This anthology is narrow and deep. Despite the definitive nature of its title, The Ecopoetry Anthology is strictly American. Its editors, poets Laura-Gray Street and Ann Fisher-Wirth, reconstruct a story that ecopoetry was born American, and that its present and future quite possibly reside there.

The myopic quality of this editorial vision might be maddening to some readers. For me, it certainly seems an inauthentic way of presenting poetic lineage, eco- or not. The Ecopoetry Anthology reveals the invisible web between Walt Whitman and A.R. Ammons, or Emily Dickinson and Rae Armantrout—but what about the international lines of influence that reach from John Ashbery to Michael Farrell, or Ted Hughes to Richard Hugo?

However, while the book’s focus is confined it enables a cohesive collection that will no doubt find commercial appeal. It complements other nationally focused ecopoetry anthologies such as Outcrop and The Ground Aslant; and eschews the culturally comparative approach of another like Entanglements: New Ecopoetry, for a more localised project of extending the American ecopoetic canon.

Apparently prompted by Robert Hass, who contributes an introduction, Street and Fisher-Wirth open the anthology with an “historical” selection that predates the post-war ecological consciousness commonly identified with ecopoetry. Presenting the field as an organically developed concern in America, they demonstrate that it not only includes the proleptic ecopoetics of Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, but that it also steadily develops all the way through American modernist poetry.

The editors are not occupied by trying to reveal lesser known voices. Perhaps they commence their history of ecopoetry with Whitman’s “Song of Myself” because its composition coincides with the rise of the industrial age as we know it; or it may be that they want to place particular emphasis on Whitman as the founding father of the American ecopoetry tradition—particularly its paradoxically all-consuming vision of “self”. At any rate, the absence of indigenous texts from this history is a bit baffling.

This is soon interrupted by the editors’ sizeable representation of modernist poetry, including more heterogeneous historical voices such as Jean Toomer, Sterling A. Brown and Langston Hughes. Hass’ introduction draws particular attention to the way that modernism has shaped ecocritical discourse, not only through its particular preoccupation with delineating and exploring the limits of the human eye and voice, but also by its neo-romantic strains. Imagist gems like Williams’ “Between Walls” have long been part of ecopoetic discourse, as have Robinson Jeffers’ jagged songs:

 You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it

stubbornly long or suddenly

A mortal splendour: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine,

perishing republic.

(“Shine, Perishing Republic”, 42)

Less expected, the extraordinary narrative poem by Stephen Vincent Benét, “Metropolitan Nightmare”, reads more like a current news update on climate change than a speculative fiction. A similar voice of witness comes from George Oppen, who, writing from California, signals virtually global consciousness: “Out there is China. Somewhere out in air”  (“California”, 89). And whilst Lorine Niedecker is afforded just two poems, the editors’ long excerpt from her “Paean to Place” is one of the most haunting notes of the anthology’s first section. It seems to draw Dickinson and Charles Olsen into strange conversation through Niedecker’s self-mythologising attention to place:

My mother and I

born

in swale and swamp and sworn

to water

My father

thru marsh and fog

sculled down

from high ground

saw her face

at the organ

bore the weight of lake water

and the cold—

(“from Paean to Place”, 74-75)

Curiously, while the anthology’s historical section is chronologically ordered, its contemporary selection is alphabetical. An interesting tension results. The historical chapter of ecopoetry ends somewhat arbitrarily with James Schuyler, the last of the deceased poets (born 1923) selected by Street and Fisher-Wirth. The contemporary chapter then progresses through the late twentieth and early twenty-first century with a non-linear sequence of chance leaps and synergies.

The rhythm of this contemporary selection is pleasing: some contributors, including but not exclusively stars like Gary Snyder and Jonathan Skinner and Forrest Gander, have a run of four or more poems; other poets might shoot past in just one short page. This structure itself is a kind of ecology: a cohort, of varying lengths of appearance, each passing the question of worlding along to the next.

I found myself wondering what narrative(s) could have been drawn out of the last forty odd years of American ecopoetry, and why the editors shied away from constructing one; the reasons are probably political (living egos need to be bypassed by some objective taxonomy), and it would have taken a more scholarly engagement than this anthology seeks to make. Regardless, the chosen approach produces an engaging sequence of surprises and questions. To this extent the larger, contemporary thrust of the collection does what an anthology should: it liberates both the texts and their readers from familiar frameworks, throwing the poems into unusual comparative contexts.

For example, the laconic lines of Lois Beardslee, interspersed with Ojibwa language as she slowly proceeds through the uses of a specific berry, seem to dance with Sandra Beasley’s “Unit of Measure”, another kind of catalogue. Side by side in the reader’s hand, Beardslee’s refrain is “Leave”, “Maybe” (“Wawaskwanmiinan”, 163); Beasley’s is “Everything”, “Everyone”, “Consider”, “Accept” (“Unit of Measure”, 164-65). By the same token, there is a temptation to contrast Mary Oliver’s prim pronouncement that “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves” (“Wild Geese”, 418), with Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik’s painstaking representation of a raven dance, which “waits   / waits              for something to break” (“Tulunigraq: Something Like a Raven”, 415). Then again, when okpik tells us that “all things / and all beings reach            back into time / before iron and oil”, perhaps she is describing the same material vision as Oliver’s “family of things”.

The contemporary selection is diverse but established. There are some bum notes, of course, which represent the editorial scope and the typical pitfalls of this field. Ronald Johnson’s concrete poem, “[earthearthearth]” is twee, and Deborah Miranda’s “Eating a Mountain” trots out the kind of self-righteous and formally slack celebration of survival that deflects rather than involves the reader: “Oh, / we are blessed!” (“Eating a Mountain”, 405). Street and Fisher-Wirth are liberal in their understanding of what constitutes ecopoetry, as Street writes in her foreword:

Of a way of thinking ecocentrically rather than anthropocentrically. Of seeing the same things we’ve always seen, stuck on the same preoccupations, humming the same tunes off key, but with humankind as a contingent part of a much larger whole rather than the be-all and end-all of everything. ("The Roots of It", xxxviii).

Embedded in contemporary poetry for which ecology is a conscious preoccupation, we are invited by Street and Fisher-Wirth to climb up and get some perspective on what that consciousness does to the formations of poetic language. How does it filter into the tropes of Language poetry; how, for instance, are the baroque, cluttered lines of Robert Duncan and Barbara Guest a different representation of organic existence than the clean, efficient images of Williams and Oppen? Does the historical lyric voice persist or dissolve, and what does this reflect about changing philosophies of being? Do we see an unfolding progression, as it were, towards a more “true” ecopoetics?

A joint editors’ preface, two individual editors’ forewords and Hass’ guest introduction offer differentiated angles on these questions. Street’s view is philosophical; Fisher-Wirth’s is reflective; jointly, they are definitive; Hass sees the educational and critical use of lengthening the ecopoetic chronology. All in all, this amount of introductory material seems excessive to the private reader’s needs and detracts from the anthology’s powerfully constructed first act. Though it might have been more critically radical and culturally informative, The Ecopoetry Anthology is clearly directed towards students and teachers. It is concerned less with scholarly delineations of tradition, and more with thematic expansiveness. It tells us again, that story of how a monument to individualist consumerism has produced some of modernity’s most arresting perspectives on ecology.

A Windfelled Feast beyond the Fence

Corey Wakeling and Jeremy Balius have curated a thought-provoking collection of poetry in Outcrop: Radical Australian Poetry of Land. Well-known names such as John Kinsella and Jill Jones will entice readers to this text, as will the presence of recognized poets such as Ali Cobby Eckerman, Kate Fagan, Michael Farrell, Fiona Hile, Duncan Hose and Claire Potter. These writers, and many of the other twenty-one contemporary Australian poets included here, have made a stinging contribution to the strengthening posthuman project to situate the human more aptly. Outcrop does this in free and fertile ways, but there is a recurrent theme of a deeply haunted warred-upon land that will not be dominated by white settlement, and further, that the painful dissonance caused by this scarring deserves and will be given voice.

The passions within this anthology provide fresh insights for readers aspiring towards a more participative and open cohabitation with the nonhuman world. These new ways of understanding the human are offered most directly when the poems’ responses are contingent on nonhuman encounters. Such moments assist reading towards what it might mean, humanly, to be situated in a more collaborative position with the rest of the world.

The multi-directional ways in which Outcrop questions limited ideas of human ascendency and human time gives this collection a political energy, made all the more powerful by the writers’ preparedness to let readers do their own work with their poems. The collection’s density demands close attention, and it is threaded with wry self-deprecation. Michael Farrell’s “The Structuralist Cowboy” is a case in point. To speak of stations “bigger/than Deconstruction” (134) is wittily suggestive of the post-conquest possibilities that give this collection its verve.

Tim Wright, like Farrell, twists the vernacular to achieve new subject positions, and this strategy is particularly effective in “The Farmer has floated in the grounds”. His well-judged lapses gesture towards a newly complex non-humanist world of “it” as he wilfully confuses subject and genus towards new meanings. These posthuman marks are particularly generative of rich ontological capital when Karl shapeshifts uncomfortably between boy, dog and, perhaps, spider (147). The delayed kicks and absences in Wright’s syntax do different work in “Chants” but again, spaces are left to reveal the complexities in the world as humans can know it (148–50). Wright, like the other poets collected in this text, is acutely responding to the “crises of pastoralism” described in Wakeling’s introduction (8). None of the poets here directly diagnose Anthropocenic damage, but the effort of this work, as a whole, is to create a positive change in the ways dominant humans create discord in the vulnerabilities of the world.

John Kinsella makes no bones about negative human impact in “Coop”. He incises the habit of nostalgia by a speaker who revises contemplations of childhood as artifact, making a macabre “museum” out of what was once a kind of “Egg fervour” (174). Kinsella portrays a vicious past, contained, like the coop itself, in corporate agriculture, where even the most private of farms are branded with the “ore” of “New Agriculture” (Conlogue). The petroleum industry’s “Golden Fleece” creates a humanist enclosure. Kinsella codifies but does not privilege the differences between diversified and non-mechanical farming (“Old Agriculture”) and industrial farming. He has no truck with any kind of pastoral ideal. The “coddling paradise” of the chookshed is only a thin line up from the “Head-chop and dunk in blanching feather-loosening strife” foreshadowed by the sardonic parenthesis “(unsavoury to say ‘slaves’, such happy chooks)” (175). This is a powerful poem. While Outcrop draws strength from its diversity, it is given ethical direction through the lifeway in Kinsella’s words.

This is not to suggest this anthology is in any way didactic. Wakeling aptly describes the collection as a series of “poetic experiments” that create new “possibilities of land as subject” (19), and indeed, from an ecocritical perspective, this laboratory generates innovative explorations of relations with the other-than-human. There are no fenced-in representations of the landscape here. Rather, these poems listen to what is being communicated beyond human sense-making, then voice this with visceral impact. This emphasis on the corporeal leaves behind limited humanist representations that can be understood, with help from Fiona Hile, as a hollow and slippery “stairwell of abstract” (“Grand Hotel”, 177).

Astrid Lorange pulses towards the concrete territory of the posthuman with lilting intent. In “WOLVES ARE SWARMS” all are parasites. Wolves, bees and ants work their way up skirts, transgressing the boundary of species through her speaker’s being with a quickening growth. These words might even be read in themselves as a “thong of wasps and they’re punchy for a suckle” (95). Lorange takes metamorphosis further, with cloning, in “SONG GOAT”, where goat, lamb and speaker fade and flesh into each other. The speaker is gleefully aware “subject bias” is being subverted here (97). Her poetry sings to the posthuman tune through unsettling not-quite anthropomorphisms.

