Recent news images of disastrous floods, fires and earthquakes vividly show we live in an unstable world. This book examines that precarity through an analysis of how disaster is expressed through poetry. It situates poetry of disaster as a distinct poetic endeavour and as an emerging field of academic research. Focusing on a selection of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry collections responding to notable disasters, these collections are explored firstly, as literary texts; secondly, as case studies into why and how the authors chose to write about these disasters in the way they did; and thirdly, as access points for wider investigations into disaster and disaster studies in the twentieth and twenty-first century. The texts also inform an exploration into the binary of 'man-made' and 'natural', a binary that stubbornly persists in contemporary representations of disaster, however problematic that differentiation is in this age of the Anthropocene.

Argues for the poetry of disaster as both a distinct body of poetic endeavour and an emerging field of academic research Challenges existing ways of thinking about disaster and literature, while extending the concept of 'poetry of witness' Contributes to an understanding of ecopoetics, as examined through the lens of disaster and catastrophe

Autorentext

Claire Cox completed a practice-based PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, on poetry and disaster. She is co-founder of ignitionpress (Oxford Brookes University), was one of three winning poets included in Primers: Volume Five (Nine Arches Press), and winner of the 2020 Wigtown Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize.

Inhalt

Chapter 1: Courting Disaster.- Chapter 2: On Shaky Ground Disaster Theory and Defining Disaster.- Chapter 3: 'the murdered outline' Industrial Disasters and the Poetry of Witness in Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead and Mario Petrucci's Heavy Water.- Chapter 4: Hurricane Katrina Stories of Disaster.- Chapter 5: 'the memorial of ice' Poetics of Climate Catastrophe.- Chapter 6: Searching for the Epicentre Witness in the Anthropocene.