Seasonal Disturbances: Environment, Climate Change, and Anthropocene Poetics of Relation in Karen McCarthy Woolf's Poetry

Abstract

Karen McCarthy Woolf describes her book Seasonal Disturbances as focusing on the ‘holistic ecology of water’. Seasonal Disturbances explores how climate change is affecting London, exposing the different levels of risk facing humans and nonhumans, from aquatic creatures and trees to women and refugees. This discussion deploys recent theories on climate change, the Anthropocene, cosmopolitanism, and posthumanism to analyse McCarthy Woolf's intricate depiction of shared risks and responsibilities — human and nonhuman. Global links are enacted at formal and thematic levels in the poems, from the Afghan landay to the Japanese zuihitsu. The poems create intricate meshes of human and more-than-human agents — plutocrats and the poor, the River Thames, unseasonable weather, global patterns of trade and migration. As such, McCarthy responds to the knotty and intractable environmental issues that have prompted geologists to propose that we are living through an epoch shaped by human actions.