Living death: reading ecological necropolitics in the Poetry of Mary Oliver, Alice Oswald, and Fiona Wright

This thesis investigates the necropastoral, the re-imagining and retelling of ecological death and dying, in a selection of poetry from Mary Oliver, Alice Oswald, and Fiona Wright. To date, there has been little research explaining how necrology is positioned and presented in ecocriticism, despite necrotized environments being a prominent feature of literature concerning climate trauma and collapse. Oliver, Oswald, and Wright are read for their opening of ecophilosophical responses to ecological death and dying through ecofeminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives. Highlighting non-human animal and ecological experiences of violence and mourning, Oliver and Oswald create a unique mythology of place accounting for the frightening phenomenology of environmental threat. Wright creates a bioregional immediacy and intimacy, conceptualising a probiotic bond between poet-speaker and environment. The dead, in the poetry of Oliver, Oswald and Wright, are physical realities and metaphors, illustrating a transcorporeal and fluid relationship between human/more-than-human bonds and the perpetuation of ecological eschatology. However, each poet also illustrates an Anglophone necropolitics that reflects the inability of environmental criticism to affirm death and dying as part of ecological life. The complexity and nuance of more-than human bonds are not radically reimagined in the poetry of Oliver, Oswald, and Wright. By sexualising and engendering necrotised environments, Oliver and Oswald emphasise a thantaophilic reading of environment which revisits rather than critiques ideological and dualist positioning of ecological bodies. Nature is illustrated as inanimate rather than radically animate. A necropolitical re-reading of Wright’s work raises questions concerning neo-postcolonialism and the sanitising of the Australian landscape from Indigenous histories of violence and mento mori, highlighting the need to decolonize mourning. Through the lens of the necropolitical, the poetry of Oliver, Oswald, and Wright, reveals a problematic fallacy within the theoretical fields of ecocriticism: how can it be that ecological agency is expressed in ecopoetics if nonhuman agency is voiced through the dead? This is not a rhetorical question, for the answer is evident; the silencing of death allows for ecological agencies to not only be easily assimilated into the anthropocentric, but to also ensure there is no possibility of voiced contention. The necropolitical highlights how if environmental reconciliation is levied at the human cost of ecological extinction, it is not ecological trauma that is being voiced, but anthropocentric lament. The scale of the current climate crisis urgently calls for both a critical and creative reimagining of restrictive and damaging ideas of ecological death, dying and mourning. The emerging and transdisciplinary field of ecological necropolitics navigates the realities of ecological death, dying, and the brutality of grief that is otherwise sanitised from Western anthropocentric discourse. This thesis encapsulates the critical and neglected significance of ecological necropolitics, challenging normative assumptions and reductive expectations associated with mass ecological extinction, instead bringing necropastoral ontologies into both contemplation and conversation.