Farrier, David

Thomson, Alex

Du, Fan

2026-04-30T14:12:03Z

2026-04-30

Situated within the field of ecocriticism and, more broadly, the environmental humanities, this thesis explores the practice of eco-ethics in experimental landscape poetry through the work of Harriet Tarlo, Peter Larkin, Maggie O’Sullivan and Anthony Vahni Capildeo. The practice of eco-ethics, as a creative and critical mode of knowing through being in the environment, takes a different form in each poet’s work. Yet they all actively deconstruct dominant ideologies that reinforce environmental and social violence in the modern world, while reconstituting relationships between humans and nature through poetic innovation, close attention and sustained dialogue. Correspondingly, this thesis engages attentively and dialogically with the work of these four poets, presenting an open constellation of contemporary poetry that re-enacts an eco-ethical mode of knowing and being in the world, as embodied in what I term “experimental landscape poetry”. Inspired by The Ground Aslant, edited by Harriet Tarlo, this term extends Tarlo’s grouping of “radical landscape poetry” by including poets not featured in the anthology and introducing new ways in which contemporary poetry engages with the environment. More specifically, by incorporating the work of Maggie O’Sullivan and Anthony Vahni Capildeo into this discussion of ecopoetics and eco-ethics, I highlight poetry that navigates multiple media and narratives, shifting the focus from optical and local perceptions of landscape to a trans-heuristic and trans-locational imagining of the earth, while maintaining an emphasis on the physical and phenomenal realms. This thesis comprises four chapters, each examining one poet through textual analysis that interweaves literary and cultural studies, with a focus on innovative poetics, landscape phenomenology, feminist materialism and postcolonialism. By connecting and comparing the work of four poets within an interdisciplinary framework, I highlight the diversity of experimental landscape poetry and its potential to constitute, communicate and enact an inclusive and contextual eco-ethics amid ongoing ecological and social transitions. Chapter One examines Harriet Tarlo’s poetry and her collaboration with painter Judith Tucker, tracing their practice of eco-ethics from the outside field to the page-space and gallery exhibition. Responding to the changing environments at each stage of their work, the artists develop distinct methods—such as walking with others, open-form composition and innovative presentation—that enact an open, dialogical mode of artmaking and placemaking. Chapter Two examines Peter Larkin’s poetry, which engages with the materiality of trees and landscapes shaped by both natural processes and anthropogenic interventions. Centring on his poetics of “scarcity”, I argue that his work contemplates the inseverable yet delicate bond between humans and nature. Chapter Three explores Maggie O’Sullivan’s poetry as a practice of weaving kinship among earthly beings, presenting both landscape and the page as sites of mutual constitution and transformation between human and nonhuman, verbal and nonverbal actors. The final chapter explores Anthony Vahni Capildeo’s poetry, linking contemporary ecopoetics, rooted in post-war Anglo-American traditions, with postcolonial Caribbean thought, particularly Glissant’s “poetics of relation” and Brathwaite’s “tidalectics”. Drawing on Capildeo’s status as an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago to the UK, I highlight their re-enactment of movements and relations among diverse subjects, landscapes and narratives, reintegrating “othered” forms of life—such as the animal, the foreign and the mad—into the presentation and discussion of the environment.

https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/44602

https://doi.org/10.7488/era/7117

en

experimental poetry

eco-ethics in poetry

experimental landscape poetry

Harriet Tarlo

Peter Larkin

Maggie O’Sullivan

Anthony Vahni Capildeo

radical landscape poetry

ecopoetics

environmental humanities

Eco-ethical composition: contemporary experimental landscape poetry in the UK

Thesis

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy