third person, Oswald very rarely opens this mode with only interior monologue: ‘Enter a dreamer/Eyes closed. aghast/Sore feet/Having walked the road since dusk’ (9: 5–8). Inner voice is linked to Oswald’s concern for part–whole relations, or discrete sense and subject units that can be slowly gathered into a site of interactivity.

7 The explicit presentation of fragmentation and reified conceptions of both human sub-jectivity and natural forces in this chapter relates to the distinctive problems identified by German critical philosophy and its attempt to establish a rational system based on ‘things in themselves’, which developed the idea ‘that thought could only grasp what it itself had created’. Jones, G. S. (1977). The Marxism of the Early Lukács, in Western Marxism: A Critical Reader (pp. 11–60), London: Verso. To move beyond this paradigm of the mastery of the world conceived as ‘self-created’ is the premise of deconstructive ecopoetics; to replay the ideal subject–object relation foreshadowed in Kant, Fichte, Schiller and Schelling is to animate the mind that ‘found itself trapped in an irresoluble antinomy: the ever-fixed gulf between the phenomenal world of necessity and the noumenal world of freedom’ (ibid., 15).


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BelongingWorld black and white. Walk up the lane.Last thing each night. Look up for the moon.No sign but rain. Almost back home.One more last quick. Glance up for the moon. (Sleepwalk 40: 5–8)

For geographers, place is defined as the constitution of activity, of both humans and non-humans; place affords and records both the interaction of multiple agents and the impact of their activities in the landscape over time. Broadly defined, place is a site of struggle. It is the accumulation of competing forces and their consequences that gives rise to degrees of belonging for each agent and group of agents. This is how place has significance for people; how the environment provides challenges to all species.

The postmodern view is that a sense of belonging in place – and thus emplacement within a culture – is relative to the subject and the values that he or she holds. In Sleepwalk we are witness to diluted versions of pre-stabilised subjectivity and the poetics of intermingling subject formation that give rise to moments of bodily involvement in planetary systems and modes of consciousness embedded within the more-than-human world. The long poem underlines and offers discrete nuances of such experi-ences of immersion in space. And yet we are only offered enough time for a quick glance at the moon sweeping through space, changing in shape and form. Geographers have long argued that places are not reducible to the relationships and interactions that fill them; places are continually inter-animated by the dialogic force between physical environment and practices within it (including the critical reflection on the environment), at once shaping and shaped by the locale. This is the appropriate context in which to consider Oswald’s transformative poetics.

Transformative poetics

Rupture over perfection, unpredictable and inherent riskiness in form, Oswald’s transformative poetics is central to the question of place-based subjectivity in Sleepwalk. We see people revisiting a specific place at different periods of the lunar cycle throughout the poem. Dart’s people are part of a bio-cultural knot bound in unique moments to the river’s geographic course; the attributes of these knots accumulate into a single


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fabric that is generated as the river runs through each clustered space on its way to realising an endpoint: at once a rushing mass of collated river voices exhausting itself into a larger entity, the sea. The book-length space that is rare in the contemporary lyric affords the poem its emo-tional depth over the duration of the reader’s engagement, and a more precise measure of the impact of the current of the river and phases of the moon on people in discrete locations. Ultimately, we are witness to change as presented by the poem’s slow unfolding history of people in space – either being moved through space as in the case of Dart, or being moved by the space as with Sleepwalk. The increased emotional coloura-tion of space takes Sleepwalk beyond the linguistic mediations and the cartographic soundscapes that obsess Dart; and the number of people working, living, moving through the river in Sleepwalk is a mere frac-tion – almost one-third – of the populace in Dart. Thus, Sleepwalk more explicitly denotes the changeability of intimately known humans in the unfixed environment, preferring to elevate the movement of affect to an equal position of the movement of subjects in space.

Living bodiesOswald has distanced herself from a Romantic sense of continuity between humans and nature: ‘if the phrase must be used then a nature poet is someone concerned with things being outside each other: how should extrinsic forms, man and earth for example, come into contact?’ (Pinard, 2009, p. 26). Oswald’s vocation as gardener portends a labour-oriented listener in the environment, for the gardener invokes the body in motion and rootedness simultaneously.

Environmental literature foregrounds points of connection, witness-ing, observation, attunement to energy fields and the more-than-human world; it is not a practising environmental psychology and yet it can be framed in alliance with environmental consciousness and pro-envi-ronmental behaviour.8 There is a legacy of misanthropy evident in such claims for ‘better people through better literature’. For David Borthwick,

8 Ideas of connection and contact can rest upon a fading dualism of body and mind, decon-structed by ecocriticism and problematised in terms of a hierarchical relationship between the internal and the external. For a fascinating counterpoint to the first wave of ecocriti-cism see Slovic, S. (1996). Nature Writing and Environmental Psychology: The Interiority of Outdoor Experience, in C. G. Fromm (Ed.), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (pp. 351–370), Athens, GA: Georgia University Press.


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ideas of connection and observation in ecopoetry suggest that its power lies in ‘its open-ended ability to strive towards questions, towards negotiation, to consider deeply the world we cannot assert ourselves as separate from’ (Borthwick, 2013). The idea of this shift to negotiation can be mental, physical, spiritual, affective; the negotiation itself can take on all these forms. What seems to be open to debate is the degree to which we can separate ourselves from nature. The body resists separation, both in its biological constitution inherently evolved from organic matter and in its resultant interdependence with the biosphere. Oswald’s text conceives of the moon as a ‘muscular unsold unstillness’ and an ‘endless wavering in whose engine’ the estuary subjects are living (4: 2–4). This body impacts on the estuary and the voices of people passing through the water. They are all walkers, bodies in space; living things in the site of poetic disclosure heralded by the movements of planetary forces, humans, non-humans – all subject to the recordings of the secretary out walking at night.

WalkingSleepwalk is the net result of many night excursions to the estuary by a ‘secretary’ who meets other humans who speak to the effects of moon-light and to how it gives shape to their subjectivity.

Walking is a spatial discourse that leads us to ‘the description of things as presented to our experience’ (Thrift, 1996, p. 34). Literary geography – which clarifies how fiction is set along a scale of localisations, ranging from the realistically rendered, highly recognisable to the completely imaginary – suggests that a poetics of walking is significant in its ‘engaged agency’, alert to ‘what shows up as it presents itself in our experience’ (ibid.).9 This sense of a world ‘showing’ itself to humans is increasingly scrutinised by critics aware of the inherent anthropocentrism of this model and of the untenable idea of nature as an externality required for this very subject–object relation that privileges perception over pres-ence. The discourse of the Anthropocene further politicises ideas here.10

9 Sharp, W. (1904). Literary Geography, London: Pall Mall. For the significance of Sharp see Piatti, B., & Hurni, L. (2011). Editorial, The Cartographic Journal, 48 (4), 218–223; 218.

10 The beautiful and terrifying inescapability of human–nature relations; reconceived as the deletion of nature owing to its lack of independence that places humans in the spotlight; and the overriding sense of no longer requiring ‘nature’ in light of our understanding of the damage that has been done, the dark ecology of the relations of organisms in the environment. Respectively, these ideas are central to three landmark texts of the


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Ecocriticism would add the following: a poem is the embodiment of the description of our experience of such things that show themselves (pres-ences); this is a process in itself, which transparently details, ironises or offers counterpoint to the reduction or translation of energy and entities into data for human sense-making. Thus, an ecopoetic counterpoint to literary geography entails that a poetics of walking is not only ‘the sign of how we construct along with others’ (Thrift, 1996, p. 37), but that moving through space shows up the very terms that aid our understanding of things, not just the things themselves. Our sense of writing changes; it becomes a corollary of walking for it is a form of traversing the environ-ment that is present to an experiencing subject. The Dream Secretary in Sleepwalk exemplifies the import of movement to experience while also enacting the process of the poem itself coming into being. Disclosure of this immersion into the record of the location and its vocal and written enactments clearly registers our witness and interaction with things liv-ing in or moving through space (Bristow, 2015c).

