The Anthropocene Lyric

"Thomas Bristow brings together the worlds of ecocriticism and cultural geography in a lyrical examination of the self, the dynamism of rapid environmental change and the challenge of the human within the world of the Anthropocene, the geological and metaphorical era where humanity is a biophysical planetary force." Libby Robin, Professor of Environmental History, Australian National University, Australia "The lyric is, as one scholar puts it, the genre of the other mind. Even when it is about an 'I,' the lyric is never strictly autobiographical, but rather reveals subjectivity as an entity in its own right. In this beautiful study, Thomas Bristow makes this concept massively wider and more physical. Bristow shows that lyric is a deeply ecological mode. Perhaps we had better start calling lyric the genre of the other affect: a non-egocentric, non-localized, more-than-human rippling of sensational energy. This book generously forms all kinds of thoughts and new terms for poetic phenomena we already feel. Bristow brilliantly shows how lyric pricks up its nonhuman ears, sensitized to the drastic geological shift of the Anthropocene and its Sixth Mass Extinction." Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University

This book takes the work of three contemporary poets John Burnside, John Kinsella and Alice Oswald to reveal how an environmental poetics of place is of significant relevance for the Anthropocene: a geological marker asking us to think radically of the human as one part of the more-than-human world.This book takes the work of three contemporary poets John Burnside, John Kinsella and Alice Oswald to reveal how an environmental poetics of place is of significant relevance for the Anthropocene: a geological marker asking us to think radically of the human as one part of the more-than-human world.