The Anthropocene Lyric

DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0001
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0001
 The Anthropocene
Lyric: An Affective
Geography of Poetry,
Person, Place
Tom Bristow
University of Melbourne, Australia

DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0001
© Tom Bristow 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-36474-6
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www.palgrave.com/pivot
DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753
 This book is dedicated to Andrea Curtis

DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0001
 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

vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0001
 Contents vii

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

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viii 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

DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0002 ix
x 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.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0003 
 The Anthropocene Lyric

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.

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 Introduction 

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 Anthropocene

In 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 geocriticism

Ecocriticism 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

DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0003
 Introduction 

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 perception
This 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

DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0003
 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 worlds
Ecopoetics, 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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 Introduction 

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 emotion
These 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.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0003
 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Introduction 

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 space

Geographies 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Introduction 

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

After Marxist geography

The 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 personhood

The 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

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 Introduction 

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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Introduction 

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 counterpoint
Alice 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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

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 Introduction 

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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

A renewed poetics of place

While 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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 1
Jam 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

Bristow, Tom. The Anthropocene Lyric:

An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137364753.0004.

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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Jam Tree Gully 

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 Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Jam Tree Gully 

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

Attributes and affects: minority geographies

Geography, 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 tree

Aunt 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 Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Jam Tree Gully 

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 here
and dandelions have confirmed a rampant
occupation: 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Jam Tree Gully 

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 biosphere
keeps the particles of the dead
close to prayers, indifference, non-
belief. Atmosphere prevents
them being lost, escaping, diluting
in the vacuum, the slow gravitational
urge 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 erase
calendars and equinoxes and cities like London
or 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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 Jam Tree Gully 

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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Jam Tree Gully 

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 compass

works in my head, having magnetics for all
directions and all pointing to one spot
I 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Jam Tree Gully 

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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 kingfisher

It 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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 Jam Tree Gully 

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 three
concrete troughs – mainly for kangaroos
but also for birds and anything else that passes
by. This morning I saw a sacred kingfisher
in 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 – name
giving, name evoking statistics from those
who’ve probably not even seen the bird. A small
bird with a large-beak that could inflict a lot
of damage on whatever it targets. Proportional
and relative. Its colours are flashy and stunning.
What part do I play in filling the trough, once

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 The Anthropocene Lyric

for sheep and horses? How much choice

to come and go does the sacred kingfisher
have? 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 within
the bird’s head. I thought of Thoreau
thinking of Alexander the Great carrying
the Iliad in a special-casket. Which now
makes me think of a coffin. Water-troughs
look like coffins, like caskets. I expected
the sacred kingfisher to swoop as if the shallow
water held nourishment. It was dead water
from deep in the earth. The sacred kingfisher
stayed in the branch, seeing the trough
for the coffin it was. The bird looked at me
then looked back to the lifeless surface
of 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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 Jam Tree Gully 

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 pastoral

Wherever 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Jam Tree Gully 

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 harmonies
Discord, 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 refrains
as if it can all be separated off: and the one bird
not appearing in the same feathers everywhere seems to affirm
this; (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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 empathy
Heat-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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 Jam Tree Gully 

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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 plugging

into 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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 Jam Tree Gully 

‘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 bereft
of satisfaction: not far from here, down where
rail follows the logic of the brook, I ‘watch
the passage of morning cars with the same feeling
that I do the rising of the sun ... ’, and catch
the 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Jam Tree Gully 

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 charges
trees and birds
extracts its needs,
its plangent definition
from their blurring
and precision. (‘In This Damaged State’ 22–28)

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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 2
Gift 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

Bristow, Tom. The Anthropocene Lyric:

An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137364753.0005.

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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Gift Songs 

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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Gift Songs 

Last day of the harbour:

rain, and the lull of gospel
clouding the sweet hiatus
of 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 Burnside
Gift 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 japonica
and waiting for the moment to arrive
when song begins; the black
transformed to green. (37–42)

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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Gift Songs 

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 spontaneity
The 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 speech
for the unsaid presence,
the way the bird
that vanished through the leaves
is 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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 Gift Songs 

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 less
with every dawn:
colour, a breath of wind,
the perfection of shadows,
till what I find, I find
because it’s there,
gold in the seams of my hands
and 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 place

No one invents an absence:
cadmium yellow, duckweed, the capercaillie
– see how the hand we would name restrains itself
till 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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 Gift Songs 

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 church
or out to sea
I cannot tell;
when evening falls, the water bleeds away
towards a rose horizon where the boats
go out to fishing grounds and other
port-towns much like this (‘St Nazaire’ 1: 13–26)