An affective habitus

Affect is the biological registration of feeling; Elspeth Probyn writes that the habitus ‘as a description of lived realities is that which generates practices, frames for positioning oneself in the world, and indeed ways of inhabiting the world’ (2004, p. 229). The affective habitus is thus an emotional situation of individual and collective subjectivity and embodi-ment. An emphasis on the latter works against the idea of emotion as directly cognitive; there are times, as Probyn has articulated, ‘when the feeling shakes up the habitus; when the body outruns the cognitive capture of the habitus’ (ibid., p. 232). It appears that we cannot combine our sense of the world and the world itself. Donna Haraway amplifies the point:

Our problem is to have simultaneously an account of radical historical con-tingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world, one that

environmental and ecological humanities: see Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin; McKibben, B. (1989). The End of Nature, New York: Anchor; Morton, T. (2007). Ecology without Nature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


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can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness. (Haraway, 1988, p. 579)

The Marxist position is that identity is not pre-given but a product of history. The great liberal myth of the modern age is that of individuals deemed to be at liberty to make their own contracts with others; more the case, we find, that what we might wish to avoid calling ‘human essence’ is the ensemble of social and environmental relations. The grounding of environmental affect in Sleepwalk, therefore, is a mobilising force within the social imagination; a riposte to the artificially generated and sustained power relations of capital.

The corporealised imaginaryI am reading the poem in terms of an expansive subjectivity that dilutes anthropocentric selfhood and gives rise to planetary personhood. Guattari challenges us to read ‘aesthetico-existential effectiveness’ of psychiatric modelling in order to

grasp the a-signifying points of rupture – the rupture of denotation, con-notation and signification – from which a certain number of semiotic chains are put to work in the service of an existential autoreferential effect. (Guattari, 2008, p. 56)

It is difficult work, but instructive, as we seek to clarify registered iden-tities and points of reflection upon identity formation, subject to vast ruptures (instanced by the affective presence of moonrise). Guattari’s intellectual ‘grasping’ of the ‘work’ of language in turn ‘initiates the production of a partial subjectivity’ which Dart and Sleepwalk appear to exploit as means to embody the habitus of environmental affect. Oswald’s somatic signification in her first five volumes of poetry speaks to a ‘corporealised imaginary’ as envisioned by Guattari precisely through silent a-signifying points of rupture. Sleepwalk’s structure places an intervening poet-figure in the text as the world is coming into being; if not rupturing the site, it interjects in the free flow of things while also putting to work the synthetic accretion of identity both within the spatial determinates of a page and of the poem over time. I now focus on these latter elements.

There is an analogue. Poirier considers the husbandry of space and the plough-like lines that detail images of ‘penetrating matter’ in Robert Frost’s poetry, as ‘the precondition for the discovery of an intermediate


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realm where something in the self and something in “things” can meet in a “system of approximations”’ (1977, p. 279).11 A contemporary theo-retical account might draw this system into a conceptual parallel with Bennett’s vibrant matter; the former is constructed to suggest difference and inequality while the latter aims to speak of a commonality within all things. The ‘system’ in Dart is animated by the movement of the river through space, from river source to sea; in Sleepwalk the Guattarian ‘chain’ (gaps that paradoxically connect things) is this very system orchestrated through a spatial text – delimited by a structure creatively mapping voice, phase of moon and the approximation of these in accumulative space. In this difficult theoretical light, both poems can be read as allegorical, in that they extensively perform the metaphor of the relationship between material culture and the structure of the imagination.

Subluminary habitusPoetic voice in Sleepwalk is impressionable and unfixed, subject to spe-cific situations in which the text and space highlight how the world con-tinues to form. Equally, as amplified by Oswald’s use of layout, textual events are defined by the ways in which subject and place are imbricated, each with the other.12 More specifically, I am arguing that a geographic imaginary inflected by planetary systems is deployed to locate envi-ronmental affect accumulating and undulating within these situations; security, identity and emotion register across stones, moon, wind, river and humans all in definable locations.

Textual structures evoke environmental affordances in Sleepwalk. Furthermore, walking in space, coloured by Sleepwalk’s enactive som-nambulance and the contingency of social encounters, complements the view that ‘the whole of something will never reveal itself in an analytical moment; no diagram will be able to display it fully, once and for all’ (Copjec (1994, p. 8), cited in Thrift (1996, p. 34)). Readers are exposed to clarity but each moment of precision either bleeds into or impacts upon another moment that comes into view and demands more time for our

11 The phrases are Ralph Waldo Emerson’s; see Bristow, T. (2006). Contracted to an Eye-Quiet World: Poetics of Place in Alice Oswald and William Carlos Williams, Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo American Literary Relations, 10 (2), 167–185; the British tradition is clarified by Haughton, H. (2013, 24 May). Water Worlds: Poets’ Rivers from Thomas Warton to Alice Oswald, Times Literary Supplement, 13–15.

12 See Thacker, A. (2005–2006). The Idea of a Critical Literary Geography, New Formations, 57, 56–73; Ogborn, M. (2005–2006). Mapping Words, New Formations, 57, 145–149.


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contemplation in the very moment that it moves on in time and space, changing accordingly. Michel Serres has argued that earth’s multiplici-ties, ‘nebulous sets ... whose exact definition escapes us’ can leave us only in a position where we feel that the earth’s local movements ‘are beyond observation’ (Serres, 1995, p. 103). Oswald’s version of space that Deleuze and Guattari (2004, p. 93) compose as ‘always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice’, suggests that the constellation asks us to consider whether non-human life transmits its detail without formu-lation or recourse to human epistemologies.

Situated voicesA poem that maps a river from source to sea by composing an amalgam of river dwellers’ voices begins with a critique of both human presence and cartography. The riposte to an item carried by the first figure we encounter – the walker and his map – suggests that representational ownership (appropriation of space) for one’s own means (either to understand or navigate the space) is only partly legitimate for pragmatic reasons. The walker speaks to the map: ‘I keep you folded in my map pocket and I’ve marked in red/where the peat passes are and the good sheep tracks’ (Dart 1: 26–27). Only a few lines later, as the walker reflects on his love for walking – rather than walking as a means to an end – he enters into an auditory imagination and the poem changes mode.

The shift in mode is an emotional trigger enabling him to ‘find’ the source of the river trickling out of a bank, ‘a foal of a river’. Such allusion to genesis invites slow consideration:

one step-width waterof linked stonestrills in the stonesglides in the trillseels in the glidesin each eel a fingerwidth of sea (2: 28–33)

The riverscape is measured by bodily experience. Elements within the river are associated with each other and with sounds, and these sounds are discovered within the elements themselves. Note the ‘eels’ rising out of the vowels (‘e’) in ‘stones’ lifted out once more in ‘glides’, remarked, and then placed at the beginning of two words that attend to singular-ity (‘each eel’). This singularity is marked out by a measurement taken


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from the analogy of the human body (a finger). Linear progress and a widening out into circularity is paralleled in the traversing of space by a walker during nightfall carrying a water purifier in his backpack ‘so I can drink from streams’ (3: 2). While the poem maps out movement and the upscaling slipstreams of water for creatures to move through space, this moment is simultaneously a circular and musical reckoning of geography. The goal-oriented observational eye is drinking up the sonic dimensions of place while keeping a mind on the human body moving through space to a new location; a question to raise here concerns the amount of technology and knowledge we might bring with us to the encounter as a means to fully experience it in its newness to us.

Turning now to Sleepwalk’s ending, we find that the Dream Secretary passage consists of two octets and a cinquain: three pulses that begin with psychological immediacy, stepping back to register the subject in third person, and then referencing the moment in the most abstract terms in the poem, respectively. For economy, I compress these here:

Last thing each night, go out for the moon.Pull on old coat, shut garden gate.

Shoulder of a woman. There, that’s her.Very old poor soul, maybe all but gone.

Sometimes the moon is more an upstairs window,Curtains not quite drawn but lit within and lived within. (40: 1–2; 11–12; 25–26)

The use of verbs in the indicative mood takes the poem away from its status as a record, offering a complex writing out of the poem as it is happening. They enact the ontology of things that Sleepwalk began in its prologue, as ‘something very hard to define’ (1: 21) and yet captured in the magnificent simile of solar-powered angels (mentioned earlier). The sense of the writer’s routine, witnessed in the secretary’s presence at the beginning of each nightwalk to the estuary during each phase of the moon, revisits the energy of situated voices and yet this is more orderly and calm than the painful struggle of the moon. Moreover, the use of ‘sometimes’ six times in the closing stanza is telling. To some degree, we assume, the poem has come to terms with changeability.

The moon: an ‘upstairs window’? The solitary orbiting satellite trans-forms into a transparent gateway between an interior professional space of writing and the outside world as we are taken on an imaginative jour-ney to the interior space of an ‘other’ from the situation of an encounter on the ground (albeit the ground as fluid estuary). The curtains’ ordinary


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social function to delimit public and private spaces and to construct privacy by obstructing or obscuring, however, is relinquished for a metaphor of domestic presence illuminated by open selfhood: ‘not quite drawn’ is certainly neither closed nor represented in full. This allusion to the closing poem itself both restates the subjectivity of the Oswaldian ‘not yet’ while the lines ring in our mind with the prologue. A vast and delicate reflective sweep across the entire poem ignites this point as an instance of gathering that delivers a consistent sense of becoming (and incompleteness) on one hand; a subtle nuance to a former state and a link to the timespace on the other, where only conditions of possibility were evident, not the world in its fullness (the prologue). Thus, Sleepwalk ends with a resistance to finished things. It is musically and accumulatively awakened to its history like our affected subjects (‘lit within’), emplaced under the new moon subject to the veracity of the Severn’s bioregion (‘lived within’). I claim this as an ecologically situated ‘self ’ in and of the landscape.

A provisional conclusion

With respect to the Anthropocene paradigm of personhood, the frag-ments of Sleepwalk that I have selected nominate ‘situatedness’ as a mode of adaptation to space and production in space. These moments are receptive to individual and community-based relations that parallel more biologically driven networks. Furthermore, in terms of ‘discrete-ness’, the borders between mind and body, human and non-human are always clear, and yet are alive and subject to the pressures of competing forms of presence. Taken together, these two concepts help to demarcate an economy of difference that is consistent in Oswald’s poetry to date. It registers ‘personhood’:

I stood in the big field behind the houseat the centre of all visible darkness

a brick of earth, a block of sky,there lay the world, wedgedbetween its premise and its conclusion

some star let go a small sound on a thread. (‘Field’ 2–7, Woods etc.)

The ‘spasm of midnight’ (10) that follows will be instanced by the spiral-ling out of lines into an unpunctuated and fragmented couplet (13, 14).


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The naked array of things that constitutes this poem’s last movement grows out of compression at the centre of the poem that ironically ties the lexis of architecture and town planning to the marginal pastoral spaces of England. There is a bursting forth from constellations in Oswald’s poetry, as much as there is a meshwork of accumulation at times. Here, the title nominates the noun for the space of husbandry and the semantic space in which data resides; the poem expands and contracts between these two scales of dwelling (living and thinking) that are an invitation to act within and interpret the environment. It is in consequence to these two pragmatic pressures that the poem acts like a lung; breathing in where lineation affords rest between each moment that resists the logic of argument. The poem is yet another Oswaldian example of how writing involves us in places, bodily.

* * *This chapter has shown how ecopoetry derives from the inhabitation of these breathing places, and that its reference to placehood posits the poem itself as a horizon of experience via proxy. As a measure of place attachment, ecopoetics unpacks the conditions of possibility for any geographic location to house the enworlded solitary ‘I’. Oswald’s poetry attends to the moment of the poem where the world resides in its own naming and navigation, which cradles each object as an energy field, animating and plastic, partly constituting and constituted by the accu-mulated, spatial formation. As such, no subject, no object, no dualism inhere.

I read Sleepwalk as an incomplete dialogic interaction between human and estuary as a total sum of separate, dispersed and unfixed agencies; however, spatially arranged subjects operate within an animated triptych (vertical layout) wherein static or containing models of foreground and background are eliminated in the arrangement. The poetic site, there-fore, registers the Severn catchment area as a fluid topos of collapsed and emergent subjectivity. There are concrete presences and undulating forces within this landscape that bring to mind the diorama and the stage. With respect to human interest, such becoming is symbolically contained within the sense of being ‘not I’ (Sleepwalk 24: 8), which is to say, being with others and changing with others. Finally, the poem instances human responses to an environment that simultaneously com-plicates that very demarcation.

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Conclusion

Abstract: First of all I review ideas of history, belonging and selfhood to clarify the challenge of the Anthropocene as finding creative and instructive ways of attuning human sensitivities to more-than-human contexts. I then align findings on territory, estrangement and identification to the senses of situatedness, settledness and discreteness from the Anthropocene paradigm of personhood. Finally, I conclude that it is apposite to trace emotions in our historical moment warped by environmental pressures, before asking where next for the lyrical imagination.

Keywords: belonging; emotions; estrangement; identification; lyrical imagination; territory



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The most pressing challenge that faces scholars developing critiques of the Anthropocene is at once ethical and conceptual: to find creative and instructive ways of placing the human at the scene of ecological breakdown. Artists are already meeting this challenge, the resurgence of poetry over the past 20 years evidencing a need to rethink models of human subjectivity and environmental history. It is apposite to trace emotions in our moment where empirical evidence for and expectation of environmental change are factors motivating refiguring the human in the material world. Ecopoetics and ecopolitics are quite separate prac-tices; in another sense they are exactly the same thing.

Poems of our climate

Marx asserted that ‘to be radical is to grasp things at the root. But for man the root is man himself ’ (1975, p. 251). Poems of our contemporary geopolitical climate have begun to negotiate the anthropocentrism inher-ent within an understanding that to think ‘radically’ is to grasp human action. Within the environmental humanities, scholars are rethinking the human within a more-than-human context; it is a useful angle on human hubris and technological advantage. Heidegger says:

As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve ... then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened[,] exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself. (1977, pp. 26–27)

Intelligent poems work through the paradox of modernity. Here, to be radical is not to grasp man but to acknowledge the dynamic, chaotic, indifferent fabric of life; the geologic turn begins with a reconstituted individualism adumbrated by new concentrations of persons and planet.

Contemporary poetry deconstructs the position of human as overlord; it dilutes the parametres of encounter to engender a sense of historical continuum in the environment while inviting thoughts on our limited biological continuity and empathic relations to human and non-human

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others. Personhood is entangled in abstractions; patterns that map the world, the human in the world and the relations between the two, simul-taneously. These patterns permit the eye of the poem to take snapshots of feelings and landscapes; these patterns – and the breakdown of the formation of patterns and symbols to construct relations between emo-tion and place – betoken the conditions for belonging, to be with others and to disclose the relational and (thus) the extended self.

In this context, the Anthropocene self exposes bi-directional and non-dualist relations rather than subject–object-based ‘othering’; more at play in the word and at risk from its own impact upon others, the lyrical self in this model is less in control of things. Lyricism takes hold of the elements that are out of place in a system, showing how systems are rarely as coherent and stable as they imagine. As a means to escape the logic of each structure, Anthropocene personhood – as registered in the lyrical ‘I’ in these three collections – fluctuates between two modes. The first of these is subjectivity ordinarily overwritten by systems theory, biological determinacy and normative social architecture that interpo-lates humans in terms of privatised agency; and the ecopoetic mode that rescues subjectivity from these reified agents and agencies is the second. The ‘I’ might reside in both modes or alternate between them, limited and selfish in the first, expansive and open-minded in the second. To oscillate between the two is to encounter the world in process and to speak from a temporal perspective destroying anthropocentric hubris and enlarging the scale of our witnessing.

A word on historyLike when god throws a starAnd everyone looks upTo see that whip of sparksAnd then its gone(Alice Oswald, Memorial)

Rather than looking at existence as a development from a source, we experience history as an on-going presence, the non-linear moment incorporating the past and future. Subsequently, place as a non-Euclidean site and record of our action is understood as the affordance of experi-ences. This is where the politics of representation meets the metaphysics of presence. Deconstruction has thought of the lyric in this very context; as a force extending from Romanticism into the contemporary, which does not consecrate history but embeds human consciousness in history;


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as Paul de Man puts it, in an attempt to locate human accountability, ‘to understand natural changes from the perspective of history, rather than history from the perspective of natural changes’ (1986, p. 83). Ecopoetics is alert to the limits of human sense perception and the creation of terms for our experience through bodily participation in the world. Alive to the subsymbolic architecture of the emotions that resists direct access and representation, poetry is witness to the inequality and non-corre-spondence across humans and nature. This historically astute manner, or mode, which I have called ‘Anthropocene lyricism’, directly addresses the requirement of the current epoch: to calibrate the song of the earth to an examination of the relationships between our societies as a whole within the context of a longue durée. The emphasis on humans acting within space-time in continental philosophy is very much the realm of occurrence-in-location for Kinsella, material presence in Burnside, enworldment in Oswald.

A note on belongingA greeting, enfilade, vestibuleof activity: that door. The din of birdsa disruption to the passage

of warplanes overhead, trainingto make a mark, a strike against threatsalways being determined.(‘Building (Extension)’ (Kinsella, 2012))

This study has asked three slim publications to speak of an epoch, the Anthropocene. And yet these collections of poetry are indicative of a new phase of nature writing, poetry and criticism that speaks from the more-than-human world. This phase collides with ecological thought to clarify the challenges for new humanisms in our historical moment. It is in this very space of dialogue between worlds and thoughts where a protagonist is revealed. The protagonist is historical. Again, Paul de Man writes, ‘history awakens in us a true sense of our temporality, by allow-ing for the interplay between achievement and dissolution, self-assertion and self-loss’ (1987, p. 13). This historical perspective – as registered by Kinsella, Burnside and Oswald – neither frames an autobiographi-cal self nor emotions floating free in space. Rather, they immerse our subjectivity in an inclusive world that registers primordial and rational feelings simultaneously. These affective states give rise to consciousness

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of a proto-self that is not absolute but forming environmentally in place and in time. A renewed sense of belonging can begin from here. There is much to gain by asserting ourselves less.

In Jam Tree Gully, belonging is only ever one part of a myth clarified by the emotional trajectory of the speaker whose line of inclination towards political ideals is held back by a vision pragmatically oriented to the politics of spatial relations. Here, the house is rarely brought in view; present through its absence, the homestead is the sum of the actions and relations that take place in space.

The eye of the beholder in Sleepwalk on the Severn is simultaneously out of the action, reporting on the events of others, and deeply embed-ded within the poem and the locale of events. Such impossibility of securing borders between an inside and outside within metaphor is transformed into geographic realism by sensory and emotional land-scapes of humans under the moon, rhythmically located within the enduring affective instability of our planetary home. This study has considered the spatial variation and distinctiveness of places as under-stood through the lyric’s ability to speak meaningfully about events as they unfold around the speaker; sites of interaction with the environ-ment detail surface manifestations while alluding to deeper processes and constant change.

Constancy is quashed by a sense of eternity that is grammatically charged by impermanence in Burnside Gift Songs. Security here is only pro-visionally entertained as a dimension of experience that is extra-sensory. The sensory mind extracts itself from the self, its contingencies and social vicissitudes, and relaxes into quietude during the event of the poem.

Poetic Anthropocene consciousness is like the earth’s disposition to realise states of low potential energy only to be animated and fleshed out by stored resources. These resources might be located in the biosphere and its seasons, or in culture (including memory). Mood functions across the interchange of these resources; indeed the lyric’s capacity to slow down the overlapping and interfacing of the two forms of resource is a site of emotions in itself, portending that the two are rarely separate.

A sketch of selfhoodOn the road to the Brensholmen ferry:snow gentians, mineral blueand perfect, like a child’s idea of north;(‘A Duck Island Flora’ (Burnside, 2002))


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To read the world as a complex wave of historical and biological rela-tions passing through the lyrical ‘I’ is one step towards the reception of the disclosure of the world on its terms. This stance evinces the post-Romantic consideration of connection and engagement with the world beyond the self in one moment in time. Anthropocene lyricism does not aim at synchronicity, harmony or holism; it is aware of such falla-cies as it is acutely informed about its geographical terrain. Purposeful in undermining, diluting or erasing human-centredness and dualistic frameworks, disconnection and breakdown define us as separate from things and yet involved with things. Understated dialogue is a conceptual and ethical touchstone here.

Our three collections indirectly foreground the meaningfulness of place via a poetic listening and questioning process. Kinsella’s immer-sion in the gully and its pressures of heat, politics and endurance (human integrity and ecological resilience) are rich with meaning for the intel-ligent and caring subject of the poem. Oswald’s transparent construc-tion of the riverscape’s fabric resonates with a reality coinciding with emotional subjects to conceive of selfhood within the local terrain of planetary change. Burnside’s situated self is hypersensitive to the unfold-ing and decaying of the natural world and the temporality of human settlements; far from reactionary intolerance of change and struggle, the poem’s eye refrains from delusional states of identity formation and yet supports the validity and vulnerability of experience with allusions to personal memory and myth.

An enlightenment of things, and the song of a world that is created by us in response to the voice of the world, are resident in the expres-sive plane of planetary consciousness in our triptych; this plane signi-fies end-states while advancing rhythms that sustain through time and incorporate last things. A dimming selfhood relates to expansive subject formation consonant with the melodic and cyclical elements of the world. These elements are partly ruined or desperately out of reach in Jam Tree Gully; they need to be viewed from non-human perspectives in Sleepwalk on the Severn; entailed within organic forms of presence in Gift Songs, they act as measures of free will and personhood. Moreover, in each collection, circularity, incompletion and unrealised potential can either be read as limiting and negative, or open-ended and liberating. This depends upon how we draw from economies of freedom and how we choose to relate to the world in time. These poets demand the atten-tion of the reader to regard how a sense of mutability over security might

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relate to the human scene and potentially to new more-than-human freedoms entailed therein.

Place is elastic; so too, people and their emotions. If the Anthropocene signifies global rapid and unpredictable environmental change, it also signifies a new critical modality that is attentive to the fabric of our planetary systems in which we are present and are sus-tained. It is noteworthy that all three collections promote the figure of the walker: the figure of the walker in this brave new century is symbolic of how we move through space, animate space and respond to ecological communities and biorhythms within place and within our bodies. Emotions make connections between these two forms of becoming; in this study they speak of a single plane of imminent ecological consciousness when viewed in terms of interrelation and interdependency.

Reflections on Anthropocene personhood

Kinsella, Burnside and Oswald each, in their own ways, indicate a fresh orientation of contemporary thought towards the idea that any previ-ously conceived metaphysical backdrop is deeply present in our everyday experience. Whether this entails a shift from knowledge to imagination for our twenty-first-century epistemologies remains to be seen.

For now, the Anthropocene paradigm has framed my approach to these texts; the poetry has warped the paradigm. Surveying the find-ings across these chapters suggests that the study has broken free from definitional questions and strict models of consciousness. The net result attempts to piece together place-related concepts for it has spoken indi-rectly of belonging, of the relations between people, planet and place, and yet it has worked beyond the ‘jigsaw puzzle’ view on putting together elements of place attachment, that is, ‘place identity, rootedness, sense of place, place dependence [and] place satisfaction’.1 There is more to it than this array of ideas, which taken on their own would come short of understanding our feelings for place. I have elected to orient my analysis to a cultural crisis where society has distanced itself, as Elspeth Probyn writes, ‘from the innate, the biological, the instinctual and the affective’

1 Cf. Lewicka, M. (2011). Place Attachment: How Far Have We Come in the Last 40 Years? Journal of Environmental Psychology, 31, 207–230.


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(2004, p. 235). I have tried, too, to imagine how poetry might help here while neither being drawn into a misanthropic thesis of connectivity nor indulging in self-serving aesthetic trickery of an environmentally nuanced presence–absence conundrum. Poetry offers a thirdspace of imaginative possibility.

There is not one picture. Additional factors associated with place include colonial history, biodiversity loss, spatial relations and political relations. In poetry, emotional communities arise and fragment from these relations; perhaps literature can clarify contingencies here, which might ordinarily be overlooked? The somnambulant consciousness in Sleepwalk is a signature of personhood that does not register informa-tion in the way that we do when awake; it promotes a phenomenological mode that appears to lack any simple principle of organisation; it pro-motes a phenomenological mode drawing from the unconscious and open to modification.2 Consciousness here is neither institutionalised nor wholly private.

This phenomenon is not unique to the three collections. Burnside’s pro-visional worlds acknowledge others in the landscape: past presences, flora and fauna and histories of settlement, husbandry and industry. Kinsella’s poetics of encounters heightens points of relations between agents and landscape to politicise approximation as a question of ethical situations that might begin with specificity of material places and the things that reside within. Oswald’s song, however, is less anxious and more assured in its knowledge of who is at the centre, margin and periphery within each scene of writing and experience. It resides somewhere between the micro-scale of Kinsella’s WA residence and Burnside’s abstracted North European wanderings. Although animals are less present in Sleepwalk than in the other volumes, the songs of the moon and the wind remind us that other beings have their own lifeworlds, their own emotions and phenomenology. They challenge what matters, what appears, what effects they have upon the world, and their significance for human concerns and the concerns of their earth others. Kinsella and Burnside radically dehumanise the image of nature, impacted as it is by human action, and Oswald more directly abandons the anthropocentric perspective that all three poets challenge.

2 See the sense of knowing more than our own minds as articulated by Bachelard, G. (1990). On Science, Poetry, and ‘the Honey of Being’, in D. Wood (Ed.), Philosophers’ Poets (pp. 153–176), London: Routledge.