Human/human relations are also present in this collection, drawing ecopoetic strength from posthuman emplacement (Mathews). Kate Fagan’s “Hawkesbury Elemental” does this beautifully where her speaker makes the point that to be non-phosphorous matter is to be “shit without reflectors” (158). This limit in human existence is a lack shared with other non-reflective matter. Humans are, with other worldly creatures (Haraway), just so much dirt, excess, waste and growth material. Like Lorange, Fagan does radical work by finding commonalities within difference. This is, as Tom Tyler has argued, a liberating way to move beyond humanist conceptual boundaries.

Shifting fixed ontologies is a slow grind and, as Wakeling indirectly suggests, consciousness stuck in the groove of human centrality can be eased into movement with the introduction of the “hallucinatory” (12). Nicola Themistes’ “Horizontologies” is exemplary in this regard. The tangents and ricochets in her poems come at the reader with nipping word bites that can be read again and again just for the delight of her dreamy word slides. “The tits are alive! cried she, aghast at the doppeldialogues ekesing out the left gripple” (27). Her understanding of the impoverished world humans are creating is brilliantly positioned in the image of a “burlish breeze” (28). This conflated horror of a gale of mushed up fish, and the terror of fish-poor polluted currents muddied by those who keep their heads in the air, has much of the ecoprophetic productivity described in Kate Rigby’s ecotheological theory.

Fagan’s and Themiste’s challenge to human assumptions of species privilege is a repeated position in this collection. Farrell’s “Ploughspeech” works the page and the reader in a similar direction with a well-honed forking pitch. The deep furrows in his seeding words remind readers that even when the world seems patterned by human makings, the nonhuman is always there, contesting as much as acquiescing. The rabbit dead, dread, “dered”, in the warrens created through the “intentional” of the poem, or, perhaps, the “Gap”, demands inventive readerly perspectives (139). Here, poetry is praxis.

The freedoms taken here, to think species differently, allows potential for an other world to take shape. Fiona Hile writes toward this emergence in her “Generic Golden Poem”. Her speaker dismisses garden “exclusions” (181), just as she refuses dulling expectations of what might be called either love or control. Such humanist world-making is contrasted with the more productive work of inviting newly thought plants to exist, making possible a different history, a “future composition” (181). Such an other world might set aside human judgments and dissolve false divisions like human/nonhuman. Let the couch grass run free.

Hile’s revision of assumptions about that which is to be expunged and that which is to be nurtured, challenges the humanist past. Human centrality is also ably critiqued by Peter Minter. “Pink camellia flowers fount over the 1940s” in his “On the Serious Light of Nothing”, telepathically speaking to the gardened exclusions eschewed in Hile’s work. Minter’s speaker finds this position through viewing gardens with a scything socio-historical perspective, “As if each year were a flower all of a sudden” (219). Minter’s “The Roadside Bramble” also seeks a different-than-human time, going with and beyond the bile that blackberries might rise from a landcarer’s belly. There is an ethic of respect in the imagery of “brittle thorn, a caul of dead grass, quiet rust” (220). Such work speaks to the “compassionate coexistence” Tim Morton suggests is needed to think ecologically.[1] Couch grass, blackberries, rabbits—Outcrop provides a space for these beings to be other than enemy. As Minter writes, “each will always yield its own” (231), perhaps even ditching humans in the process. Minter’s attentive celebration of the estrangement in familiarity is a route towards taking on Morton’s challenge to meet nonhuman unfoldings on more appreciative terms.

Understanding that revelations of the nonhuman are not limited to human time demands a temporal mobility, and such timing underpins Lionel Fogarty’s work. Here, access to Gondwanaland’s past and future is layered through privilege carried by blood, rather than possession. In his “Posh Ports”, places of pause signify transport through drinking as much as mooring and unmooring, such are the flow of his words. Fogarty’s fluid time, where “1853 is like the filth of 2053” (192) lends immediacy to “MUTUAL FEVER”. In a texted yell, even with the font turned down, old language mixes with new in the reclaiming and declaiming extraordinary line, “OUR LUBRAS PASSIVELY GAVE TREMBLE” (195). The prickling conquest in “OUR” is subsumed by the “VALLEY OF FLICKERING EYES” that let nothing be laid to rest. The honesty in Fogarty’s work requires the same of the reader.

Jill Jones reads and writes with her own stoic honesty, in the bleak and beautifully observed “Arkaroola”. Her speaker’s grieving question, “What blackens my soles?” (211) prepares readers to understand this nuclear testing ground’s “afternoon radioactive ridges” (212) as a legacy of humanist lack of care. The earth both touches and is touched, as Jones shows, shaping the flavours of the past towards the future. All partake in the “Grit tasty grit” of this tested land (213). Jones’s awareness of the textures in time also gives weight to the transient immediacy of moments found in “Dry Tender Would”. The poem itself, like the “Bronze fern luminous bathed in seconds” (214), transports, yet also stills the reader, through its care-formed visions.

The tastes provided here read this gritty Outcrop as a strong, disruptive and lasting collection. Together these poems form a sweeping and ever shifting flock of “Message birds”, to borrow from Ali Cobby Eckerman’s memorable “Kumerangke” (64). Decoding the communications generated by encounter requires human attention. This attention involves, as Eckerman’s speaker notes in “Ashes”, a process of waiting “for the listening” (71). Nonhuman readiness to listen might only be discernable to a small proportion of the readied, or perhaps, only the blooded, but there is much to be gained, as Outcrop demonstrates, in leaving space for this listening world. Readers will do well to wait for such listening in the windfall gathered up in Outcrop.

Stuart Cooke’s Speaking the Earth’s Languages: A Theory for Australian-Chilean Postcolonial Poetics is a unique and memorable book. Like the “nomadic poetics” it traces, it is similarly “concerned with … articulating complications” (275) and shares a commitment to movement, listening, becoming. It has a sometimes-restless energy running through it, and seems as manifold as the poetics it describes, with its focus shifting from country, to poetry, to theory, to politics, and from the local to the transnational and back again. In many ways, this approaches the “lateral flows of ideas that can take place in a heterogeneous mixture”, which Cooke suggests are the consequences of a necessarily nomadic discussion that starts from “ground level” (19).

