From Library Journal
Aldo Leopold's land ethic introduced the concept that healthy communities depend on all living things to coexist in harmony. Scigaj (English, Virginia Polytechnic Inst.) suggests that ecopoems "help us to live our lives by encouraging us to understand, respect, and cooperate with the laws of nature that sustain us." He further differentiates environmental poetry from ecopoetry by identifying the former's reverence of nature and focus on environmental issues while lacking a concentration on nature "as an interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems." Although he concentrates on four American ecopoetsAA.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin, and Gary SnyderAScigaj uses about a third of the book to establish his argument that phenomenology rather than poststructural language theory should be used to define environmental poetry. According to Scigaj, phenomenology recognizes the referential context of literature while poststructural language theory remains hermetically sealed from the quotidian world. The density of the text makes this appropriate for academic collections.ASue Samson, Univ. of Montana Lib., Missoula Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Over the past thirty years many poets have exhibited an increasing sensitivity to ecological thinking. But Leonard Scigaj is the first to define ecopoetry - Marked by its appreciation of nature as a series of self-regulating cyclic systems - as separate and distinct from nature or environmental poetry. Ecopoetry insists that the interests of humans must be balanced with the needs of nature. Focusing on the work of A. R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, W. S. Merwin, and Gary Snyder, America's foremost ecopoets, Scigaj explores each poet's depth of involvement in nature and his ability to use ordinary language that models biocentric ways of seeing nature. Just as a sustainable society does not depreciate its resource base, so a sustainable poetry does not restrict interest to textuality.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal