| Focusing on the work of A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin, and Gary
Snyder, author Leonard Scigaj shows that just as a sustainable society does not
depreciate its resource base, so a sustainable poetry does not restrict interest
to language. Over the past thirty years many poets have shown an increasing
sensitivity to ecological thinking. But critics trained in poststructuralist
language theory often fail to explore the substance of ecopoetry. Scigaj is the
first to define ecopoetry as separate and distinct from nature or environmental
poetry, marked by its concern with balancing the interests of human beings with
the needs of nature. Just as science learned that the earth was not the center
of the universe, ecopoetry insists on the recognition that humans are not at the
center of the natural world.
Leonard M. Scigaj, professor of English at Virginia Tech, has written three
books on poet Ted Hughes.
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Reviews:
"Will join
John Elder's Imagining the Earth as the most important contribution to
date to the study of contemporary ecopoetry."—Lawrence Buell
"A rich context
for our understading the work and persons of A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, W.S.
Merwin, and Gary Snyder, four outstanding American poets."—Psychological
Reports
“The first book to treat the US’s four foremost ecopoets as
ecopoets.”—Choice
“Anyone who things that nature poetry is a leftover mode
from a bygone era, or that all nature poets are alike, needs to read this book
before we have no nature left.”—Virginia Quarterly Review
“Scigaj uses his
examination of contemporary ecological poetry to mount a direct assault on the
way literary theory has been conducted over the past twenty
years.”—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
“Urges
readers to distinguish between two kinds of poetry in order to set the stage for
an epic intellectual and aesthetic battle.”—Western American
Literature
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