AustLit

'When opening a slim volume of poetry entitled Land Art, a reader might expect a collection of ecopoetics. Instead, Stuart Cooke offers what might be termed “egopoetics.” A critical reader of both his own work and the poetry of numerous writers from around the (not just English-speaking) world, Cooke offers an exegesis for Land Art in the Forward. Less an apology, defence, or justification, the Forward is more an exploration of questions raised by writing and drawing about the relationship between poet-speaker and land. For Cooke, writing and sketching are both linguistic artforms, and he points to the history of writing in the West as ineluctable from the aesthetic and the visual. He points to the time before the printing press rendered prose and poetry prosaic and illuminated manuscripts grew scarce. As Cooke observes in the Forward to his collection, “the printed alphabet is embedded in long histories of aesthetic decisions.” ' (Introduction)