Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination

Abstract

Examining how poets engage with and mediate botanical life, 'Plants in Contemporary Poetry' affords a glimpse into the ontologies, epistemologies, and semiospheres of flora and, by extension, the natural world. Highlighting the botanical obsessions of seminal poets writing in English today, the book calls attention to the role of language in deconstructing the cultural codes that limit an understanding of plants as intelligent beings. Ryan argues that, as poetic thought harmonizes with vegetality, writers gain direct knowledge of, and profound inspiration from, the botanical world. Plants in Contemporary Poetry provides a timely intervention in the prevailing tendency of ecocritical scholarship to date to examine animal, rather than plant, subjectivities and life-worlds. A sensuous return to vegetal being is actualized in this study through a focus on the contemporary poetries of Australia, England, and the United States.The lively disquisition traverses a cross section of contemporary poetic genres from confessionalism and experimentalism to radical pastoralism and ecopoetry. Through readings of eight poets, including Louise Gluck, Les Murray, Mary Oliver, and Alice Oswald, Plants in Contemporary Poetry centers on the idea of the botanical imagination and proposes a unique conceptual model the author calls vegetal dialectics. Drawing from developments in neuro-botany and contributing to the area of critical plant studies, the book also develops phytocriticism as a method for responding to the lack of attention to plants in ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and the environmental humanities.This ground-breaking study reminds readers that poetic imagination is as important as scientific rationality to appreciating the mysteries of plants on an increasingly imperiled planet. The book will appeal to a multidisciplinary readership in the fields of ecocriticism, ecopoetry, environmental humanities, and ecocultural studies, and will be of particular interest to students and researchers in critical plant studies.