Reading Carol Ann Duffy’s “Politics” through Unnatural Ecopoetics

Zainab Abdulkadhim Mhana,Ikhlas Abdul Hadi,Zainor Izat Zainal,Rosli Talif

doi:10.17576/3l-2019-2501-07

Zainab Abdulkadhim Mhana, Ikhlas Abdul Hadi + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.17576/3l-2019-2501-07

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Abstract

Carol Ann Duffy is one of the most notable poets in contemporary English poetry. In accordance with her poetic dexterity, she was appointed as Great Britain’s Poet Laureate in 2009. This study deals with Duffy’s “Politics,” which was introduced in The Bees (2011), her first collection published after having been named Poet Laureate. In this poem, the poet tackled natural and unnatural imagery resultant from diverse experiences. This study proposes that the material environment surrounding Carol Ann Duffy is intertwined with her nonmaterial environment in “Politics.” This argument runs parallel with the concept of unnatural ecopoetics, which is considered to be a new direction in ecopoetics in examining contemporary poetry. The current study argues that the poet’s ideology after becoming poet laureate and also her experience as a Scottish, feminist, bisexual poet have all together configured a kind of nonmaterial environment intertwined with the material world or nature in the textual space through “Politics”. This assumption is not far from Sarah Nolan’s concept of Unnatural Ecopoetics in her book Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces of Contemporary Poetry (2017). So, this study is conducted in the light of Nolan’s concept, which denotes the relations between the human, natural, and unnatural environments and the language in the poetic text. Accordingly, more focus will be on the poet’s experiences, memories, ideology, and feelings which inspired her to symbolize nature in another dimension in “Politics” as an unnatural ecopoetics poem. Keywords: Carol Ann Duffy; Politics; The Bees; ecopoetics; unnatural ecopoetics

Highlights

As a post-modernist and feminist poet, Carol Ann Duffy has occupied a pivotal role in contemporary English poetry
“Politics” is one of the poems introduced in The Bees (2011), her first collection after becoming Great Britain’s Poet Laureate
This study presents a new way of reading Carol Ann Duffy’s “Politics” through Nolan’s (2017) concept of unnatural ecopoetics

Summary

INTRODUCTION

As a post-modernist and feminist poet, Carol Ann Duffy has occupied a pivotal role in contemporary English poetry. The collection has some feminist merits, as a Scottish poet, Duffy’s discourse in “Politics” carries many themes that generally seem to deviate from her previous discourse concerning lesbians and her striving for female identity These contemplations concerning Duffy’s textual space and her new poetic direction motivates this study to examine her poetry through Sarah Nolan’s(2017) concept of unnatural ecopoetics, which constitutes a new trend in ecopoetics theory. Ecocriticism initially began in the USA with writing published in many journals After that, it appeared as a critical and academic theory in Glotfelty and Fromm’s The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996). The fourth wave of the ecocriticism Movement began with the adoption of new concepts and theories especially ecopoetics which goes deep into the hidden meaning of texts to examine the elements of material or physical environment along with the elements of nonmaterial environment

ECOPOETICS THEORY

UNNATURAL ECOPOETICS

CAROL ANN DUFFY AS A POET LAUREATE

CONCLUSION