Redstart by poets Forrest Gander and John Kinsella is now available from the Contemporary North American Poetry series of the University of Iowa Press.

The damage humans have perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet’s means and material. But can poetry be ecological?

Can it display or be invested with values that acknowledge the economy of interrelationship between the human and the nonhuman realms? Aside from issues of theme and reference, how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics?

To answer these questions, poets Gander and Kinsella offer an experiment, a collaborative volume of prose and poetry that investigates—both thematically and formally—the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception. They ask whether, in an age of globalization, industrialization, and rapid human population growth, an ethnocentric view of human beings as a species independent from others underpins our exploitation of natural resources. Does the disease of Western subjectivity constitute an element of the aesthetic outlook that undermines poetic resistance to the killing of the land? Why does “the land” have to give something back to the writer?

Joan Retallack, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College, wrote, "Reading this book is enormously exciting amidst current explorations of language and other natural phenomena within ecopoetics and ecocriticism. It should and does raise important questions about poets’ ventures into textual and extra-textual ecologies. The kind of work that Gander and Kinsella do in Redstart is particularly important at this dire, edgy, near-catastrophic moment in the history of human v. everything else on the planet. It is an evocative investigation of our limitations and our possibilities as the poetic species."

Gander is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Core Samples from the World, and Science & Steepleflower, novels, and essays. He is Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University. A United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and recipient of the Witter Bynner fellowship from the Library of Congress, he has also won fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations.

Kinsella is the author of more than 30 books and has won many prizes, including the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the John Bray Award for Poetry from the Adelaide Festival, and the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award. He has also published novels, collections of stories, verse plays, criticism, and autobiography. He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Western Australia and a fellow of Churchill College.

The book is available at bookstores or from the UI Press, 800-621-2736 or www.uiowapress.org. Customers in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa may order from Eurospan Group at www.eurospanbookstore.com.

The Contemporary North American Poetry Series documents, analyzes, and seeks to sustain the many exciting and diverse developments in North American poetry since the 1950s by publishing critical studies of recent poetry, collections of essays on poetics, and biographies of individual poets or groups of poets as well as correspondence and memoirs. Its aim is to represent a variety of contemporary aesthetics and to illuminate ongoing debates about the material forms and contexts of recent poetry.

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