Country Matters: Introducing Australian Ecopoetics

Ecopoetry signals the delicate interpenetration of multivarious modes of life. Contemporary Australian literature is involved in the process of adjusting human relationships with the natural world; ecopoetics of the island continent accordingly signs for three new inflection points this century: Anthropocene anxiety, climate grief, and elegiac extinction. This chapter examines Australian writing along these coordinates to show how poets examine human emotions within a holistic framework of social and biological change. Moreover, in the neo-colonial shadows of experience, ecopoetics in Australia shapes itself in reciprocity with the manifold textures of an animate earth; testing sovereignty, waiting on its resistance and expression.