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Territory (as situatedness)Lewicka has argued that there is ‘an almost unanimous opinion’ amongst human geographers that ‘the prototypical place is home’. Moreover, that home ‘is a symbol of continuity and order, rootedness, self-identity, attachment, privacy, comfort, security and refuge’ (2011, p. 211).3 Our three poets reify this home as a living, breathing, decaying and regener-ating biological and cultural muscle.

John Kinsella’s inner ear is pragmatic and his ultimate measure of a short lyric appears to be how lineation and stanzaic formulation embody and scaffold his intellectualised yet localised reworking of a sense of place. This knowledge of place is collocated with the wake of our fall into language inflected by the postcolonial Anthropocene.

Cairns – where youths empty swollen bladdersdrunkenly into the fissures and cast amber bottlesinto cobwebbed abysses, where wild oats grow atimpossible angles and lure the sun into darkness.

As I rock pick I unravel these pictures and spreadthem to all corners of the paddock. I coin phrases,devise anecdotes, invest the ups and downs of mylife in these cairns constructed from the landscape’s wreckage, place sheep skulls on summits.

Alone, I feed these rowdy cities the stuffof my blisters, sign the structures with brokenfingers, convert plans to ash and scatter them about the foundations.Softly softly I sing the ruins of ourpampered anatomies, draw strength from the harsh realities of empire building.(‘Rock Picking: Building Cairns’ (Kinsella, 1995, pp. 28–43))

This poem is about clearing the land and building a home, and how these actions are antagonistic and reciprocal. To Kinsella’s lyrical con-sciousness this double-edged action is paralleled in the work of writing; together, they signify removing former presences and markers of place and putting down one’s roots. The Cairns, in the final line of this poem,

3 The literature on emotional connections to places – or ‘place attachment as affect’ has been summarised by Scannell, L., & Gifford, R. (2010). Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite Organizing Framework, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 30, 1–10.


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are read as ‘pyramids of the outback’ and ironically denote the imposed spatial imaginary and linguistic hegemony of European settlers on the Australian landscape.

The poem unpacks the doubleness of the Cairns – the northern Queensland city of the same name and a place stereotyped as one replete with youths behaving in this manner. The ethically ungrounded youths, caught in an act of nature, portend an innocence or naïveté in being confident in one’s place. This comportment is counterposed to the sensi-tive ecological voice of attunement to future growth in a different mode of freedom beyond our reckoning ‘wild oats ... at impossible angles’. And this opposition triggers the reflective stance into a guilt-ridden inter-nalism that questions survival based on encounters in the landscape. Thus, implicitly, Kinsella’s reflexivity confirms one sense of what such an encounter means for lyricism in this historical moment. Pictures, phrases, anecdotes are assembled as ‘investments’ from this territory; now the exploiter of his situation, the ‘I’ turns this experience of ethi-cal reflection into livelihood feeding the ‘rowdy cities’ his poetry of the bush; and then, beyond an audience, there is the translation of world into money, converting ‘broken/fingers’ into the source of home economics. This is a heady progression of cynical tenor that subtly reanimates an awareness of the ‘ruins’ that lie in the wake of cultural practice. It is for the reader to decide whether this is pushed forth too heavy-handedly in the double-frame of the final line and its end stop: the ‘empire build-ing’ of the pastoral mode, which fits with the rugged city of the tropical north.

The lyrical project appears to be a one that can register this histori-cal problem of physical and intellectual territorialism that runs into the present. Rather than delineate a holistic sense of continuum wherein human and nature are in harmony, Kinsella encourages the line not to feign a humanist injury from this fact of barbarism, but during an ethical realism of our worldliness the poetic line holds firm to steady any nervousness or frailty that might arise in an attempt to secure this record as means to escape it. John Burnside’s concern is for the ways that consciousness of this affective space (as a phenomenon within the lyric’s arresting of world) comes to mind, and how once raised this brings to relief the possibility for wider relations to place.

There are times when I thinkof the knowledge we had as children:

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the patterns we saw in number, or the spellsand recipes we hadfor love and fear;

the knowledge we kept in the bonesfor wet afternoons,the slink of tides, the absolutes of fog,

or how a lapwing’s egg can tipthe scale of the tongue;

how something was always present in the snowthat fell between our parish and the next,

a perfect thing, not what was always there,but something we knew without knowing, as we knew

that everything was finite and alive,cradled in warmth against the ache of space,

marsh-grass and shale, and the bloodroot we dug in the woodsthat turned our fingers red, and left a stain

we kept for weeks, through snow and miles of sleep,as if it was meant to happen, a sliver of fateunstitching its place in the marrow, and digging in.(‘Being and Time’ (Burnside, 2002))

Incredibly, this lyrical journey into the dynamic imaginative continuum across time-past and time-present inhabits one fractured sentence. Couplets and triplets are nothing but pauses in poetic breath, each sus-taining a shade of sophistication and nuance that clarifies the depth of a micro-moment of lyricism. This is Burnside’s endeavour to presence world and mind’s reckoning of the world.

‘Unstitching its place in the marrow, and digging in’ (21): locating these verbs superficially might indicate oppositional forces, one loosening up, and the other fixing down. There are at least two ways to read this. One might suggest that the poet is illustrating a sense of moving away from the inmost or essential part of selfhood (the interior cavity, where blood cells are made – the ‘marrow’) and sustaining a sense of vitality in con-necting to the earth. Another might see this as a critical reflection on the shift from vague dream or recollection (stored as malleable text, the ‘mar-row’) to a fixed sense of the experience derived from the fictional truths we make as we repeat our sense of things to ourselves (‘stitching in’). Memory, identity, the recourse to nature both as metaphor and trigger


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to a sense of selfhood within place commutes the ultimate paradox that must be held in mind out of a respect for the contradiction that subsists in nature: namely, moving away from one fixed niche (geographical or psychological) enables us to find roots in this movement, to find comfort in alienation as a pre-requisite to dwelling.

A similar sense of unsettlement appears in Alice Oswald’s lyrical ‘I’ flickering between an erased self subsumed by the environment and ego-free listener attuned to the song of the present ecology (micro and bioregional). Like Burnside’s impulse, Oswald’s is a movement denoting self-reflective subjectivity standing among things in the world and record-ing them as they pass through modes and moods of acknowledgement.

closed and containing everything, the landleaning all round to block it from the wind,a squirrel sprinting in startles and seessections of distance tilted through the treesand where you jump the fence a flap of sackingdoes for a stile, you walk through webs, the crackingbushtwigs break their secrecies, the sunvanishes up, instantly come and gone.once in, you hardly notice as you move,the wood keeps lifting up its hope, I loveto stand among the last trees listening downto the releasing branches where I’ve been –the rain, thinking I’ve gone, crackles the airand calls by name the leaves that aren’t yet there(‘Wood Not Yet Out’ (Oswald, 2005))

The poem begins by suggesting that protection or security is its theme. The poem’s subject is the almost impossible conflation of two things – entering a wood and becoming the wood; it contrasts the movement of the squirrel and the human in the same place. Being safe and moving in, taken together as one idea is not simply a metaphor for the movement into a dwelling consciousness; it is the laying out of the world ‘once in’ (9), that is, seeing things from inside the world. Here, in the wake of our reckoning a creaturely habitat, the human subject is seen moving within a site of experience and encounter configured by lyrical consciousness that is grounded in careful reflections and refractions of the relationship between mind and world, landscape and psychology, people and place.

The wood, however, is ‘not yet out’; it is early; it is becoming; it is in process. With this ontology in view, one simple turn in the lyric permits

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the I to ask questions of itself. These questions are neither temporal nor moral questions, but humanist concerns for identity and identification (to be with things). The reader should be clear that these questions, while of great relevance to all ethically reflective subjects, are burdened with political freight in our historical moment. The tradition of lyric poetry (and its relationship to Romanticised moods and feelings) is fur-ther weighted down by Anthropocene gravity: humans identifying with nature without causing harm.

I loveto stand among the last trees listening downto the releasing branches where I’ve been –the rain, thinking I’ve gone, crackles the airand calls by name the leaves that aren’t yet there (10–14)

The second sentence confirms the ‘I’ for the first time. It is shortly fol-lowed by lines that open with the preposition ‘to’ rushing forth a dou-ble sense of selfhood from a congealed state to one determined by an emphasis on movement and extension. This moment is metaphorically significant as it speaks of ‘the last trees’ just as the human ‘I’ enters the poem; furthermore, these lines can be read for their sense of terminus, of last things, or as enjambed lines (11, 13). Such doubleness is compelling. This is earth and sky framing selfhood while the poem is silently denot-ing a complex sense of contact and contiguity, which is to say human and non-human are similarly placed in a site of exchange and intimacy.

Estrangement (as settledness)Oswald’s poetry is written from within the more-than-human world to harness instability and struggle; Burnside emphasises security only within insecurity; Kinsella’s paranoia is tempered by the arrangements of poetry that gesture towards their insincerity out of respect for the other-ness of things outside the languaged world. Such craftwork enables the reader to rehearse connections and disconnections with the familiar and with the unfamiliar. Such rehearsal is not simply to aid connection with all that exists before us, to place the onus of planetary relations squarely on the shoulder of the individual – that is a neoliberal myth of homo eco-nomicus. These rehearsals clarify our cultural imaginary and its failures to articulate disconnection.

An ecocritical approach to these texts locates subjectivity as world-liness, from pragmatic physical action in the landscape at one end, to


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metaphysical abstraction beyond reflexivity on the other. We are wit-ness to this in various modes. Kinsella’s mindful and moral presence in the landscape is simultaneously earthbound and idealised. Burnside’s disappearance through this reflexive mind betokens a philosophical compound of abstraction and embodiment. Oswald’s ability to record the meta-consciousness as it parses reflection is a lyrical tool engender-ing fresh subjective inflections of mood.

Burnside appears to be pushing the idea that to be in place is to orbit a psychic space that is ultimately political. Rather than question how places look on maps as locations for our navigation, landscape lyricism in his unique mode of imaginative transport is a question of how these places come forth, how we might be estranged from them and how we might potentially conceive of them emotionally; it enquires into how these very actions settle new mindscapes: imagined worlds that press upon and respond to the real.

Each of our three collections has engaged the reader in the decon-struction of the objective perspective and a sense of being outside of the events of nature. Each, in their own distinct ways, has offered versions of existential insideness. Together they offer a riposte to a thesis of estrangement from the world and any loss of human qualities that might be entailed in the willingness to sacrifice self to the more-than-human perspective. This security comes to the reader when poems directly ask us to ‘follow’ and ‘notice’ events unfolding in their worlds. To stand beside the poem’s eye in the surveying of the space before them under-scores a sense of emplacement where the self undulates and personhood is immanent.

Identification (as discreteness)Kinsella’s ‘Rock picking: building Cairns’ (discussed earlier) signifies northern Australia. In the poem, geography (or place-name) is also a noun: the word operates within the wake of the once historical signi-fier for a mound of stones laid down as a monument, memorial or burial chamber. While ecopoetics is particularly attuned to the verb, conversely, in Kinsella’s pastoral, space and time squarely register his act of clearance alongside the making of the poem as a monument to human action within the landscape. This poetic act itself – a reflexive act – is a conflation of the process of writing the poem, the distribution of it to others and the husbandry of place. The combination is aligned

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squarely to territorialism for action in the poem is countersunk into the level plane of the Scottish- and Irish-diaspora-turned colonisers. The combination of thought and action, pragmatism and reflection, and the ethical compression of space-time are registered in a signal grammatical act of violence in the poem’s title: the colon between two verbs, one clear-ing, the other constructing. Thus the reflective, ironic lyrical ‘I’ permits a subtle intellectual humour within a tortuous and difficult ethical terrain defined by a desire to do the best for this land while potentially repeating an action of devastating consequences, particularly in the cleared bush of the desperately dry wheatbelt of WA that is the pastoral space named Jam Tree Gully by the poet.

In Oswald’s ‘Wood Not Yet Out’ (discussed earlier), cracking bush-twigs have already released their song of action and sound compressed into onomatopoeia, but their ‘secrecies’ for the moment are owned by the listening self, the eye-quiet ‘I’. And yet despite the clear picture of the diluted self (the listener as less intrusive than the holder of a gaze), nature’s agency (land and squirrel ‘leaning’ and ‘sprinting’) is overwrit-ten momentarily by the ‘I’ entering the poem, firm and confident in its emotions. It lends itself to the passive voice. And as the reader steps back to read this ‘I’ standing within the scene of lyrical accounting, they wit-ness that this is not a scene of control but one of uprooting and change. Poet and world are one: ‘I love/to stand’ (10–11) meets ‘where I’ve been’ (12) and time is thus collapsed. The staccato rhythmic punctuation at ‘the rain, thinking I’ve gone, crackles the air’ (13) paradoxically slows things down, separates world into a short array of elements while it promotes a sense of melding identity. We are exposed to climate – ‘rain’, conscious-ness (of absence – ‘I’ve gone’), and then a soundscape that reclaims the opening agency moving the world into the realm of the unnameable non-presence (‘aren’t yet there’). This occurs while indicating imprecision on the thinking self: does the rain think ‘I’ve gone’ or the ‘I’ think this? Thus part–whole melding within a scene of quadruple experience of place – squirrel, human, wood, rain – raises questions on the stability of identity and the stability of a sense of any possible point of relation between self and other. This acute instability in Oswald’s lyricism indicates ecopoetic moments in time and their material contact points where the landscape and its inhabitants are equally not ‘yet there’.

It is a commonality to find arrangements and patterns taking on sym-bolic weight and metaphoric economy in Oswald’s poetry. Similarly, in Burnside’s verse they are signifiers of seeking and finding, longing and


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knowing. Lyrical oscillations between these streams of juxtapositions are counter-witnessed as figurations setting alight solid absolute qualia of the assured child (‘the lapwing’s egg’, ‘mash-grass and shale’), which are later developed and figured as a ‘perfect thing’ – the idealism of a mature mind in a reflective state coloured by a sense of a depleted world. This reflective mind clarifies points of identification between human corporeality and more-than-human worldiness. Here, a moment of first-hand experience is transformed and romanticised as an object in the mind; and yet this is in itself something that can occupy the lyric’s critical attention. Rather than explore the dichotomy of adult and child as a means to offer another form of knowledge than idealism, the mixed emotion that comes from a combina-tion of intuition and longing is set as foreground and feeling (underscored by an incomplete subordinate clause through lineation); a half-thought carried over into ‘something we knew without knowing as we knew’ (14). Enjambment arrests us from holding this line on its own in our mind for too long. While it is clear that the earth-stained children are of bone and dust, infected with the presences of the becoming of the world, it is less easy to map this understanding of prior selfhood in the same moment of evolu-tionary extension unless the reader is attentive to the poem itself expanding while sense units fragment. Here, elasticated and broken subjectivity and the record of the reflection on subjectivity are identical.

Where next for the lyric imagination?

If, when the story ends, we are transformedto something else: new memories and tastesarriving from the dark and suddenlyfamiliar, like the strangers in a dream,

new eyes to see the world, another lightunfolding in another type of brain,a foreign tongue for mimicry or song,frogskin or petals, swansdown or living fur,

if we return to what we cannot loseas anything at all, let us be mothsand wander in the certainties of grassand buttercups, unsure of what we are,but ready, for as long as time allows,to fill the meadows with a new becoming.(‘On Kvaløya’ 2: Metamorphosis (Burnside, 2002))

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Jam Tree Gully realises the importance of each referent in its domain; Sleepwalk embodies multiple modes of environmental perception; Gift Songs demands a cultural ecological view of co-evolutionary husbandry. All three collections are backlit by the human propensity to alter land-scapes; they write of the capacity of landscape to alter human perception and for it to connect minds and emotions. To be simply as we are, and to think of how we can be, requires the witness of but one thing: the dynamic meaning-making process of human-environment relations. These relations cannot be converted into statistics or ideograms; they are held within the capacity of literature to undo or deconstruct a sense of place through its ability to transfix and transverse. In the final analysis, lyric poetry works in this space to imagine affective subjectivities.

Place, people, emotion – these are accumulated in the Anthropocene lyric as crafted by Burnside, Kinsella and Oswald to affirm that geogra-phy is a rich hermeneutic milieu. Our task in literary studies is not to reduce this complexity to an environmental psychology, but to refine our interpretation of the relationships between humans and places. Then we may develop modes and genres that give rise to new affective subjec-tivities within the Anthropocene. Let us acknowledge the relevance of geography and location to cultural studies in the interface of landscape, bioregion, Anthropocene and formal experimentation that is already the new domain of ecocriticism. This acknowledgement in turn can help us to reach out from the humanities towards consilient epistemes in the social and natural sciences.

The next step, perhaps, is to write towards an Anthropocene phenomenography.

