Abstract
This essay examines recent British poetry informed by Concrete and ‘open-field’ poetics which engages with landscape through experimentation with the spatiality of the poetic page. Amounting to much more than just formal playfulness, this mode of ‘landscape writing’ raises pertinent questions about the politics and ethics of environmental aesthetics. In particular, it offers opportunities for investigating and complicating Timothy Morton's critical formulation of ‘nature writing’ as ‘ecomimesis’. My argument draws on examples from the work of three poets whose writing eschews straightforwardly mimetic relations to landscape but nevertheless claims connections between the space of the page and material geographies. These poetries ambivalently participate in an attenuated form of ‘ecomimesis’ and in doing so, provide occasions for critical reflection on the ethical imperatives and problematics of this aesthetic impulse.
Published Version
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