The Poetry of Disaster

The Poetry of Disaster: Chernobyl, Katrina, and the Anthropocene is an extremely well researched and carefully written survey of pertinent issues connected to the poetic addressing of disasters as regards their victims, others' trauma, and the ownership of stories. This ethical crux, carefully explored, is vital and at the heart of the matter. One of the great achievements of the book is the way it teases out the many strands and layering of these ethical issues. To have them set out with such clarity and judiciousness is in itself a major contribution to knowledge' - Peter Robinson , author of The Sound Sense of Poetry Recent news images of disastrous floods, fires and earthquakes vividly show we live in an unstable world. This book examines that precarity through an analysis of how disaster is expressed through poetry. It situates poetry of disaster as a distinct poetic endeavour and as an emerging field of academic research. Focusing on a selection of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry collections responding to notable disasters, these collections are explored firstly, as literary texts; secondly, as case studies into why and how the authors chose to write about these disasters in the way they did; and thirdly, as access points for wider investigations into disaster and disaster studies in the twentieth and twenty-first century. The texts also inform an exploration into the binary of 'man-made' and 'natural', a binary that stubbornly persists in contemporary representations of disaster, however problematic that differentiation is in this age of the Anthropocene. Claire Cox completed a practice-based PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, on poetry and disaster. She is co-founder of ignition press (Oxford Brookes University), was one of three winning poets included in Primers: Volume Five (Nine Arches Press), and winner of the 2020 Wigtown Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize.