The west side of any mountain : place, space, and ecopoetry /

Editor of several collections of criticism on nature writing, Bryson (Mount St. Mary's College) draws on the concepts of "place" and "space"--as described by cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan--as a prelude to identifying a key characteristic of contemporary ecopoetry, namely, its problematic relationship to these concepts. In the poetry of Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, and W.S. Merwin, Bryson discovers both concerted attempts to value place and fundamental inabilities to fully understand its value. Bryson distinguishes the ecopoets primarily according to their differing poetic strategies for foregrounding this inability, strategies that demonstrate differing abilities to register an awareness of "space," defined as the extent to which the world is ultimately unknowable. By introducing "space" and "place" as not adversarial but mutually reliant terms, Bryson provides a basis for more subtle readings of what he describes as a central ecopoetic dilemma. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. G. D. MacDonald Virginia State University