Full Description
Alice Major observes the comedy and the tragedy of this human-dominated moment on Earth. Major's most persistent question—"Where do we fit in the universe?"—is made more urgent by the ecological calamity of human-driven climate change. Her poetry leads us to question human hierarchies, loyalties, and consciousness, and challenges us to find some humility in our overblown sense of our cosmic significance.
Now, welcome to the Anthropocene
you battered, tilting globe. Still you gleam,
a blue pearl on the necklace of the planets.
This home. Clouds, oceans, life forms span it
from pole to pole, within a peel of air
as thin as lace lapped round an apple. Fair
and fragile bounded sphere, yet strangely tough—
this world that life could never love enough.
And yet its loving-care has been entrusted
to a feckless species, more invested
in the partial, while the total goes unnoticed.
— from "Welcome to the Anthropocene"
Contents
Prologue
-In medias res
Welcome to the Anthropocene
-Welcome to the Anthropocene
-The local globe
-Windfall advisory
-There goes the neighbourhood
-Guardians of Eden
-Privacy acts
-Bird singularities
-Dust to dust
-Annual grains
-Demeter waits at the arrivals gate
-Red sky at ...
-Climate change debate
-Badger
-Mouse dreams
-Ratatoskr
-Waltz, wasp
A working world
-Office hours
-I heard the bells ...
-Staff Christmas lunch
-Free time
-Receptionist
-Bell curve
-The Gambler's Fallacy
-After a morning spent in a visioning session with a well-paid consultant
-Among the Magi
Long division
-Catena
-Zero divided by zero
-Complex number plane
-Discounted annuals
-Draft of a poem on 'inclusion'
Discounted annuals
-The hat
-The realms of asphodel
-Kind to a cat
-Child care
-Old Anna
-The things we drag behind us
Laundry hearts
-This afternoon before the clocks turn back
-In memoriam
-Battle River country
-Season of metal
-Laundry hearts
-Within, without
-In every tongue
-Threshold
-Sun thread
-Foil
-Circadian Arcadias
The poet's handbook of cognitive illusions
-Hallucinating the muse
-Pronominal
-Pathetic fallacy
-Pareidolia
-The Texas sharpshooter fallacy
-Necker cube illusion
-Confabulation
-The League of Poets Burial Society
Epilogue
-Cledonism
Notes
Acknowledgements