Last order - Nick Laird

Any poem that takes nature as its locus must also be conscious, even in refusing, of being a hymn to it in its sickness. Since no poem can be written about nature in ignorance of its dereliction, nature poetry has become eco-poetry. We possess a new fact, new by its indisputability: nature does not belong to man, but man belongs to nature. This poetry doesn't necessarily mean a poem needs to be a rant against chainsaws - though why not? - but rather that it manages to connect the hidden interior of humans with their outer mapped world.

In the 1920s, Wallace Stevens could write, in "Anecdote of a Jar":

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill,
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild . . .