Reading Carol Ann Duffy’s “Politics” through unnatural ecopoetics
Carol Ann Duffy is one of the most notable poets in contemporary English poetry. In accordance with her poetic dexterity, she was appointed as Great Britain’s Poet Laureate in 2009. This study deals with Duffy’s “Politics,” which was introduced in The Bees (2011), her first collection published af...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2019
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/13975/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/13975/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/13975/1/26718-98549-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | Carol Ann Duffy is one of the most notable poets in contemporary English poetry. In accordance with her poetic
dexterity, she was appointed as Great Britain’s Poet Laureate in 2009. This study deals with Duffy’s “Politics,”
which was introduced in The Bees (2011), her first collection published after having been named Poet
Laureate. In this poem, the poet tackled natural and unnatural imagery resultant from diverse experiences. This
study proposes that the material environment surrounding Carol Ann Duffy is intertwined with her nonmaterial
environment in “Politics.” This argument runs parallel with the concept of unnatural ecopoetics, which is
considered to be a new direction in ecopoetics in examining contemporary poetry. The current study argues that
the poet’s ideology after becoming poet laureate and also her experience as a Scottish, feminist, bisexual poet
have all together configured a kind of nonmaterial environment intertwined with the material world or nature in
the textual space through “Politics”. This assumption is not far from Sarah Nolan’s concept of Unnatural
Ecopoetics in her book Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces of Contemporary Poetry (2017). So, this study is
conducted in the light of Nolan’s concept, which denotes the relations between the human, natural, and
unnatural environments and the language in the poetic text. Accordingly, more focus will be on the poet’s
experiences, memories, ideology, and feelings which inspired her to symbolize nature in another dimension in
“Politics” as an unnatural ecopoetics poem. |
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