Witness to the makeshift shore: Ecological practice in A Littoral Zone
Abstract
This essay suggests that Douglas Livingstone's long poem 'A Littoral Zone'
(1991), an explicit conversation between his work as an environmental
scientist and his work as a poet, makes for a poetic statement that is, in
various senses of the word, ecological. The sequence of poems draws
extensively on scientific research in the field of bacteriology, is minutely
located in 'place', evokes a secular sacramentalism in its representation of
ecological interconnectedness, and situates the present moment in the context
of deep time. In all, Livingstone's distinctive stance involves a tough, tender
negotiation between irony, equanimity, wonder, and a sense of critical
environmental urgency. Read twenty years later, his view of the South Coast
littoral and of the world in which it is situated, seems prescient.