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Glossary

Affect and Emotion (Heidegger; Tomkins): For Heidegger, emotion and mood are an irreducible pre-theoretical background to life. With less stress placed on causality and more on possibility, this background is relative to the way in which humans and animals are situated within either the world’s disclosure (material, biological formations) or the manner in which it is rendered intelligible (conceptual, artistic, etc.). More recent theory considers affects as pri-mary physiological expressions (a face turning red in anger or shame) and emotions as fully integrated experiences of feelings within the context of a subject’s private life history and social meaning structure (sadness felt through the loss of a loved one; joy experienced at meeting someone new). Affect is biological, innate with the species; emotion is biographical. See anthropocene and anthropocene emotion.

Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer): The Anthropocene is a proposed unit of geological time marking a break with the Holocene period. The term refers to anthropogenic environmental change, the tangible impact on Earth’s eco-systems by human activities. Since the eighteenth century, humans have been the dominant influence on climate and environment: they have contributed to a 30% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide; exhausted 40% of the planet’s oil reserves; and have transformed 50% of land surfaces.

Anthropocene emotion: Anthropocene emotions take on various modalities: direct arousal from environmental conditions that impact on livelihood (embarrassment and

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shame at the government’s latest environmental policy; anger at rising ocean acidification); indirect arousal from scientific understanding (fear of the planet’s future owing to the impact of climate change; grief for the rate of species loss; anxiety over the resource economy). Cognition is an important aspect of emotion, particularly with respect to complex arousal through interpreting events over time. New experiences and sites of subjective and communal feelings are signified by new motivating and distracting forces, new behavioural responses. Anthropocene emotions highlight two areas for thought: first, whether new historical emotions arise within this period; second, whether the capacity for emotion ena-bles admirable ethical adaptation to a situation. See affect and emotion and anthropocene.

Attunement: The idea of being attuned to an other takes on new mean-ing in the Anthropocene. The loss of a (dualist) sense of nature as some-thing external to us has gone; thus it is difficult to be attuned to an ‘other’ in that traditional sense. For humans, attunement is more a question of being involved in relation to the intelligibility of world and others. Thus, attunement in the Anthropocene might refer either to a somatic state where one is mindful of being acclimatised to how things are in the world, or to how we experience the need for more-than-human virtues of the future. See dualism and world.

Comportment: Behaviour or bearing; the expression of a belief or value judgement through bodily conduct. The movement of a limb, or head, as an expression of feeling or rhetorical device (bowing the head in shame; opening one’s hands and arms while moving inwards to listen intently). These movements and gestures might be deliberate or inadvertent. Comportment rests somewhere between posture (physical stance or stature) and gesture (subtler culturally codified behaviour). These divisions have their own history speaking to one’s comportment and its relationship with etiquette, civility and character. In addition to marking a body’s impact in the scene of life, comportment also registers receptiveness to the world. Comportment indicates physical positioning within the life of things; by extension, it remarks upon the epistemic availability of the world owing to the perceiver’s location and corpo-reality. The Anthropocene signifies new spatial relationships between species. The period might mark out intentionality in new ways and thus locate a site wherein an anthropocentric sense of comportment might be worked anew. See more-than-human and stance.

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Dualism: A philosophical position (after Descartes) which claims that matter and mind are ontologically distinct and irreducible categories. Dualism in a broader sense seeks out binary modes such as good and bad, yin and yang. In contemporary analytical philosophy, perspectives on the embodied, enactive, embedded, extended mind – the so-called 4E ontologies – draw on neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and continental phenomenology to develop plausible alternatives to the tra-ditional ‘somatic envelope’. Responding to the same concerns on cultural grounds, ecocriticism promotes intimacy and interdependency; it belies the radical separation of mind and body, body and world, inherent to dualism. Dualities are markers of points of conflict; there is a connec-tion between the structuring of thought as opposing pairs and modes of domination. Patrick Curry has spoken of dualism as the apartheid of matter and spirit; citing the work of Australian philosopher, Val Plumwood (Curry, 2010), Curry outlines a vital project for life, namely, beginning the tasks of reimagining and refashioning the spiritual as also material, and the material as also spiritual. See attunement, ontopoetics and presencing.

Marxist Geography (Harvey, Massey): Harvey’s ‘space–time compres-sion’ (Harvey, 1991) and Massey’s ‘power geometry’ (Massey, 1993) are critical tools for analysing globalisation and its attendant crises; between them they form a significant discursive current within Marxist Geography. Political Ecology uses Marxism to clarify human–environ-ment relations and social justice issues; Cultural Materialism extends Marxist critique to the realms of cultural forms, including aesthetics, the built environment and landscape. In response to recent criticism (that economic relations are less secure and totalising than Marxism might argue), Marxist Geography is currently analysing the global impact of the world’s dominating economies and their relationship with nature and its commodification, and how neoliberal capitalism produces highly uneven geographies of growth and decline. See more-than-human and world.

More-than-human (Abram, Whatmore): A general term reminding us that the non-human world (on which humans are absolutely dependent) has agencies of its own. For Abrams we are only human when in con-tact with what is not human; renewed acquaintance with the sensuous world is a tool for conviviality. The earthlife nexus, as Whatmore calls it, shifts disciplinary registers from material concerns (which speak of an

Glossary

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external nature) to the fabric of corporeality. This shift entails a literacy of intimacy by which the human is redistributed in relational space. See comportment and Marxist Geography.

Oikos: Gk: household, house, family; English prefix ‘eco’, economy and ecology. In an Anthropocene context, oikos means the domicile of a planet, or planetary house.

Ontopoetics (Mathews): A philosophical idea wherein the Cartesian split between external appearance and internal reality is problematised by a fresh conception of dialogic consciousness or poetics as ontology. Here, experience and knowledge are schooled by receptiveness, playfulness and openness across human–nature divisions. In response to the domi-nant global mindset – namely, atomism and economism – ontopoetics comprises likeness between mind, meaning and materiality. Electing to emphasise a field-concordance between psyche, meaning and cosmos, the paradigm opens up worlds within worlds so that the poetic voice and the self may become more dynamic and responsive. See comportment, dualism, more-than-human, presencing.

Parousia: A term used in primitive Christianity to denote the imminent return of Christ in glory. In Greek parousia means ‘arrival’ and ‘pres-ence’ (ousia is the present participle, ‘being’). The distinction between being and arriving, of something that ‘is’ and something that is ‘coming’ raises our awareness for the ongoing unfolding events in the world. See presencing.

Place-making: Cultural Geography’s interest in place-making incorpo-rates the cultural practices, discursive expressions and the artefacts of people and society distributed over space. It is particularly concerned with cultural values and material expressions invoked in the ways places are made to have meaning for us – this includes place identity construction, representation, authenticity, sustainability and legitimacy. Knowledge and meaning are produced and communicated; people build senses of place. Place and identity are conjoined in an imaginary, which is produced and governed, and in an incessant state of becoming. See Marxist Geography.

Presence, Presencing (Husserl, Heidegger): The attempt to describe pure phenomena and beings just as they are independent of any presup-positions. In Heidegger’s view, Husserl’s phenomenological programme failed as it referred back to a transcendental subjectivity, an absolute

Glossary

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being. This ground of subjectivity is dismissed in being as presencing, for such existence is to endure unlimitedness, openness. For Heidegger, presencing is a noetic programme – referred to as unconcealment, dis-closing, self-showing – always arising, emerging, lingering, unfolding, thus things are not represented in terms (or at the scale) of the thinking subject (at least not a fixed, absolute subjectivity). To follow pre-Socratic thought, being calls the world and all its many manifestations into ques-tion; being is the source of wonder and of thought (sometimes referred to as an abyss) and it casts the human being out into the world, throws her towards death, takes subjectivity out of habitual ground and opens before her the mystery of existence. See dualism, more-than-human, place-making and ontopoetics.

Reckoning: Poetry is not here to measure things for the financier or the economist. The etymology of reckoning (accounting) suggests that the original sense of the word is ‘to stretch’ or ‘to reach’, which is retained in the Dutch rekken and the German reken but lost in Old English. However, the root to rekken and reken, ‘rek’, is found in recche, which is ‘to tell, narrate, expound’, as well as ‘pursue one’s course’, and ‘proceed in one’s way’. We begin to note the idea of moving through the world rather than accounting for it. Furthermore, the Old Frisian word rekon and Low German reken designate a quality, particularly of a street, that is clear, open and unobstructed. Reckoning carries ideas of speech, measurement, judgement, and events of habitat in relation to a path or way registered as ‘a clearing’ or ‘openness’, something that lacks obstruction. Poetic reckon-ing, then, is a metaphor for freedom; a space where we can dwell (exist in given and changing states). It is a place or home where the poet’s measur-ing is transformed into an investigation of what it means to be part of the more-than-human disclosure of the world. See parousia and presencing.

