Author Description

Though It Is Common To Speak Of Nature Poetry, Poetry's Nature Contends That The Essential Nature Of Poetry Is Bound Up With The Natural World: By Looking To Nature, We Can Better Understand Poetry, And-perhaps-vice Versa. The Study Draws On Contemporary Physics And Philosophy To Argue That All Beings, And All Matter, Are Enmeshed In Relations To One Another, And That Such Processual Relations Can Help Us To Think About Poetry As An Ever-arriving, Ever Unfinished Art. The Poem May Then Be A Microcosm Of The World: Parts Are Grounded By Their Relation To One Another, Always In The Process Of Creating A Whole. Poetry's Nature's Four Chapters Explore Four Paradigms That Illuminate Poetry's Relation To Other Natural Phenomena: The Ways Poems Draw On Birdsong To Veer Between Language And Sound, And Hence Between Semantic Density And Meaninglessness; The Experience Of Seasonality As A Paradigm For The Lyric's Recursive Use Of Time; The Flows And Forms Of Water As An Inspiration For The Enactment And Depiction Of Motion And Rest In Poems; And, Finally, The Vast Domain Of The Imperceptible As A Resource For The Imagination. Poems Are Events That Are Felt In Time Rather Than Being Merely Cognised; Rewarding Of Our Attention, Like The Natural World; Experienced, Like The Weather, In Our Bodies. By Reframing Poetry In Its Relation To Nature, Poetry's Nature Hopes To Reframe Our Relation To The World In Which We Live, A Task That Is Of Ever Greater Urgency-- Provided By Publisher.