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Article: Coloring nature big and wet, dry and varied, and pushed aside. (Poetry Today)
- Article from:
- The Antioch Review
- Article date:
- January 1, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Antioch Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Nature: the sign, the scene, the nullified scene. These are its three guises in contemporary poetry. What i s new in the catalogue is the third item, the erasure of nature as scene. You can't get the taste of pitch off the cones of some recent poems that refer to nature, and that is their point: in some of them, even the language is partly self-eradicating, swallowing its potential for aroma and rhythm. My subject, then, is not exactly "nature poetry" - a term that, in any case, tends (like night) to blanket diverse directions of travel. It is, rather, three distinctive relations to nature, answering to three kinds of temperament: the ecstatic; the companionable and ...