"Half sun. Half thinking." Jared Stanley's Western Poetics (Just Deserts, part 2)
Jared Stanley’s 2012 collection The Weeds (Salt: London) represents a development in western poetics. Stanley’s writing sees human interactions as part of the “natural world,” and connects not just to Romantic landscape imagery, but to the intricacies of scientific representations, as well. That’s not the development, though. There’s plenty of western writing that sees the ecological perspective (interwoven, interactive) instead of the environmental (anthropocentric, isolated). What I find fresh about Stanley’s poetics is that it’s not elegiac. Stanley’s not quietly weeping while the glaciers bleed out. Neither is he proselytizing on the street-corner, or, more applicably, from a laptop in an air conditioned apartment. In his wild, wide-ranging new book, Stanley’s clear-eyed about the situation vis-à-vis global warming, extinction spiral, etc.: your children’s children’s children will be hanging around someplace. ...