Contemporary Poetry

environment and space 161

by climate change, and an associative patterning of refl ections
creates a poetic form that is fl uid and organic. The appeal to ‘we’
in ‘we search’, ‘we refl ect’, ‘we are’, ‘we were’ indicates the need
for communal intervention in the human catastrophe of ‘island
wreckage’ (p. 105 ). Kinsella asserts that human ownership of
the sea’s ecosystems cannot be claimed, since he evokes a pre-
human history of ‘hot coral forests, ice forests / and memories of
mimosa / from the driest parts’ (p. 105 ). ‘Ocean Forests’ presents
a contracting of environmental space within a global economy
and both locals and visitors are ‘brought together’ (p. 106 ). As the
geographical size of the earth appears to contract, human societies
have:

grown fl uid in the wobbling

of the earth’s rotation

shortening all our days

bringing palm trees and ice forests

under the same cut-glass sky. (p. 106 )

Kinsella’s poem performs as both an elegy and lament, reminding
us of our place in the earth’s ecosystem, as well as a tribute to the
lost and those vulnerable through economic disenfranchisement to
climate change. One could claim that Kinsella’s poem, in its dis-
comfort with statically observing the human tragedies of the ‘torn
shores of an ocean / so close, so distant’ (p. 107 ), echoes Lovelock’s
assertion that the earth is not owned by humanity. Lovelock puts us
in our place: ‘We are creatures of Darwinian evolution, a transient
species with a limited lifespan, as were all our distant numerous
ancestors’.^67

CONCLUSION: JULIANA SPAHR’S ECOPOETICS AND
IDEAS OF CONNECTION

Global information and newsgathering systems form a key com-
ponent of Juliana Spahr’s volume this connection of everyone with
lungs ( 2005 ).^68 Spahr has insistently described poetry as medium of
thought and enquiry: