Skip to main content

The More Than Human Perspective in Environmental Poetry: A Poem and Interview with Susie Wild

Interview by Zoë Brigley

Welcome back to our series on writing the #MoreThanHuman. We offer a set of interviews with poets and writers on how they approach writing about the environment. The more-than-human is a phrase that seeks to side-step traditional nature-culture dualisms and draw attention to the unity of all life as a kind of shared commonwealth existing on a fragile planet. It also reminds us humans that there is more to life, that there is more world, than the human. It relocates us in relation to the mystery.

This week we meet Susie Wild, author of the poetry collections Windfalls and Better Houses, the short story collection The Art of Contraception listed for the Edge Hill Prize, and the novella Arrivals. She tells us she lives in Rhondda Fach “with a TBR pile almost as high as Llanwonno”.






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Open newslist

Guardian open up their newslist. Helpful and insightful or another step towards the takeover of less-informed citizen journalism and media cost-cutting/ job cuts? Discuss... More:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/series/open-newslist?fb=native In other media news... The Times and Sunday Times cut 150 editorial posts More:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/20/times-job-cuts?fb=native

GIG ALERT: Natalie Ann Holborow at Uplands Poetry Night, Swansea

 

BOOK REVIEW: 'It deserves to be read far more widely.'

In her engaging review essay 'Fantastical Doubles and Split Selves' in the latest issue of New Welsh Review , author of The Word, JL George, looks at responses to trauma in three recent novels including Fox Bites by Lloyd Markham . Here are three of our favourite snippets: ‘Lloyd Markham’s first full-length novel Fox Bites , set in early-2000s Zimbabwe, takes a similar tack, colliding social upheaval – as viewed through the sometimes-uncomprehending eyes of a young, neurodivergent boy – with smaller, more personal disruptions. The young protagonist, Taban, suffers bullying and isolation among his peers after his family splits apart: his aunt, uncle, and beloved cousin Caleb moving away to a farm which will later be seized during land reforms.’ ‘Taban must resist the temptation to become part of a cycle of abuse, thereby becoming a conduit for the destruction of his world. Although the stakes of the book eventually become world-threatening in the expected way of science fiction...