Introduction

Poïesis – production, creation, making – transforms and continues the world where thought, matter and time are mediated and attuned in and for the human subject. Following a certain phenomenological discourse, about which there is more to be said in this Introduction, what I will be calling throughout this study the body–subject becomes integrated with the world. Thus, through making, ...

‘A word will set the seed / of life and death’: Robin Robertson’s Protean Lyric

The chapter discusses Robin Robertson’s poetry, stretched between the existential and the material, oscillating around edges, junctures and transitions. Focusing on legends and folk tales that are forged in the Scottish landscape, Robertson, for whom the sense of place is ‘absolutely crucial’, combines them with classical myths. The analysis centres around Robertson’s preoccupation with these themes, arguing that the inherent order of the world as evoked in his poems is governed by chaos and change. In various forms of being volatility dominates, occurring in transfigurations of the material world, standing against the claims about the inertness of matter. Vitality connects with epidermal vulnerability revealed in the poems’ frequent focus on metamorphosis. The apprehension of the temporality of the body is captured in Robertson’s enfolding of the subject into the seasonal cycle. The chapter thus investigates the corporeal drive as co-temporal with the rhythms of the non-human world.

‘Gifts of the Wild’: Dwelling, Temporality and Landscape in Kathleen Jamie’s Writing

Following Kathleen Jamie’s words that ‘poetry is a sort of connective tissue where myself meets the world, and it rises out of that, that liminal place’, the chapter discusses Jamie’s poetic work from a phenomenological perspective. An important aspect of Jamie’s writing, connectivity highlights interrelations between the world and poetic form and as such is examined in a theoretically-informed analysis. The chapter argues that in a place where the poet meets the world, poetic language negotiates external factors that have an impact upon it, and in doing so, the poet can begin to illuminate lived experience. In the process of writing a temporary self that evokes the experience of the world through embodied participation, temporality plays an important role. As Jamie demonstrates in her writing, the perception of the land — and our coexistence with it — is affected by the awareness of the passage of time. The discussion focuses on the poems recording the experience of landscape represented in past, present and future considerations of change, and examines how in Jamie’s writing a sense of permanence is intermingled with a pervasive sense of transience. It centres around Jamie’s emphasis on transitoriness, which foregrounds the temporality of our dwelling.

‘Buried in the flesh’: Home, Embodiment and Interanimality in John Burnside’s Work

The chapter discusses the role and significance of concepts such as home, dwelling, language and the question of embodied Being in relation to John Burnside’s writing. Developed through the thinking of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty specifically, and phenomenological thinking more generally, but with reference to other modes of critical apprehension, the discussion expands the examinations of the idea of dwelling and the place of human animals within the living world (as part of an attempt to decentre the human), which constitute predominant themes in Burnside’s work, complicating the notion of ‘nature poetry’. The analysis focuses on the relation between human selfhood and the non-human world, Mitsein, or Being-with other animals, and the question of naming things. In this respect, this chapter provides not only a particular way of reading Burnside’s poetry, but also a more detailed investigation of the way in which the concept of dwelling relates to certain aspects of place, understood as a dynamic nexus of relationships, as well as the concept of the creaturely. It argues that these themes, together with the problem of language dominate Burnside’s poetic work.

Wandering in the Open World: Kenneth White’s Poetics

Covering vast geographical and cultural areas, the wingspan of Kenneth White’s poetic programme covers a cross-cultural, transdisciplinary field of study. The chapter examines White’s work, focusing on the interconnectedness and intertwining of the poetic subject with the natural world. It analyses White’s concepts of intellectual nomadism and the open world by means of tracing the main philosophical influences that inform his writing. It examines the poet’s explorations of landscape and mindscape, stemming from philosophical contemplation and spiritual realisation. The analysis attempts to follow the poet’s mapping of extensive territories of the globe in the context of the problem of proper dwelling, investigating the ways in which it mediates place in a phenomenological relationship. It explores the poetic subject’s self-identification with its surroundings, which stresses the interfolding of a mind with the natural world. Finally, the chapter also considers the syncretism of poetic forms employed by White, ranging from haiku to ‘diamond’ poems, to polyphonic itinerary poems.