The book compares poetry and poetic texts from Australia and Chile on the basis of histories and legacies of colonialism and postcolonialism, according to the logic of a “nomadic poetics” (after Pierre Joris, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and with influences from a number of other thinkers). It draws connections between the work of Aboriginal and Mapuche poets and builds an argument for the relevance of such connections with regard to the politics of postcoloniality and the potency and sustainability of poetry that is intrinsically tied to “local ecologies” (54) and that is concerned with and affected by “the intersection of colonization, ecological destruction and dispossession” (181).

As Cooke describes:

This book critiques dominant examples of non-Indigenous postcolonial poetics before turning to ask, “What would constitute an Indigenous postcolonial poetics?” The aim is to give primacy to the poetics of the nation’s first peoples in the formulation of a contemporary literary ethic. (24)

The two sections of the book outlined above, though not equal in length and not delineated into sections as such, are separated by virtue of a comparison between “high-modernist” poetry and “indigenous poetic responses to high-modernist thought” (24). The former is represented in the book by the poetry of Judith Wright and Pablo Neruda, whose work Cooke reads as dominated by axioms, affected by a poetics of transcendence, individualism and universalism, and directed through the gaze of the “high-modernist optic”. For Cooke, both of these poets are unable to fully engage language as a function of place—instead, according to Cooke, Wright’s poetry departs from country via traditional poetic forms and biblical mythology (41, 46), and Neruda’s poetry increasingly becomes usurped by “the omniscient Nerudian gaze” (93). By contrast, song-poems are “local, itinerant propositions” (137) which are intrinsically connected to country—a point that Cooke makes in the fourth chapter, which sets up the basis for the continuing discussion of the oral dimension of nomadic poetics in Aboriginal and Mapuche texts.

The latter of the two parts, constituting the bulk of this book, concerns the poetry and poetic texts of Mapuche poets Leonel Lienlaf and Paulo Huirimilla, and of Aboriginal storyteller Paddy Roe and poet Lionel Fogarty. These are the “nomad poets”, whose texts Cooke reads as “mobile meeting grounds” (265)—productive and flexible examples of the “virtual becoming-actual”(163) and the past operating through the present; “multilingual ecologies”(23) existing on the “plane of immanence” (113), involving intersubjective realms that are inclusive and communal. This poetry, Cooke argues, is “ecological” in the sense that it is “communally created … developed by virtue of an interaction with human and non-human things” (29) and is therefore strongly located in country. To further demonstrate this, Cooke briefly examines one poem each from Ali Cobby Eckermann, Roxana Carolina Miranda Rupailaf and Peter Minter in the concluding chapter, arguing that “a nomadic ecopoetics needs to be based on the capacity of the poet’s voice to cohere with what surrounds her” (291).

In Speaking the Earth’s Languages, this connection of poetry and country—a “poetics of immanence in which everything—language, spirit and law—is to be found in the ground beneath our feet” (115)—is dependent on a notion of ecopoetics that is based on a kind of ecological intelligence, wherein one thinks in ecosystems. Following this logic, language is situated “within a wider ecology” of contexts (197), as part of the biosphere (225), and is “but one of a variety of processes acting upon the environment” (130). The poem, as a “product of the environment” (272), speaks from the land and allows the human to synthesise with the world (159). It is no surprise, therefore, that Cooke uses the metaphor of the waterfall to illustrate the prominence of voice as expressed in the structure of Huirimilla’s poetry:

Frequent justification to the left margin ensures that each line emerges from the same place, albeit at different points in time, like ribbons of water tumbling from a waterfall. […] Waterfalls are sacred spaces for the Mapuche. […] When standing before Huirimilla’s waterfall, we hear a “sonic mesh”, as a boiling multiplicity of sounds collide with and overrun one another. (255–56)

To think in ecosystems means “we must think nomadically” (28). As Cooke argues throughout the book, this involves not only the imbrication of poet and world—and the attendant understanding of the ways in which language, culture, environment and experience are drawn together ecologically—but also the “errant” and necessary movement between the individual and the communal, and between the local and the transnational. Using Aboriginal and Mapuche poetry as case studies of a postcolonial nomadic ecopoetics, Cooke articulates the emergence of a kind of zeitgeist driving “a more than personal expressive energy that is abroad throughout the world” which exists because “[e]xpression moves laterally across ecologies” (262). One of the great successes of this book is how it convinces the reader that Aboriginal and Mapuche poetic texts can be illustrative of this poetics.

Speaking the Earth’s Languages is a welcome contribution to the quiet space of comparative discussions of Australian and Latin American poetry and to the louder space of South-South dialogues. The book covers much distance and is clearly the result of sustained fieldwork and research, and also of deep and conscientious engagement with individual writers, their cultures, histories, literatures and communities. There is evidence of much learning here, as well as the generous sharing of knowledge. The role of “postcolonial translator” that Cooke adopts, his multilingualism and careful attention to the vital linguistic and cultural dimensions of the politics and history of (post)coloniality should be recognised. Indeed, Cooke’s published commitment to multilingualism[1] needs to be especially commended in light of the place where he speaks from (to adopt his language): postcolonial Australia of the 21^st century, a place with a recent history blighted by the loss of indigenous languages (amongst many other outcomes of colonial violence), where ideals of “multiculturalism” might be celebrated, but which can be so profoundly monolingual and exclusively monocultural.

For all its strengths, the book runs a number of risks (which might very well be an intentional part of its design). For instance, one reading of this text might be that this is very much a book concerned with its own terminology. The risk that it takes is that this terminology will weigh it down. In this sense, it shares an affinity with critical theory of various kinds. The weight of terminology is, however, offset by the close attention to the poetry (and surrounding politics) and the evocative language used to analyse its features and effects. Nonetheless, it is difficult to keep track of the multiple kinds of poetics charted in this book, and of where these cross over, coalesce or cohabitate. Whilst it would be incorrect (and a misreading of the ethics and structuring of the text, as much as of its central arguments) to suggest that Cooke writes taxonomically in this book, there still exist a myriad of mostly original—and hence mostly unfamiliar—terms to describe poetics, politics and poetry, such as the following: “[t]ranspacific indigenous poetics”, “multilingual ecologies”, “an Australian ecological poetics”, “a poetics of immanence”, “nomadic poetics”, “after-modern” poetry, “a poetics of becoming-actual”, “a poetics of the relation”, “a poetics of the interstitial”, a “trans-Pacific postcolonial poetics”, “a poetics that is never at rest”, a “more-than-local indigenous poetics”, “country-reflexivity”, and so on.[2] Although the proliferative terminology might displease some readers, others will no doubt find this a very attractive feature of the book. Indeed, it is perhaps this shifting network of terms that best encapsulates Cooke’s nomadic aim for the book’s chapters to be “zone[s] of distinct intensity” such that “lines of communication race between them before dissipating into other zones” (36).

