Compass Points for an Australian Ecopoetic

Modulations to belief and doubt in the nature poem inhabit the history ofradical landscape poetry in Australia. This phenomenon, and its subject,hasnecessarily turned the arts towards the science of ecology and its emphases on interdependence, feedback, non-linearity. More recently, we have aligned our discipline’s sense of cultural practices and their relationship with geological time to the findings of climate change science, the longue durée of The Great Acceleration, and The Sixth Great Extinction. So, too, have Australian poets offered new modes of writing that work out responses to the toxic world, but also overdevelopment and its manifest bushfires, drought crises and extinction. Ecopoetry might claim exceptional status, yet global phenomena localised at scale across this island continent have long excited poets not only those interested in nature. A curious tradition of such interest has yet to be taken seriously.With a view to specifically explore contemporary Australian ecopoetics, this chapter draws from Australian Environmental Humanities,particularly its concern with more-than-human worlds, and multi-species ethnographies.It also reflects on a vitally important articulation of Country that speaks most profoundly to what ‘ecology’ might mean to contemporary environmental literature. Analysis of poetry from the last twenty-five years will includethe following authors: Michelle Cahill, Stuart Cooke, Louise Crisp, Ali Cobby Eckerman, Martin Harrison, Coral Hull, Jill Jones, John Kinsella, Peter Minter, Claire E. Nashar, and Tracy Ryan. This chapter will also locate the editorial practices of uncensored collections of First Nations poets (e.g. Red Room Poetry), and poetry in Australian language art zines and ecology corners (e.g. Black Rider Press, PAN journal, Plumwood Mountain).