ABSTRACT
Eco-poetry emerged from and is entangled with environmental literary criticism. Its definition is a source of continued deliberation and its poetics a site of innovation and experimentation. While innumerable poems take nature as their theme, eco-poetics queries the notion of ‘nature’ itself, engaging in the intellectual, ontological and political debates which occupy what is called ‘green cultural studies’: the nature/culture divide; animal–human relations; gender critique; and decolonising environmentalism. New forms of eco-poetry, including hydro-poetics, tidal poetics, litho-poetics and geo-poetics, have been invented to better attend to the conditions of ecological crisis through an expansion of vocabulary and diversification of poetic styles. This chapter outlines this poetic novelty.
