ABSTRACT
In the history of poetry, plant death predominantly has been constructed in metaphorical language as a trope for human mortality or the decline of social values. Yet the materiality of plant death as an impactful and significant event emplaced in time has received limited attention in Western thinking. John Kinsella attends to plant death as the negation of an interactively coproduced, regionally based, and multispecies life-world that closely engages vegetal being. His botanical melancholia derives from the gravely fragmented locus of his ecological consciousness: the ancient plantscape existing as small, disconnected remnants within the agro-pastoral Wheatbelt district of Western Australia. Consequently, rather than an incidental occurrence in his work, plant death is essential to Kinsella's enunciation of radical pastoralism. His poetry furnishes a counterweight to an idyllic textualization of botanical nature as existing in an unimpacted Arcadian state of happiness, harmony, balance, and equitable exchange with the built environment.
