Abstract
The growing consciousness of ecological breakdown goes hand in hand with the need for constantly revised terminology. With each new updating, climate scientists, commentators and organisations use stronger language to drive home the emergency of the crisis.
This emphasis on topicality seems to be incompatible with the slow momentum of poetic language. Given its reliance on the image and metaphor, how can the language of poetry relate to the “direct existential threat” faced by the Anthropocene (Gutterres 2019)? One of the most prominent voices in Irish poetry today, Ailbhe Darcy touches upon various global issues and offers speculations about the future of the planet.
In her ekphrastic poems, centos and “translations” she presents images of a world which is at the same time very much up to date and on the brink of disappearance, and comments on the problematic relationship between art and ethics. This paper reflects on how Darcy’s poetry explores borderlines between genres, cultures, as well as the human and non-human, and how she ultimately refutes any clear-cut distinction between ecology and culture (Zapf 2008).
Language is shown to be painfully inadequate in face of various crises and catastrophes. But while words are scarce, they are also never the same, as one of the poems proposes.
It is in this contradictory sense of deficiency on the one hand and possibility of renewal on the other that Darcy’s language and its ecological work originates.