In a generous tribute to a Romantic forerunner, the contemporary poet Paul Farley has hailed John Clare as an outstanding evoker of place. Farley is appreciative of how, in a poem such as ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’, Clare personifies the place, giving it a voice of its own. In Farley’s reading, though, this does not amount to a simple manifestation of delimited locality. Clare, he claims, ‘speaks out of, and for, the fragility of the natural world and the rootedness of places […] bearing witness or giving voice to a landscape being altered irrevocably’. Farley contrasts this to the...

Barry MacSweeney’sWolf Tongue: Selected Poems(2003) and S.J. Litherland’s collectionThe Work of the Wind(2006) explore the same ‘territory’, in many senses of that term. According to its publisher, Litherland’s book ‘charts the hurricane years [1993–2000] the author shared with her fellow poet Barry MacSweeney’, while MacSweeney’sSelectedcontains three major late sequences –Hellhound Memos(1993),Pearl(1995/1997) andThe Book of Demons(1997) – which cover the same period.¹ This essay mainly discusses connections between the two books, using what I call the ‘geographies of hurt’ to explore the way each person in the relationship...

John Tripp (1927–86) was one of the key figures in the 1960s explosion of Anglophone Welsh poetry known as the ‘Second Flowering’. In his 1989 study of Tripp’s life and work, fellow Welsh poet Nigel Jenkins neatly suggests something of Tripp’s literary character when he begins his book by recounting that Tripp ‘used to say’:

I was born in Bargoed in 1927[…]and I want to know why. This affirmation, undermined characteristically by the niggle of doubt, draws together the two abiding preoccupations of John Tripp’s writing: a passionate, if critical, devotion to his native country, and in...

One of the most influential thinkers in Wales during the 1960s and 1970s was the philosopher J.R. Jones, who invented the termcydymdreiddiador ‘interpenetration’ to describe the indivisibility, as he saw it, of language, culture and territory.¹ In his influential work on Britishness,Prydeindod, he argued forcefully that there was no such ‘interpenetration’ between Welsh people and the notion of British identity. On the contrary, Britishness, according to Jones, was an invented political category which was imposed from outside, whereas authentic Welsh identity was indissolubly imbricated in the Welsh language and in the culture and geography of Wales. Jones’s...

Is it possible to experience nostalgia for a home which one has never truly left?³ The individual who, like the slighted, forlorn older brother of the Prodigal Son parable in Luke’s Gospel, chooses to cleave to native soil, refusing the temptations of elsewhere, is frequently denied the chance to speak of home, as if this rejection of mobility is always a signifier of a story-free, constricted life.⁴ Twentieth- and twenty-first century literature abounds with tropes of exile and ostracism: Modernist narratives, for example, frequently thrive on rebellious flights from family, political banishment and spiritual homelessness. James Joyce, the exemplary literary...

Though his earliest work was not published until the 1950s, Thomas Kinsella inherited a Modernist desire to challenge tradition, to engage in a relentless investigation of the inner life, and to expose its workings in formally challenging ways. His search for meaning is a complex and contingent process: in his work the incorporation of dynamism and stasis is not just an observable element of his formal control, but is in fact central to his understanding of the relationship between the act of human perception and the material world. For Kinsella, the individual is a cultural being, combining a variable relation...

Read together, these two epigraphs sound several keynotes for this essay. In the first, Rebecca Solnit remarks on the way in which a particular practice of space – walking – constitutes a means by which to bring together and establish dialogues between the representational (mapped) and experiential (lived) registers of a place. In this way, the maze is ‘made sense of’ – what was confusing becomes clear. Walking offers resolution. The second statement, given by Carson in interview with Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, might be read in a similar vein. Here, ‘exploring’ – an activity that, for Carson, would most often take...

Post-war British poetry displays an ambivalent attitude towards littoral geographies, equivocating between residual Romantic understandings of ‘sublime’ coastal prospects and conceptions of the coast as a space crisscrossed with economic and political interests.¹ Monastic understandings of the coastline as the threshold between the earthly and the heavenly also conflict with the modern globalised understanding of it as integral to traffic and shipping interests.² The kind of poetry that makes profound geographical demands of its readers, with which this volume as a whole is concerned, uses these differing literary traditions to raise questions about the counterpointing of sea and land in...

Peter Riley is a poet deeply engaged with the poetics of place, producing representations of landscape that are at once learned, reflexive and rich with the details of sensuous experience. Walking frequently serves his narrators as a means of phenomenological immersion and performative enactment, though a dense weight of research into the history, geography and geology of his chosen loci is discernible between or behind the lines, as are a profusion of playful intertextual dialogues. Specific places provide both creative impetus and a thematic focal point in texts from across Riley’s large and diverseoeuvre; as Simon Perril remarks, his...

The Faber poet Norman Nicholson (1914–87) spent all but twenty months of his life at 14 St George’s Terrace, Millom: a three-storey terraced house located at the centre of this iron-mining community on the Cumbrian coast. Unsurprisingly, his poetry repeatedly reflects upon the palimpsestic layering of loco-specific memories generated by ‘a lifetime spent in that same town’; and he was thereby practising a form of ‘deep mapping’ long before that label was given cultural currency by the American literary cartographer William Least Heat-Moon.³ As with Heat-Moon, author ofPrairyErth(1991), Nicholson draws upon a personal commitment to place in...

Landscape begins where we begin to look. And, as many recent cultural geographers have pointed out, any visual claim that we make to the landscape is always ideologically situated, perhaps never more so than in terms of constructions of the feminine. In art the connections between woman as nature and nature as woman become deeply entwined, not least because, as Gillian Rose has remarked, ‘the techniques of perspective used to record landscape were also used to map female nudes, and the art genre of naked women emerged in the same period as landscape painting’.³ If – and I risk this...

John Burnside has remarked that ‘[o]ur response to the world is essentially one of wonder’, and his approach to the mysteries of the natural world is distinguished by a blend of awed fascination, forensic scrutiny and a complex sense of obligation.¹ His explicit concern with ecology is well established, and is exemplified by the anthologyWild Reckoning, co-edited with Maurice Riordan, which celebrated the fortieth anniversary of Rachel Carson’sSilent Spring.² Burnside’s ecological preoccupations are fundamental to his work, yet his poetry, and increasingly his fiction, at once resists and surrenders itself to the fleeting, intangible yet transforming encounter with...

Alice Oswald’s book-length poemDart(2002) is plainly a geographical poem. It is structured by the flow of the river Dart from its emergence at Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor, down through Two Bridges, Staverton, Buckfast and Totnes before it reaches the sea at Dartmouth; and, although it is written in a complex weave of voices, it is perfectly easy to see how its stages correspond to the river’s progress on an Ordnance Survey map. But although Oswald herself calls it a ‘map poem’, its own kind of mapping is far more than a representation or description of people in given...

In a combined memoir and essay, Matthew Sperling proposes that Roy Fisher should not only be included in ‘discussions of ecological poetry, but central to them’ because he ‘is one of the few poets whose work puts the social and the economic back into “eco” in a genuinely cogent way’.¹ Yet the poet has not expressed any particular allegiance with the green verse of recent years. If Sperling’s proposal is itself cogent, there must be qualities of Fisher’s work in profound accord with environmental ecology, below and beyond overt commitment to the new nature writing.² Here I outline some of...