134 contemporary poetry
bird’s habitat.’^2 We will eventually consider how an understanding
of ecopoetics might broaden our reading of poetry’s relationship to
the environment.
The publication of geographer-philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s
The Production of Space in 1974 introduced to a broader audience a
spatial awareness to understanding the environment. According to
experimental geographer Trevor Paglen, the more general idea of
‘the production of space’ which Lefebvre references proposes that
‘humans create the world around them and that humans are, in
turn, created by the world around them. In other words, the human
condition is characterized by a feedback loop between human activ-
ity and our material surroundings.’^3 We will consider the impact of
reading poetry ‘spatially’ specifi cally as the writer’s response to
urban landscape. Increasingly poets are subject and alert to a global
mobility that undoubtedly challenges fi xed ideas of region, cultural
identity and geographic stability. Contemporary poets often intro-
duce through their work a travelogue, or a narrative of cultural dis-
location. Responding to the threat of environmental catastrophe,
twenty-fi rst-century poets attempt to assimilate scientifi c accounts,
texts and news bulletins into their work to inform both the reader
and themselves. The frequently apocalyptic scenes envisaged by
such poetry are often counterbalanced by the possibility of imag-
ined spaces. In this context contemporary poetry acts both as an
elegy for a vanishing world and as an attempt at its reconstruction
in a new ecological form.
ECOCRITICISM: LANDSCAPE AND ECOLOGY IN GARY
SNYDER’S POETRY
According to Cheryll Glotfelty, ecocriticism is ‘the study of the
relationship between literature and the physical environment...
ecocriticism takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies.’^4
Increasingly ecocriticism is seen as a multi-genre critical approach,
linking disciplines such as ecology and environmental science
with the plastic, digital and literary arts. One of the poets most
associated with the ecocritical turn in the late twentieth century
is Californian poet Gary Snyder. Snyder’s body of work includes