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In determining a corpus of recent British writing to be pastoral, Deborah Lilley eschews epithets such as ‘dark’ or ‘post’ for a more generous ‘new’, explaining that she intends her ‘usage to encom...

This handsome new edition of J.H. Prynne’s 1983 poem makes it freshly accessible – I’m tempted to say consumable – whether readers have previously encountered his work or not. The thoughtful appara...

When Michael Malay begins his incisive, well-written analysis of animal poetry by discussing the prose of Thoreau, Stanley Cavell and J.M. Coetzee, one wonders whether he has doubts about his chose...

Patrick D. Murphy’s latest book argues that ‘literary and cultural criticism […] is an academic form of persuasion’ (160), and, as a result, that ecocriticism could constitute a form of activism. I...

The persistence of Romantic tropes into the twentieth century is read as problematic in the poems of Wallace Stevens and Basil Bunting. In ‘The Man on the Dump’, Stevens figures this persistence as accumulated waste, which is then considered in terms of material ecocriticism. By attending to waste’s recalcitrance, Stevens exposes an environmental unconscious, and his imaginative composting of what will not materially degrade demonstrates an impulse to bring it within natural cycles of decay and fertility. These are further explored by the duality of waste as desolation and abundance in his poem ‘The Plain Sense of Things’. The image of the rat in this poem and in Bunting’s Briggflatts gives us access to the waste that shadows human existence, on which life depends. Bunting uses the practice and the motif of art to accommodate organic decomposition within composition.