During the eighteenth century, some of the most popular British poetry showed a responsiveness to animals that anticipated the later language of animal rights. Such poems were widely cited in later years by legislators advocating animal welfare laws like Martin’s Act of 1822, which provided protections for livestock. In The Animal Claim, Tobias Menely links this poetics of sensibility with Enlightenment political philosophy, the rise of the humanitarian public, and the fate of sentimentality, as well as longstanding theoretical questions about voice as a medium of communication.    
      
In the Restoration and eighteenth century, philosophers emphasized the role of sympathy in collective life and began regarding the passionate expression humans share with animals, rather than the spoken or written word, as the elemental medium of community. Menely shows how poetry came to represent this creaturely voice and, by virtue of this advocacy, facilitated the development of a viable discourse of animal rights in the emerging public sphere. Placing sensibility in dialogue with classical and early-modern antecedents as well as contemporary animal studies, The Animal Claim uncovers crucial connections between eighteenth-century poetry; theories of communication; and post-absolutist, rights-based politics.  

In this unprecedented anthology, acclaimed poets from around the world select poems from their countries of origin to share with a wider audience. Readers will find eloquence, urgency, and idiosyncrasy, poems all in English but springing from drastically varied voices, geographies, and histories. Using an artist’s rather than a scholar’s approach, these poems — chosen out of love and admiration by practicing poets — show the vitality of English deployed by revered and emerging poets in Ghana (selected by Kwame Dawes), India (by Sudeep Sen), South Africa (by Rustum Kozain), the Caribbean (by Ishion Hutchinson and five other Caribbean poets), Canada (by Todd Swift), and the Antipodes: New Zealand (by Hinemoana Baker) and Australia (by Les Murray). Mindful of the contentious history of colonization and its staining of any notion of a unified Anglophone poetics, editors Catherine Barnett and Tiphanie Yanique have created an “anthology of anthologies”: a choral oratorio, a many-accented gathering of voices that invites further discovery and promotes an intra-cultural conversation. Featured poets include: Ama Ata Aidoo, Tatamkulu Afrika, Kofi Anyidoho, Tusiata Avia, Kofi Awoonor, Marion Bethel, Christian Bök, Jenny Bornholdt, Dionne Brand, Kamau Brathwaite, Diana Brebner, Abena Busia, Michelle Cahill, Christian Campbell, Vahni Capildeo, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Amit Chaudhuri, George Elliot Clarke, Jennifer Compton, Jeremy Cronin, Mahadai Das, Ingrid de Kok, Peter Goldsworthy, Lorna Goodison, Bernadette Hall, Lesbia Harford, Shake Keane, A. M. Klein, Shara McCallum, Bill Manhire, Kei Miller, Arthur Nortje, Kwadwo Opoku-Agyeman, Richard Outram, P. K. Page, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Olive Senior, Mongane Wally Serote, Kenneth Slessor, Kelwyn Sole, Billy Marshall Stoneking, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Habib Tiwoni, Hone Tuwhare, Priscila Uppal, Chris van Wyk, David Wevill, Judith Wright, and many more.

How poetry can help us think about and live in the Anthropocene by reframing our intimate relationship with geological time
 

The Anthropocene describes how humanity has radically intruded into deep time, the vast timescales that shape the Earth system and all life-forms that it supports. The challenge it poses—how to live in our present moment alongside deep pasts and futures—brings into sharp focus the importance of grasping the nature of our intimate relationship with geological time. In Anthropocene Poetics, David Farrier shows how contemporary poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Evelyn Reilly, and Christian Bök, among others, provides us with frameworks for thinking about this uncanny sense of time.

Looking at a diverse array of lyric and avant-garde poetry from three interrelated perspectives—the Anthropocene and the “material turn” in environmental philosophy; the Plantationocene and the role of global capitalism in environmental crisis; and the emergence of multispecies ethics and extinction studies—Farrier rethinks the environmental humanities from a literary critical perspective. Anthropocene Poetics puts a concern with deep time at the center, defining a new poetics for thinking through humanity’s role as geological agents, the devastation caused by resource extraction, and the looming extinction crisis.