Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World

Monika Szuba is Associate Professor in Literature at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Gdańsk. Her research is concerned with modern and contemporary literature informed by Environmental Humanities, with particular interest in phenomenology. She is the author of Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World: Burnside, Jamie, Robertson and White (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), co-editor of Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination: Early Modern to Late Modern (Brill, 2022), The Poetics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature (Palgrave, 2019) and Reading Victorian Literature: Essays in Honour of J. Hillis Miller (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and editor of Boundless Scotland: Space in Scottish Fiction (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2015).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction 1. Wandering in the Open World: Kenneth White’s Poetics 2. ‘Buried in the flesh’: Home, Embodiment, and Interanimality in John Burnside’s Work3. ‘Gifts of the Wild’: Dwelling, Temporality, and Landscape in Kathleen Jamie’s Writing 4. ‘A word will set the seed / of life and death’: Robin Robertson’s Protean LyricBibliographyIndex.

Monika Szuba focuses on the significance of ‘the natural world’ for each of her chosen poets. Throughout the variety of work discussed, the valuable pressure of concern which unites the poets in a common purpose is clear. This is a vital contribution to our understanding of modern poetry and to what Scotland might yet be.