The selective use of critical debate in Speaking the Earth’s Languages also seems risky. Although there is careful justification of the central argument and rigorous defense of the approach throughout (as well as valuable acknowledgements of the limits of theoretical concepts in relation to the poetry), there is a lack of comprehensive discussion—sometimes even a lack of acknowledgement—of key critical debates pertinent to the text, such as those from postcolonial and anti-colonial theory and those concerning Australian poetry. This is not to say that Cooke doesn’t engage with key critical texts—rather, that the texts included don’t represent the breadth of debates. The absence of attention to such critical debates could be interpreted as running counter to the ethos of the book, which champions an inclusive poetics of postcolonial nomadic thought and action. Though this absence might be regrettable, it also invites responses to the book within these critical forums, which would provide valuable “lines of communication” to add to those amongst the book’s chapters. Bringing Cooke’s arguments about the poetry into direct conversation with other critiques of these texts, for instance, would be interesting.[3]

The often-persuasive readings of poetic texts in Speaking the Earth’s Languages certainly give a clear picture of what a postcolonial and trans-Pacific nomadic poetics looks like. The book will likely also introduce new readers to these texts and to other poetry from Mapuche and Aboriginal communities and writers. The challenge now is to continue to test Cooke’s “theory for Australian-Chilean postcolonial poetics” by applying it to more of the poetry produced out of these places. If, as Cooke argues, “a proper postcolonial poetics in Australia or Chile needs to be an imagination of diversity”(287) and “a nomadic poetics might structure a dialogue with which indigenous and settler poets can begin to re-imagine the terms of use for Australian and Chilean ecologies” (292), then the project must necessarily continue its momentum. Important questions will emerge from this process, such as “How will this dialogue take place?” and “How will it affect the reading and production of poetry in the future?”

‘Edgeless origami in an unfolding universe’

In Susan Hawthorne’s Cow, the main protagonist is a cow named Queenie, who is a wanderer in space and time, a witness to and participant in times of horror and bliss. Queenie is no peripheral cow, but a being at the very centre of the world, and of language itself:

Queenie is no fool she’s been around for a while

since the beginning of time

who spilt the milky star road?

who set the galaxies spinning? (49)

Structurally, Cow employs what is described in the first long sequence what the poet says as “edgeless origami in an unfolding universe” (7), handling metamorphosis, time shifts, tragedy and wry commentary with breathtaking ease. It is through the perceptive gaze and the knockabout humour of our guide that the poetry takes us to the mythical worlds of Greece, India and elsewhere without any sense of awkwardness or “scene-setting”. This is achieved most essentially through the voice of Queenie, the subversive and sometimes wary voice of nature itself, a voice enriched by the poet’s facility with the languages of Sanskrit and Ancient Greek.

At the beginning of the book, the farm child poet forms an almost transformative, totemic identification with the beast of wonder. After being frightened of the cow when small:

I have doubled in age and am learning

the internal properties of cow

stand your ground calls my father

as the biggest cow of the herd

breaks away and runs straight at me ...
 

I have found my cow inside

I have learnt the internal property

that she will give way if you stand your ground

stand your ground I say to myself

even the internal cow is impressed (2)

The cow becomes a way of seeing, of entering the creative universe, or as Hawthorne says, “the cow is at the limits of my thinking” (3). As a bellwether of fear and oppression, the cow can inhabit a fecund world of feminine paradise:

the poet says we roamed arcadia

spread out over the hills

and across the plain

wherever food was plentiful

we travelled with our daughters

close by our side

the bullocks we sent off after a time

their existence more solitary (57)

or she can be both a prisoner of and an escapee from colonialism:

cows came to Australia

with convicts

but there was no emancipations for good behaviour

from five cows have come millions
 

Indian cows the Zebu roam

the colony at Cape Town

like convicts

they escaped went bush

by the time they were found seven years later

their numbers had increased ten-fold
 

what happened to these five cows

in the seven years they went missing?

what is the untold story of these runaway cows

these fugitives from empire? (5)

One of the highlights of the collection, also on the theme of rebellion, is what cows and calves say, in which a violent storm is suggestive of the intimacy, restrictiveness and callow behaviour of family members:

thunder bolting at high speed

rolls across the corral

shaking it from roof to roof ...
 

through our mother’s breast a wave

in oscillation we rebellious youngsters

troublemakers unteachable bodytappers

make our own worlds achieving

well beyond what was imagined

Cleis whispers in that teenage tone

look what I’ve done (26)

As the wandering Queenie enters and reveals poignant scenes of history and myth, she takes her time to reveal her/the poet’s vision to the poet herself:

she took her time reaching my garden

a poet’s paradise at the end of the road

she had thought the market was tasty (13)

but once in train, this shape-shifting meditation on myth, history and language which Cow becomes has some memorable passages. Poems where etymology is embedded in image and voice are particularly strong. The passages involving Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana, are fine examples. What Sita says employs the meaning of the name Sita, the furrow or line of a ploughshare, (“the result of a cow and a plough”, 32) to connect with her voice and the very earth she inhabits and embodies:

history is one thing

you won’t find me there

you need to dig for me

you need to burrow

underground

follow the motherlode

the seams of soil and rock

bedrock and magma

burrow until you reach the centre (32)

