AustLit

'What is generally understood by the term ‘lyric poetry’? The prominent lyric theorist Jonathan Culler (99), proposes that lyric poetry is seen as the expression of a single consciousness in figurative language and usually takes the form of a short poem voicing personal feeling. If that is the case, what might an ‘ecopoetic lyric’ look like? Tom Bristow (15) writing on the ecopoetic lyric, or as he terms the ‘Anthropocene lyric’, believes that ecopoetry should distance itself from anthropomorphic descriptions of nature and integrate conceptions of humanity’s impacts on the planet.' (Sophie Finlay : Introduction to Embodied Belonging: Towards an Ecopoetic Lyric

'As Australia burned during the 2019-2020 bushfire season, many of us struggled to reckon with the scale of the loss. Alongside the immense impacts on human communities—including the loss of life, of property, of income, and of security—we tried to make sense of the devastation faced by the wider community of life: of billions of dead animals and of the vast areas of bushland, millions of acres, that they once inhabited.' (Thom van Dooren: Introduction)

'Over a period of several months in 2020 most of us lived through a slowing and restriction of movements, unprecedented in global scale, as we complied with extreme ‘social distancing’ measures in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Some referred to this period as the Great Pause: empirically measured in the 17% drop in daily global CO₂ emissions from last year’s mean. How did we take its qualitative measure?' (Jonathan Skinner, Introduction)