The Anthropocene Lyric

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Tom Bristow

   Pages 1-18

3. Jam Tree Gully

   • Tom Bristow

   Pages 19-46

4. Gift Songs

   • Tom Bristow

   Pages 47-76

5. A Sleepwalk on the Severn

   • Tom Bristow

   Pages 77-106

6. Conclusion

   • Tom Bristow

   Pages 107-123

7. Back Matter

   Pages 124-139

   PDF

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.

• Anthropocene
• Literary geography
• John Burnside
• John Kinsella
• Alice Oswald
• environment
• lyric
• poem
• poetics
• poetry
• British and Irish Literature

“Through a careful selection of writers and texts, The Anthropocene Lyric is a useful tool that can be used to explore the relationship between the human and more-than-human world within the context of the Anthropocene, where poetry has a firm foothold.” (Veronica Fibisan, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, September, 2017)

“Bristow’s book is a significant, insightful and lyrical contribution to ecopoetic studies on many important levels.” (Sue Edney, Green Letters - Studies in Ecocriticism, Vol. 21 (1), 2017)

“The gambit of Bristow’s book is that ecopoetry offers one path to a reconsideration of human positioning on earth. … This is an excellent book, and one that confirms Bristow’s place among the vanguard of ecopoetic theorists.” (Mark Dickinson, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Vol. 23 (3), November, 2016)

"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

• University of Melbourne, Australia

  Tom Bristow

Tom Bristow is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He read English Literature at the University of Leicester from 1999–2003 and his PhD was awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 2008. Tom is a member of the Mellon Australian Observatory in the Environmental Humanities research programme, University of Sydney; editor of Philosophy Activism Nature (PAN); and former President of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, Australia and New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ).

Policies and ethics