Here, the tread of the cow reveals the beauty of myth, but in a fine narrative twist in what Queenie says about Sita, Sita is given a voice contrary to the standard mythical chauvinism, with her compliant self transformed into somebody who is enjoying life in Ravana’s compound:

… she stays on

at the mountain resort

with its beach views elephants peacocks

temples evening dancing

and good intelligent conversation (23)

after which she makes the most of her Rama-enforced exile:

she starts a school for the study of language

people come from lands all around

they tell stories

recite day-long epic poems

play music

dance and paint

finally life is good (25)

The “origami” technique of metamorphosis works well in such pieces as what she says about shadows, where an illuminated shadow of a painted cow itself shines with “the glittering lights/of Deepavali” (33), a festival connected to the Ramayana, and in what she says about Ereshkigal, who:

changed the world when she picked dirt

from under her fingernail like a

fletcher

plucking feathers to balance the arrow (38)

In the ever-expanding world of cow and journey, the cow becomes a maker of language and a maker of place. The wandering cow in what Io says introduces a deft piece of etymology:

until I arrived at the sea

at the crossing now named for me

Bosphoros cow bearer

I swam those black waters

reached the far shore (40)

As in what the linguist says and what the linguist says about Queenie, the traveller cow/ the poetic sensor, this bearer of sensibility and tragedy, this giver of language, of feminist interpretation, inscribes an etymology entwined with the earth and with nature:

I dig for language uprooting words

from the trail of historical

syntax across continents

down through tap roots

the shapes of letter and words

frizzing on the edge of a root (78)

and:

she was dancing over India

and out fell the languages

thousands of them written

in hundreds of alphabets (79)

Cow works best when the connection between nature, etymology and travel, between perception and rebellion, is apparent in the poetry itself. On occasion the language, particularly in the latter part of the book, is underworked, as if relying on the originality of the overall concept to get it through. But this is a minor criticism of what is a deeply original and entertaining work.

Definitions of “ecopoetry” are many, varied, and, as David Borthwick indicates in his helpful introduction to this volume, contested. Whereas, for example, the Heideggerian concept of “ecopoetics” framed by Jonathan Bate in The Song of the Earth (2000), namely, as a verbal “making (Greek poiesis) of the dwelling place”,[1] is capacious enough to encompass lyrical writing of many times and places, Borthwick follows the usage of those, such as Scott Bryson,[2] for whom “ecopoetry” emerged only relatively recently in response to the current ecological exigencies of the Anthropocene. In his analysis—one that certainly applies well to the verse represented in Entanglements and that I will therefore quote at length—ecopoetry:

seeks to question and renegotiate the human position in respect of the environment in which we are enmeshed. Its ethic is to oppose the violent assumption that the world around us exists only as a set of resources which can be readily and unethically exploited and degraded for economic gain. […] Ecopoems signal a conscious re-engagement with a world that is familiar and strange, full of animals and plants that we must answer to, and which we need to address, again, more carefully, to define the questions that will help us to renegotiate ways of living in an uncertain future of biodiversity loss, climate change and the consequences of disposability. (xvi)

While this delineation of the ecopoetic field has a keen socio-critical edge to it, the contemporary ecopoems garnered by the editors of the volume, as they stress in their “Editors’ Notes”, exclude any that they identified as “largely political, or straight-forwardly ‘environmental’” (xii). Favoring instead works that exemplify a “new wave of poetry that seeks to directly respond to the world in which we find ourselves, and that dramatises a growing hunger for a meaningful connection with the earth” (xii), Knowles and Blackie actually draw closer to Bate’s understanding of what is at stake in ecopoetics: that is to say, not so much the issuing of directives as to what is to be done to halt the ravaging of the earth, as the disclosure of why nonhuman others and the places in which we encounter them, and the ways in which we are entangled with them, might actually matter to us, that is, in non-pragmatic terms (aesthetically, for instance, or affectively, ethically, psychologically or spiritually). For without this recollection of mattering and reinfusion of meaning all calls to ecological virtue that are irreducible to economics are likely to fall upon deaf ears.

Problems and perplexities start to emerge, however, when “we” probe into the “we” that is being invoked here, and when we question which “world” it is in which “we find ourselves” and how it is that we might reconnect, and with which “earth”. In the case of the poets represented here (along with the reviewer of the volume), the “we” is euro-western, white and (at least from a global perspective, if not necessarily in their nations of residence) more-or-less privileged. This is not intended as a criticism so much as a starting point for contextualizing the collection. Indeed, this sociological delimitation of the ecopoetic field, as it is conceived and represented here, is acknowledged by Borthwick, who observes that:

Ecopoetry is a predominantly western movement, emanating from writers who take their responsibility seriously to stand against the myths of domination and disposability that characterize, but also emanate from, the places they stand in. There is no room for piety, however, instead a profound need for honesty: the poets here, primarily from the UK, the USA, Canada, and Australia, find their voices more readily heard owing to the circumstances which progress has permitted. (xx)

These, then, are western voices raised, to some degree at least, in self-critique: voices of resistance to the dominant tendencies of the society that nonetheless enables them to write for a global readership. As such, they speak, to a greater or lesser extent, from a somewhat liminal zone: from a position of relative privilege, to be sure, but also from the margins of the social world in which they find themselves, and in a form that is itself marginal in relation to more popular and populist modes of communication: namely poetry, and, in the case of some of the contributors to this volume, decidedly avant-garde poetry to boot. Although all write in the globally dominant tongue—with the glorious exception of Rody Gorman’s Gaelic “Air An Doirling Mu Dheireadh,” and, in a few cases, from non-English-speaking locations (Japan, the Netherlands, and France)—their uses of language, as well as their perspectives, pull against the mainstream.

