This text asks what it means to write poetry in and about the Anthropocene, the name given to a geological epoch where humans have a global ecological impact. Combining critical approaches such as ecocriticism and posthumanism with close reading and archival research, it argues that the Anthropocene requires poetry and the humanities to find new ways of thinking about unfamiliar spatial and temporal scales, about how we approach the metaphors and discourses of the sciences, and about the role of those processes and materials that confound humans' attempts to control or even conceptualise them. 'Poetry and the Anthropocene' draws on the work of a series of poets from across the political and poetic spectrum, analysing how understandings of technology shape literature about place, evolution and the tradition of writing about what still gets called Nature

Introduction: poetry and science 1. Evolving systems of (eco)poetry 2. ‘Life subdued to its instrument’: Hughes, mutation and technology 3. ‘Germinal ironies’: changing climates in the poetry of Derek Mahon 4. The resistant materials of Jeremy Prynne Conclusion: Evolution, agency and feedback at the end of a world