Contemporary Irish Ecocentric Poetry and the Writing of Nature: Sounds and Signs

Contemporary Irish Ecocentric Poetry and the Writing of Nature explores how poetic language can apprehend non-anthropocentric points of view. It builds on the recent developments in environmental humanities and seeks to show that four Irish poets, Derek Mahon, Paula Meehan, Moya Cannon and Seán Lysaght, offer means of diversifying our perception of nature and our place in it. This diversification, in turn, is intended to help us change our idea of natural environment from seeing it as a passive space, which we can either exploit or preserve, to a view of nature as an interrelated network of agents, in which humans are one actor among numerous others. Utilising a broad theoretical and philosophical context to help frame the analyses of verse in up-to-date conceptual schemes, this volume serves as a critical foundation for the future work and research in Irish ecocriticism and on ecopoetics in general, making the monograph an ideal read for postgraduates, scholars and researchers in these fields.

Wit Pietrzak is Professor of British and Irish literature at the University of Lodz, Poland.