Interestingly, many of the contributors also reside, geographically and socially, on the margins, in out-of-the-way, non-urban places, pursuing non-mainstream lives. This goes for the editors too, who identify themselves in “About the Editors” as living on a “working croft by the sea, right at the end of the most south-westerly road on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides”. It is here, in the company of their “Hebridean and Jacob sheep, two breeding sows, a Kerry milk cow, bees, a miscellany of poultry, and a polytunnel”, that Blackie and Knowles also run Two Ravens Press, along with EarthLines, a magazine devoted to writing about nature, place and the environment. There are clues aplenty here as to the question of which “earth” it is towards which the poetry in this collection primarily (although not exclusively) directs the reader who is willing to heed its call to “reconnect”: namely, that which is to be encountered outside the city walls and out-of-doors, in rural places and wild corners, in contact with other-than-human phenomena that have the capacity to drag “us”—we denizens, that is, of (not yet post-)industrial (not yet post-)modernity—even if only momentarily, outside that world well characterized by Val Plumwood as that of a suffocating, heart-numbing, sense-deadening “human self-enclosure.”[3] Appropriately, then (and not to mention, nobly), all of the contributors have “allowed their work to be used for no personal gain”, since, as the editors stress, “royalties will be donated to The John Muir Trust (www.jmt.org) an organization that fights hard and well to protect wild land in a world in which it is constantly under threat”. (xiii)

What this all means is that one looks largely in vain for any trace of the kinds of transnational entanglement of environmental degradation with social injustice examined, for example, in the postcolonial environmental justice ecocriticism of Rob Nixon.[4] Again, this is not necessarily intended as a criticism, critical though I consider this socio-ecological perspective to be (one that I take to have been foreshadowed, moreover, in the work of Australian ecopoet, Judith Wright, and theorized early and incisively by her philosophical acquaintance, Val Plumwood). One might regret the failure to acknowledge the existence of other kinds of ecopoetry, such as that which turns our attention to inner-city nature (or, rather, natures-cultures), responds to environmental injustices, and/or is written from indigenous or non-western perspectives; but it would be a category error to object to the absence of such ecopoems in this collection, which, as Borthwick and the editors make clear, has a different agenda.

In their enactment of this agenda, many of the poems here invoke the time-honoured trope of the pastoral; but they do so in a diversity of fresh and interesting ways. Some, such as Andy Brown’s distinctly (and exquisitely) Rilkean sonnet, “Pen Y Fan”, which locates the poet and his companion(s) “alone”, trying in vain to “fit a landscape/into notebooks” (14), might run the risk of being tagged by the more sternly politically-minded as escapist, potentially functioning as what John Kinsella has termed “a tool for placation” (146), proffering aesthetic compensation in a world of commercially-driven and industrially-powered environmental degradation and social inequities. In my view, though, this would be unfair, both to Brown and the book as whole. The solace that is undoubtedly provided by some of the more traditionally pastoral lyrics in this collection functions, for me at least, as an encouraging reminder that all is not yet lost: that there remain places of more-than-human flourishing, the things of which, living and otherwise, have a call on us, even though they cannot be caught in our words, is, after all, what makes continued resistance worthwhile, as well as embodying in itself a form of resistance to the wholesale human appropriation and instrumentalisation of nonhuman others. Crucially, moreover, the collection opens with a self-reflexive poem that effectively reframes all that follow by anchoring them in a wider world of rampant industrial pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity loss, while warning of the ever-present risk of aestheticisation (“Our minds can turn anything romantic/Is the problem”), familiarization (“Our minds can assimilate all horrors./Is the problem”) and constructivist idealism (“But then we keep say, ‘Let’s construct another narrative.’”) (1). By insisting that “The nightmares must simply be called reality”, Catherine Owen’s “Nature Writing 101” enables us to “carry on” (1) in the perusal of the ecopoems that follow without forgetting the positioning of the more-than-human places and other-than-human entities that they invoke, however rural or wild, within this nightmarish anthropogenic reality. This might, for example, prompt the reader to follow the speaker of Brown’s “Nocturne” badger watching, or that of Meg Bateman’s “Touched”, who has sneaked out of the office for an illicit session of eco-eroticism in the woods, in the light of such ecopolitical concerns as the massive badger cull that look place in southern England last summer in the hope of controlling the spread of bovine TB, or the continued swallowing up of woodland by the “concrete and glass” (11) to which Bateman’s speaker is obliged to return, or by the roads on which she drives back there. Meanwhile, in the more emphatically “post-pastoral”[5] of these ecopoems, damage and danger enter directly into the verse itself: in the excerpt from his extended avant-garde work “Fault Lines”, for instance, Gerry Loose, who lives on a boat close to the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarine weapons base at Faslane, which is built over a fault line in the Scottish Highlands, recalls the threat posed to more-than-human life by human military conflict; while Allen Tullos lends an ominous literalism to the Wallace Steven’s line that serves as his epigraph—“Every thread of summer is at last unwoven”—in “Data Points Cloud the Horizon” (92). There is encouragement here too, though: as Tullos concludes with respect to the global climate system, “There is currently no tutorial/on how to activate system restore” (92); but as Alec Finlay’s “Wind-Songs” recalls, there are places where efforts are being made to stem the damage, even though some degree of potentially disastrous climatic change has now become inevitable: “the domestic turbines that tirl/in the mirr of the outset isles/in today’s winds” will also be doing so “in tomorrow’s gales” (63).

While Owen uses the term “romantic” pejoratively, a number of poets here work in a more nuanced way with the mixed legacy of Romanticism, in some cases recalling by name the ecopoetic forerunners on whose tracks they find themselves. Roger Mitchell, for instance, seeks to respond to something that he can’t quite name by reading Clare’s response to what he called the birds’ “under song” (116), while Andrew Forster (a Literature Officer with the Wordsworth Trust), follows Wordsworth—a virtual “companion”, perhaps, who is also “out of sight/around the ridge, focusing on his own ascent” (98)—up through the Duddon Valley, beset by dizzy spells. The most interesting of these explicitly post-Romantic poems, perhaps, is John Kinsella’s “Penillion of Stanbury Moor”: ‘There shines the moon, at noon of night-’”. A “penillion” is a Welsh form of song, which is improvised in counter-point to a traditional melody played on the harp.[6] Here, the traditional melody is implicitly that of the Emily Bronte poem recalled in the title, against which the Australian poet riffs while walking in Bronte country, noting how her wild moors are now edged by industrial agriculture with its “plastic bound/Bales”, while carrying forward the eco-emancipatory Romantic impulse in sensing “ring ouzels/Vindicating/Their rights; nearing” (5).

Here, as in many other poems in this collection, one privileged path of reconnection that is gestured towards is that afforded through encounters with (other-than-human) animals, generally free-living ones, although in one engaging instance, dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s “Driving the Mares”, they are beasts of burden: draft horses, whose compliance in the matter of ploughing does not deprive them of their own agency and inner life, which presents itself in its very alterity to the speaker—who nonetheless exploits their labour—as a “passage out of this life” (128)—the life, that is, of human self-enclosure. Here, as in several other poems, reconnection is enabled by the recognition that the animal other inhabits a perceptual world, or Umwelt, to use Jakob von Uexküll’s term, that differs from that of humans, and ultimately eludes our grasp. This is the case, for example, with the “two powerful owls,/Cloaked in spindrift […] flyfishing/the night, the new moon for a hook” (159) of Mark Tredinnick’s “Owls”: it is the sense that they know something that the human speaker does not which takes him out of himself, paradoxically perhaps, by revealing his own human-all-too-human limitations. In other cases, however, the speaker dares to enter imaginatively into the consciousness and mode of being of the animal other: Jane Routh, for instance, purveys the “teachings of Strix Aluco” (the tawny owl) and invites her readers into the “private life of Lepus Lepus” (the hare) in her poems of those names, the Latinate titles of which indicate that these are scientifically informed works of ecopoetic imagination. Dilys Rose appears to go further in the direction of identification by actually assuming the voice of the animal other in “Stone the Crows”, but her corvid speaker is self-consciously, and amusingly, anthropomorphic. Susan Richardson, by contrast, takes us deeper into an unfamiliar psycho-physical realm in “The White Doe”, a neo-Ovidian tale of becoming-animal as a strategy of escape from an explicitly gendered form of human confinement, in which the English language too undergoes some weird and wonderful transformations: her “hind-mind” “ferned/with ancient memories of wolf/and the urge to neverstill”, Richardson’s zoomorphic speaker declares:

Though the man I was meant to wed

turns hunter,

I will out-wood him.

For an unlife in the unlight

has taught me slinkness,

and how to happyeverafter

when I tellme tales. (153)

This declaration of defiant animal agency is nonetheless counter-posed in this collection to reminders of creaturely vulnerability, as in the “message” rolled in by the sea in the guise of a dead sperm whale in Katrina Porteous’s “The Whale” (163), and the “animal/big neck, muzzle and horns” that narrowly evades being struck by the speaker of Les Murray’s “High Speed Trap Space”, who is hurtling along a highway “walled/in froth-barked trees” with a lorry on his tail and another car bearing down from the opposite direction (139). In addition to its skilled evocation of the moment of danger and its unfathomable passing, in which the imperiled life of the driver no less than that of the animal are graciously saved, this poem, in my reading (and notwithstanding Murray’s own distaste for left-leaning ecopolitics), offers a powerful metaphor for the wider socio-ecological order that has cornered most of its citizens into a situation in which they are constrained “to refuse all swerving” (139), even though they can see that they are speeding towards a potentially catastrophic collision, in which both human and nonhuman lives will be lost.

How to get out of this “high speed trap space”, not just for a time, as individuals or small collectives, but as a (globalizing) society, is a question for socio-ecological and ecopolitical deliberation and experimentation. What it might mean, or entail, is nonetheless hinted at in the magnificent concluding poem of the collection. Like several of those that precede it, Alice Oswald’s “Sharpham House” is a poem of place—place being another of the privileged vectors of reconnection proffered by many of Knowles’ and Blackie’s new ecopoets, most of whom are nonetheless alert also to the entanglement of the local with the global (most emphatically so in Jorie Graham’s expansive work of planetary thinking, “Earth”), while one, Jennifer Wallace in “I wanted to change my name”, importantly acknowledges too the vexed nature of forging a neo-Emersonian connection with “remote” locales in colonized space (111). In Oswald’s poem as well, the local and the global, pastoral place-making and colonial dispossession, are intimately entangled: Sharpham House, so we are told, was acquired and improved by the English naval captain, Philemon Pownell, with the assistance of plunder from the Spanish treasure ship that he had captured in 1762. The poem opens in the manner of a letter addressed to Captain Pownell, in a superb pastiche of Augustan style, regarding the state of his property, which, to the speaker’s evident agitation, cannot be sealed off from the incursions of a diversity of other entities, animate and inanimate, human and otherwise, such as the “spiders that have pegged their tents/To various lamps and ornaments”, the light that has “taken on/The leasehold of this place”, and even a “crowd of nuns” who “Left candles here and baked bean tins” (165, 166). Meanwhile, as the poem progresses, the cursive names of local plants and animals that comprise the marginalia invade the central space of the page, displacing the constrained order of the neo-Augustinian verse letter, with its formal closure and assumptions of human mastery and possession, by the invocation of an array of innumerable heterogeneous entities that are assembled willy-nilly in a non-hierarchical open field, transforming the text into a rambunctious performance of the radical decentralization of the human subject, with all its culturally-configured claims to know, own and control. While nonetheless acknowledging that naming itself is a kind of claiming (“all these things are written down as yours”), this poem, and the collection as a whole, concludes with the reminder, that “life is not so limited in its pen and ink …” (171).

At the end of his Introduction, Borthwick proposes that this collection be termed a “rubosology” rather than an “anthology”. For while the latter likens its items to “a collection of flowers, a garden of verse, or perhaps a vase: a vessel filled with poor, rarefied specimens”, the former alludes to the “cosmopolitan genus rubus”, which includes the raspberry and the bramble with their “many-faceted” fruit, “sinuous canes” and “recurved thorns, designed to ensnare, not let one go easily” (xxi). This is an apt metaphor, in my view. Although I look forward to further anthologies that will include the other kinds of ecopoetry that do not feature here, many of the poems that do (including several that I have not been able to mention in this short review) have got this reader well and truly hooked.