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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Gift Songs 

On the bridge to Petit Maroc,

a legend: vaguer LA NUIT
DANS DES LUMIERES NARRATIVES,
an invocation, maybe, or a prayer,
but, really, all there is is what it says:
the wind in my eyes
and 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 Marées
looking out
to 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Gift Songs 

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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 materialism

In 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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 Gift Songs 

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 warblers

parley from shade to shade,
becoming the air
in 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 grass
and what the body offers of itself
to any journey, any secret thing
that passes in the dark and flits away
not 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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 Gift Songs 

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 neighbourliness
Burnside’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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Gift Songs 

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 liturgy
In 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 heads
till, 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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, slowly
from the stockyards in the town,
the scent of beasts arrives;
the biblical;
rudderless gazes
turned 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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 Gift Songs 

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 hues

On 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Gift Songs 

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 life

Our blood does not forewarn us
Like 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 fox
came silently out of the distance,
half-way to summer already, the silvery fur
threaded with auburn
and brown, the face
indifferent, although it caught my eye
and watched, for a minute
– scenting me,
sounding me out – (1: ‘Arctic Fox’ 6–14)
When they sing from the harbour wall, amongst
the soured lines and ten-fathom creels,
it sounds like an apprenticeship for something more
auspicious
– fulmar, say,
for whom this salt-sweet air is neither
fate, nor home; (2: ‘Rock Pipits’ 1–7)
my house the unsettled reflection
of what I have made
from off-cuts and leftover shingle
to house the birds. (3: ‘Eider House’ 5–8)
the intricate sweetness of oil,
the declensions of rain,

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 The Anthropocene Lyric

a pocket of mildew and hair

in the mole drain, flushed from its cover,
the animal that dips beneath the sickle,
wed to the map of the grass
and 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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 Gift Songs 

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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Gift Songs 

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 trailing
Consequences of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable
And 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 3
A 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

Bristow, Tom. The Anthropocene Lyric:

An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137364753.0006.

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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 not
One among many moodswung creatures
That have settled in this beautiful
Uncountry 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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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 up
Soft 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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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 affect
I 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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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

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 kind
To the mighty angels of purgatory
Who come solar-powered into darkness
Using 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

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 form

Where 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 caught
catches a stick, a straw, a sack, a mesh
of leaves, a fragile wickerwork of floodbrash,
I saw all things catch and reticulate
into this dreaming of the Dart
that sinks like a feather falls, not quite
in 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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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

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 struggle
A 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 moonlight

Almost frost but softer almost ash but wholer
Made almost of water which has strictly speaking
No feature but a kind of counterlight call it insight

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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

Like in woods when they jostle their hooded shapes

Their heads congealed together having murdered each other
There are moon-beings sounds-beings such as deer and half deer
Passing through there whose eyes can pierce through things
I 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

hand captures these shifts in consciousness. I want to focus now on how

these developments are achieved in the text.

Withness
Sleepwalk 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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.

Footholds
An 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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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

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 sticking
out of the mud with a leg in it. Or is that a heron
standing 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

Belonging
World 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 bodies
Oswald 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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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

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.

Walking
Sleepwalk 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

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 imaginary

I 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 habitus
Poetic 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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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

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 voices
A 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 water
of linked stones
trills in the stones
glides in the trills
eels in the glides
in 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 

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 house
at the centre of all visible darkness
a brick of earth, a block of sky,
there lay the world, wedged
between 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 Anthropocene Lyric

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

Bristow, Tom. The Anthropocene Lyric:

An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137364753.0007.

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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Conclusion 

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 history
Like when god throws a star
And everyone looks up
To see that whip of sparks
And 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 belonging
A greeting, enfilade, vestibule
of activity: that door. The din of birds
a disruption to the passage
of warplanes overhead, training
to make a mark, a strike against threats
always 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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 Conclusion 

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

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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Conclusion 

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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

(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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 Conclusion 

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 bladders
drunkenly into the fissures and cast amber bottles
into cobwebbed abysses, where wild oats grow at
impossible angles and lure the sun into darkness.
As I rock pick I unravel these pictures and spread
them to all corners of the paddock. I coin phrases,
devise anecdotes, invest the ups and downs of my
life in these cairns constructed from the landscape’s
wreckage, place sheep skulls on summits.
Alone, I feed these rowdy cities the stuff
of my blisters, sign the structures with broken
fingers, convert plans to ash and scatter
them about the foundations.
Softly softly I sing the ruins of our
pampered 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 think
of the knowledge we had as children:

