Leonardo

This book is an in-depth scholarly investigation into the relevance and efficacy of poetry, understood in its broadest sense, in this period of history we find ourselves in, called by some the Anthropocene. As Catherine Rigby notes, "This is not just a work about poetry; it is an exquisitely poetic work of scholarship."

So just what is the Anthropocene? It is the current era in which human impact on the planet as a whole is taking place. Human activities such as fossil fuel extraction, massive-scale monocultural farming practices, large-scale deforestation activities and pollution of the atmosphere and waterways are causing actual geological changes. Although various authorities argue about when this period started, the most popular agreed-upon time is around the middle of the twentieth century. At this time massive expansion in all human activities took place, including population growth, and on a larger global scale than ever before.

David Farrier is a senior lecturer in modern and contemporary literature at the University of Edinburgh. In this highly readable—although complex, theoretical and detailed—investigation, he "puts deep time at the center, defining a new poetics for thinking through humanity's role as a geological agent, the devastation caused by resource extraction, and the looming extinction crisis" (rear cover).

The book has five sections:

• Introduction: Life Enfolding in Deep Time

• Chapter 1. Intimacy: The Poetics of Thick Time

• Chapter 2. Entangled: The Poetics of Sacrificial Zones

• Chapter 3. Swerve: The Poetics of Kin-Making

• Coda: Knots in Time

A smattering of black-and-white illustrations and an extensive Notes section are extremely valuable for future research.

Chapter 1 looks "at the "geological intimacy" presaged by the Anthropocene in terms of the "thickened time" of lyric poetry. It explores the intimacy that inheres within the deep time of geological and evolutionary processes. Thick time is discussed in detail and is defined as the way lyrics can put many different timescales into one frame to bring about an awareness of these other times. Farrier discusses the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney.

Chapter 2 explores the "extractive economies and depleted environments of the Plantationocene" in the context of what Evelyn Reilly calls "relational poetics." The experimental poetry of Reilly and Peter Larkin is discussed to show how "avantgarde writing can reveal the density [End Page 224] of entanglements that lie behind ostensibly homogenized or 'smooth' spaces and surfaces of plastics and plantations" (p. 11). This chapter also "proposes a diffractive poetics of entangled spaces" (p. 12).

Chapter 3 "applies the work of [Donna] Haraway and Deborah Bird Rose on multispecies kin-making to poetry concerned with a less bio-diverse future" (p. 9). Farrier introduces the figure of the clinamen in this chapter, which defines a poetics of kin-making and "also stands for a range of literary figures that can provide us with shapes for thinking about what a poetics of kin-making might look like" (p. 12).

In the coda Farrier introduces Singapore's "super trees." These are an "ingenious combination of giant solar panels and vents for the heat generated from creating electricity from the city's waste biomass" (p. 125). They exemplify the notion that technology will offer a way out of our ecological disaster. Singapore, the Garden City, is paradoxically a combination of vast amounts of concrete and gardens. Farrier sums up briefly the various poets discussed throughout the book and ends by saying that he does not want to overstate the case for poetry.

The real question the coda raises is just how efficacious poetry is in bringing about significant global change for the better. My great-grandmother wrote "activist" poetry in London in the late 1890s. I have written essays discussing poets as visionaries, often quoting Shelley's famous lines that "poets are the legislators of the world." Some of my own contemporary poetry exposes the dangers of disastrous practices such as coal...