“A garden of green lace”: P. K. Page’s Ecolect
Abstract
The aim of my paper is to analyse a recurring rhetorical strategy in some ecologically informed poems by P. K. Page. The growing amount of ecologically-informed writing and literary criticism seems to demonstrate the fact that thematically oriented analyses that regard nature and landscape as adversaries have been finally superseded. Many writers are now attempting to redefine their relationship with the environment by using a holistic approach that recognizes both human and nonhuman life-forms as equal and interdependent. The analysis of the ecolects (Sykes Davies 1986: 274, 319) employed by P. K. Page in some exemplary texts I shall discuss, shows her to be more interested in capturing the relationship between writer and nature than to reflect on the man/nature relationship in oppositional terms.
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-58
Bibliography
Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unit. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Bentley, D. M. R. 1990. ‘Along the Line of Smoky Hills’: further Steps towards an Ecological Poetics. Canadian Poetry, 26: v-xix.
Biehl, Janet. 1991. Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
Cheney, Jim. 1987. EcoFeminism and Deep Ecology. Environmental Ethics, 9, 2: 11546.
Davies, Hugh Sykes. 1986. Wordsworth and the Worth of Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Diamond, Irene & Gloria Orenstein eds. 1990. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
“Ecotone”. 1992. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 4: 359.
Frye, Northrop. 1971. Canada and Its Poetry. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi,129-143.
Gorjup, Branko. 1998. La rosa dei venti. Compass Rose. Ravenna: Angelo Longo Editore.
Helms, Gabriele. 1995. Contemporary Canadian Poetry from the Edge: An Exploration of Literary Eco-criticism. Canadian Poetry, 36: 44-61.
Lincoln, Roger, Geoffrey Boxshall & Paul Clarke. 1982. A Dictionary of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Merchant, Carolyn. 1992. Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World. New York: Routledge.
McKusick, James. 2000. Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology. New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press.
Page, P. K. 1991. The Glass Air: Poems Selected and New. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Page, P. K. 1994. Hologram: a Book of Glosas. London (Ont.): Brick Books.
Page, P. K. 2002. Planet Earth: Poems Selected and New. Published by Erin Ontario: Porcupine’s Quill.
Page, P. K. 2010. Kaleidoscope: Selected Poems. Published by Erin Ontario: Porcupine’s Quill.
Porteous, J. Douglas. 1990. Landscapes of the Mind: Worlds of Sense and Metaphor. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Reid, Alastair ed. 2001. Pablo Neruda. Fully Empowered. A Bilingual Edition. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Sullivan, Rosemary. 1998. La rosa dei venti. Compass Rose. Gorjup Branko (a cura di). Ravenna: Angelo Longo Editore.
Sykes Davies, Hugh. 1986 Wordsworth or the Worth of Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Warren, Karen J. 1987. Feminism and Ecology: Making Connections. Environmental Ethics, 9, 1: 320.
Zimmerman, Michael E. 1987. Feminism, Deep Ecology, and Environmental Ethics. Environmental Ethics, 9, 1: 2144.