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 Conclusion 

the patterns we saw in number, or the spells

and recipes we had
for love and fear;
the knowledge we kept in the bones
for wet afternoons,
the slink of tides, the absolutes of fog,
or how a lapwing’s egg can tip
the scale of the tongue;
how something was always present in the snow
that 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 woods
that 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 fate
unstitching 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 land
leaning all round to block it from the wind,
a squirrel sprinting in startles and sees
sections of distance tilted through the trees
and where you jump the fence a flap of sacking
does for a stile, you walk through webs, the cracking
bushtwigs break their secrecies, the sun
vanishes up, instantly come and gone.
once in, you hardly notice as you move,
the wood keeps lifting up its hope, I love
to stand among the last trees listening down
to the releasing branches where I’ve been –
the rain, thinking I’ve gone, crackles the air
and 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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 Conclusion 

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 love
to stand among the last trees listening down
to the releasing branches where I’ve been –
the rain, thinking I’ve gone, crackles the air
and 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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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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 Conclusion 

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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 The Anthropocene Lyric

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 transformed
to something else: new memories and tastes
arriving from the dark and suddenly
familiar, like the strangers in a dream,
new eyes to see the world, another light
unfolding 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 lose
as anything at all, let us be moths
and wander in the certainties of grass
and 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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 Conclusion 

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

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0008

 Glossary 

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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 Glossary

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

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 Glossary 

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

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 Glossary

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

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 Glossary 

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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 Index
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, 103
anthropocene emotion, 2, 5, 7,
34, 57
anthropocentrism, 13, 30, 46,
96, 99, 108
array, 16, 17, 26, 33, 53, 61, 72,
82, 85–6, 90, 106, 113
assemblage, 33, 87
Augustine, 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, 121
geopolitical, 108
climate change, 3, 20, 22, 23,
28, 42, 43, 44
Coleridge, S. T., 66, 68
composure, 61
corporeal, 9, 51, 60, 88, 93, 94,
101, 122
creatureliness, 49, 65
damage, 26, 29, 30, 35, 43, 45,
99

de Man, P., 110
decolonised, 9, 21, 24–6, 32
dialogic, 8, 49, 97, 106
discreteness, 13, 105, 120
dualism, 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, 102
emotional literacy, 13
emotions, 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, 81
enworlded, enworldment, 46,
61, 106, 110
evolving subjectivity, 79
excess, 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
DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0010

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, 26
intersubjectivity, 40
intertextuality, 50
irony, 42, 44, 67, 81
James, W., 66–7, 68–9
joy, 3, 22, 29, 38, 45, 50
labour, 11, 43, 73, 82, 84, 89, 98
landscape 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, 108
materialism, 11, 62, 64
Merleau-Ponty, M., 76, 82, 95
moodswung, 80
more-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, 72
organism, 8, 14, 93, 99
pain, 3, 28, 29, 30, 66, 67, 87–9, 94
pastoral, 20–2, 24, 25, 27, 32, 33, 35, 37,
38, 78, 80, 87–9, 116
pathetic fallacy, 15, 30, 41
pattern, 10, 40, 64, 73, 86, 88, 91, 96,
109, 117, 121
DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0010
Index 
phenomenology, 5, 18, 48, 70, 82, 114
place-consciousness, 79, 91, 92
place, poetics of, 2, 18, 53
placehood, 14, 79, 106
place-making, 7, 52
prayer, 27, 51, 55, 59
presencing, 15, 16, 17, 42, 61, 74, 89, 96
radical pastoral, 37–8, 43
Rilke, R. M., 48, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72
romantic, romanticism, 15, 41, 49, 50,
52, 57, 66, 69, 70, 98, 109, 112, 119,
122
settledness, 13, 119
shame, 66
silence, 17, 35, 37, 52, 83, 89, 96
situatedness, 7, 13, 92, 105, 115
soul, 7, 52, 66, 69, 74, 104
spatialised emotion, 41
stance, 6, 7, 34, 112, 116
standpoint, 6, 18, 42, 96
Stevens, W., 48, 49, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59,
61, 63, 66, 69, 72, 73
still to come, 51
stillness, 37, 51, 61, 67, 68, 85, 89
structure, 82, 86, 92, 93, 102, 109
struggle, 27, 30, 88, 89, 92, 94, 96, 97,
104, 112, 119
subjectivity, 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, 50
survival, 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., 66
worldliness, 6, 7, 17, 96, 116, 119