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ABSTRACTThis article pursues a non-green reading of The Crystal World(1966) that explores Ballard’s links with artist Robert Smithson, for whom the motif of the crystal was a key inspiration, and the biophilosophical ideas of Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze, who argue that crystals provide a non-organic model for understanding life. The crystal has occupied key positions in the inter-related histories of philosophy, art and science. To show the significance of this for ecocritical theory and practice, I draw on Simondon’s work, which understands material processes of crystallisation in terms of an ontology of becoming that collapses distinctions between organic and inorganic. Deleuze applies these insights to his analysis of cinema through the notions of the ‘crystal image’ and ‘crystalline narration’, which I apply in turn to Ballard’s text. In this way, I propose an ecocritical reading of Ballard that resists antinomial oppositions of nature and culture.

The work of Belfast poet Padraic Fiacc is an important but critically neglected contribution to the canon of Northern Irish poetry. This article explores Fiacc's work, giving particular attention to the collections published during the bloodiest years of the Northern Ireland conflict and to the anthology of poems on the subject of the conflict which he edited and published in 1974 with the Blackstaff Press. Beyond the intrinsic value of Fiacc's poems themselves, his work has the benefit of causing us to reconsider issues of canonicity in the Irish poetic tradition and to revisit some of the assumptions about the relationships between poetry, history, and politics which have become dominant in our understanding of this tradition. Fiacc's poetry, while located in a distinctly Irish cultural context, bears important resemblances to the work of continental figures such as Rimbaud and Celan. In addition, Fiacc's work raises crucial questions about the relationship between violence, poetry, and language at a more general level. The article addresses some of these questions through the insights of philosophers such as Slavoj iek, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin.

Situated in the ‘Painted Desert’ north-east of Flagstaff, Arizona, James Turrell’s ‘Roden Crater Project’ is an unprecedented instance of landscape architecture and one of the most important examples of contemporary environmental art. Enclosed within the region’s volcanic terrain, the project adheres to a system of precise geocosmic alignments, showing a fealty to celestial and astronomical events comparable with the ancient architectures of Newgrange, Ireland and the Temple of the Sun at Karnak. While dominant readings of Turrell’s work suggest vague notions of its ‘harmony’ with its natural environment, we propose that the significance of the ‘Roden Crater Project’ deserves a more thoroughgoing reconsideration of the architecture–environment relationship. We argue against any aesthetic recourse to ecopsychological theories purporting a reconciliation of the divide between nature and culture. We instead offer, through readings of the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari and Nick Land, a novel theoretical framework for ecological aesthetics, which we call the eco-clinic. Drawing in particular on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘intensive space’ and Land’s conception of ‘geotrauma’, we argue that Turrell’s work represents a radical, post-naturalist reinvention of ecological perception that exceeds the nature/culture divide in every direction.

A number of 'ecological' theories of cinema have emerged in recent years, many of which remain bound by antiquated models of figure and ground. These models typically belong to a pre-cinematic aesthetics of nature, sustaining an image of humanity uninformed by the recent prospect of species self-extinction. We hereby propose a new model for conceiving of this relation, one based upon Nick Land's post-psychoanalytic notion of geotrauma, and which suggests that the earth as ground gives rise not just to territories but moreover to processes of ungrounding. These processes are recapitulated in the human history of a traumatic relation to this (non)ground, suggesting a properly geophilosophical understanding of cinema that observes catastrophism as a genetic principle. Of consequence for any attempt to theorize human artifice and design under the present 'environmental' moment, such an understanding presupposes a thoroughgoing revaluation of creative practice and process. We hereby provide a reading of three recent films in which the figures or iconography of the natural environment reflect this 'revolt' against ecological fixity. Visions of catastrophic environmental change force us to reconceive of the very concept of nature as something fundamentally at odds with our perception of what is natural. We thus combine Land's theory of geotrauma with Deleuze's conception of cinema to argue that the cinematic image testifies to a 'pantraumatic self-movement', one by which the relations between parts forming the conditioned or ecological whole are subjected to a universal ungrounding, and therefore by which something necessarily unconditioned escapes its 'natural' conditions. This geophilosophical emphasis upon escape, flight or deterritorialization should replace the ecological aesthetics of figure and ground with a perceptual catastrophism, disrupting every naturalizing appeal to an harmonic relationship between the human and non-human, cultural and natural worlds.

The poem "Colossal Heads of My Parents," by Aidan Tynan is presented. First Line: In a walled garden the colossal heads; Last Line: his childlessness in the shade of yellow trees.