Situated Knowledge (Haraway, Pinker): The idea that all forms of knowledge mirror the particular conditions in which they were pro-duced. Social locations and identities of knowledge producers are also reflected by historical, material and cultural conditions. Donna Haraway (1988) clarifies that responsibility for epistemic claims lies with the knowledge producer, instead of being grounded in an ostensive reality supposedly independent of the observer. Producing situated knowledge is a form of reflexivity, neither fixing an anthropocentric position in a fluid more-than-human world, nor understanding human differences as relative. From a different perspective, Steven Pinker (2002) suggests

Glossary

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that universal philosophical validity is not a goal of situated knowledge; our brains evolved for fitness, our bodies to master the environment. See standpoint.

Stance: A term that can refer to bodily or ethical disposition (a golfer’s posture, pose; a neoliberal attitude, point of view); a standpoint, posi-tion, approach, line or policy and the role of behaviour of a writer in relation to her subject. Interestingly, stance reaches modern English via stanza (sixteenth-century Italian), meaning a stopping-place. See com-portment, standpoint.

Standpoint: Standpoint theories are alive in critical areas of debate, such as postcolonialism or feminism, which concern the connections between ideas, reality and experience. The goal to offer different approaches to making a particular body of knowledge more plausible and authoritative might be driven by a resistance to orthodox ideology or by a strong ethi-cal commitment. See also situated knowledge and stance.

Timescape: Time perceived as possessing multiple dimensions. The Anthropocene requires consciousness and metrics of complex niche formation, causality and non-human temporality; its ethics need to stretch across deep time (past and future), the longue durée and the great acceleration, and our violent futures.

World (Heidegger): In concordance with the sense of mood and emo-tion as pre-theoretical fabric of existence, the life of the world has an a priori structure. World is not a collection of people, things, objects; rather, it is composed of human and non-human involvements. The eve-ryday world refers us to activities and comportments wherein animals, people, plants, things, objects are either used to do something or they are produced or consumed. These ideas are relevant to Cultural Geography in the Anthropocene; speaking of the proximity of things, an inescapable relationship with things. See Marxist Geography.

Worldliness: The human species understood as a historically condi-tioned, multivalent aggregate of discrete complex entities. From the perspective of the Anthropocene paradigm, persons are always part of the more-than-human world. The distinction between the public (‘we’) world and the private (‘I’) world no longer holds; personhood is extended to worldhood. Rather than ‘being’ considered to be embodied, affect and supervening emotional incorporation resembles a kite in the wind (or a philosopher in the river) – it is enworlded.

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accumulate, accumulation, 60, 79, 88–9, 95–7, 106, 123

affect, 2, 15, 21, 23, 26, 32, 33, 40, 42, 46, 61, 78–9, 84, 90, 92, 93, 95, 98, 100–1, 110–13, 115, 123

amalgam, 46, 58, 96, 103anthropocene emotion, 2, 5, 7,

34, 57anthropocentrism, 13, 30, 46,

96, 99, 108array, 16, 17, 26, 33, 53, 61, 72,

82, 85–6, 90, 106, 113assemblage, 33, 87Augustine, 51, 57, 66, 67, 68

bodily, 40, 48, 60, 69, 78, 93, 95, 96, 97, 103, 106, 110

body, 4, 7, 8, 14, 15, 17, 29, 59, 64, 75, 76, 78, 87, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 104, 105

bonds, 24, 88

climate, 7, 21, 22, 30, 37, 108, 121geopolitical, 108

climate change, 3, 20, 22, 23, 28, 42, 43, 44

Coleridge, S. T., 66, 68composure, 61corporeal, 9, 51, 60, 88, 93, 94,

101, 122creatureliness, 49, 65

damage, 26, 29, 30, 35, 43, 45, 99

de Man, P., 110decolonised, 9, 21, 24–6, 32dialogic, 8, 49, 97, 106discreteness, 13, 105, 120dualism, 2, 11, 15, 38, 48, 50, 70,

98, 106

ecopoetics, 4, 6, 9–12, 15, 78, 96, 106–10, 120

Eliot, T.S., 34, 48–9, 54–6, 63, 66, 69, 72–3, 75

embodied, embodiment, 7, 62, 74, 100, 120

Emerson, R.W., 66–9, 102emotional literacy, 13emotions, 4, 5, 8, 22, 23, 30, 32,

38–9, 40, 44, 50, 60, 68–9, 75, 77, 79, 85–6, 107–8, 110–11, 113, 114, 121, 123

emptiness, 28, 51, 52, 67, 72, 81enworlded, enworldment, 46,

61, 106, 110evolving subjectivity, 79excess, 6, 91

freedom, 3, 25, 31, 38, 55, 58, 60, 67–9, 96, 101, 112–13, 116

Frost, R., 101

guilt, 34, 116

habitus, 8, 14, 47, 49, 72, 100–3

Heidegger, M., 55–6, 69–70, 74–5, 108

Index

Index

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history, 7, 11, 13, 23–4, 28, 32, 38, 40, 45, 49, 50, 52, 57, 62–4, 69–70, 74, 75, 78, 83, 87, 98, 101, 105, 108–10, 114

home, 3, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, 27, 30, 31, 32, 45, 48, 50, 51, 65, 67, 70, 71, 78, 97, 111, 115, 116, 128

international regionalism, 26intersubjectivity, 40intertextuality, 50irony, 42, 44, 67, 81

James, W., 66–7, 68–9joy, 3, 22, 29, 38, 45, 50

labour, 11, 43, 73, 82, 84, 89, 98landscape 6, 10, 12, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23–6,

30, 32, 34, 37, 39, 41–2, 43, 45, 50, 51, 61, 62, 64–5, 73, 75, 78, 80, 89, 92, 96, 97, 105, 106, 109, 111, 114, 115–16, 118, 119–20, 120–1, 123

loss, 3, 12, 22, 24, 27, 29–31, 34, 35, 39, 50, 52, 56, 64, 65, 69–70, 93, 110, 114, 120

Marx, K., 62, 108materialism, 11, 62, 64Merleau-Ponty, M., 76, 82, 95moodswung, 80more-than-human, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12,

13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 35, 38, 39, 41, 46, 61, 68, 71, 74, 78, 85, 89, 95, 97, 98, 108, 110, 113, 119, 120, 122

myth, 45, 52, 56, 101, 111, 112, 119

openness, 32, 38, 44, 45, 55, 61, 64, 72organism, 8, 14, 93, 99

pain, 3, 28, 29, 30, 66, 67, 87–9, 94pastoral, 20–2, 24, 25, 27, 32, 33, 35, 37,

38, 78, 80, 87–9, 116pathetic fallacy, 15, 30, 41pattern, 10, 40, 64, 73, 86, 88, 91, 96,

109, 117, 121

phenomenology, 5, 18, 48, 70, 82, 114place-consciousness, 79, 91, 92place, poetics of, 2, 18, 53placehood, 14, 79, 106place-making, 7, 52prayer, 27, 51, 55, 59presencing, 15, 16, 17, 42, 61, 74, 89, 96

radical pastoral, 37–8, 43Rilke, R. M., 48, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72romantic, romanticism, 15, 41, 49, 50,

52, 57, 66, 69, 70, 98, 109, 112, 119, 122

settledness, 13, 119shame, 66silence, 17, 35, 37, 52, 83, 89, 96situatedness, 7, 13, 92, 105, 115soul, 7, 52, 66, 69, 74, 104spatialised emotion, 41stance, 6, 7, 34, 112, 116standpoint, 6, 18, 42, 96Stevens, W., 48, 49, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59,

61, 63, 66, 69, 72, 73still to come, 51stillness, 37, 51, 61, 67, 68, 85, 89structure, 82, 86, 92, 93, 102, 109struggle, 27, 30, 88, 89, 92, 94, 96, 97,

104, 112, 119subjectivity, 3, 15, 17, 18, 25, 40, 42, 58,

62, 65, 79, 82, 83, 86, 92, 93, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 105–9, 110, 118, 122

surprise, 3, 50survival, 13, 14, 30, 36, 116

Thoreau, H. D., 36, 37, 43, 44

walking 10, 30, 57, 58, 60, 75, 78, 99, 99–100, 102, 103

witness, 4, 7, 17, 20, 24, 26, 31, 36, 51, 64, 86, 92, 97, 98, 100, 110, 121, 123

Wordsworth, W., 66worldliness, 6, 7, 17, 96, 116, 119

the anthropocene lyric: an affective geography of poetry, person, place

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