‘When Species Meet'

Eóin Flannery calls attention to both the necessity and the danger implicit in poetic representations of the human-nonhuman relationships. In particular, he reveals how the poetry of Ciaran Berry and Moya Cannon each manifest a self-reflexivity that enables their work to evade the tendency to aestheticise or reductively encapsulate the nonhuman. Thus, Flannery shows how Berry in a ‘Cold Pastoral’ thwarts the romanticising of the nonhuman implicit in the pastoral genre and the sonnet form by infusing the former with the gothic and scrambling the traditional rhyme scheme associated with the latter. The analysis of Moya Cannon’s work stresses the self-reflexive focus of her writing, as she tracks and measures the distances between signifier and signified in the context of the composition of ecopoetry.