The fragility of a more-than-human world: Ecological awareness in the poetry of Robert Bringhurst

ABSTRACT

This article examines the poetry and thinking of Robert Bringhurst, a 21st-century Canadian humanist who denounces the depletion of natural resources and environmental degradation brought about by the practices of postcapitalism and neo-liberalism in highly industrialized societies. More specifically, it examines two poems from a sequence entitled “The Living” included in his Selected Poems (2009), “The Living Must Never Outnumber the Dead” and “At Last”, remarkable lyric specimens that testify to Bringhurst’s profound ecological concerns and commitment to writing poetry that addresses the more-than-human world. When reading his intellectually demanding poems and essays, the reader cannot help noticing how an ontology of humility seems to flourish suddenly. Bringhurst’s biocentric poetics invites humans to rethink their place in the cosmos and to recover an awareness of the deep link pervading all living forms if they are to make the Earth a liveable place.

KEYWORDS:

• Robert Bringhurst
• ecopoetry
• more-than-human
• Anthropocene
• precarity
• expulsions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In Sassen’s view, predatory formations are a complex assemblage of multiple elements pushing towards acute wealth concentration and leading to inhumane expulsions of people from economies and human communities. Expulsions are “part of larger assemblages of elements, conditions, and mutually reinforcing dynamics” (2014, 77).

2. In “The Instruments of Mental Production”, Frye explains that “the knowledge of most worth, whatever it may be, is not something one has: it is something one is” (1970, 1). In his Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou (1999) outlines four procedures producing different kinds of truth: scientific, artistic, political, and amorous truths. A truth is a paradoxical thing, as it is “at once something new, yet [ … ] also the most stable, the closest, ontologically speaking, to the initial state of things” (36).

3. The Orations of Cicero §15 reads: “[W]hen to an excellent and admirable natural disposition there is added a certain system and training of education, then from that combination arises an extraordinary perfection of character” (Cicero 1927, 418).

4. The Encyclopedia Britannica (2009) entry on “Beothuk” states: “Their skill as canoeists was noted by many early writers; they speared seals with primitive harpoons and fished for salmon and shellfish. Equally at home in the woods, they tracked deer with bow and arrow” (1722).

5. Abram (1996) argues that in almost all oral cultures “the enveloping and sensuous earth remains the dwelling place of both the living and the dead” (15), the primaeval home to which all beings return upon their death.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leonor María Martínez Serrano

Leonor María Martínez Serrano is a lecturer in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Córdoba, where she gained a PhD in Canadian literature. Her research interests include poetry, Canadian literature, high modernism, First Nations and oral literatures, ecocriticism, literary translation, and comparative literature. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, University of the West of Scotland, University of Bialystok (Poland), and the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg (Germany).