Irredenta

While Irredenta may carry the spirit and tradition of past American ecopoetics in its lyrical precision, its fragmentary lines and honest images render these poems beyond the mere pastoral, and by depicting and deconstructing myths in the geographical and political landscapes of America, we venture into new poetic and philosophical perspectives, ones that will lead readers to question their identity, ethics, and their role as everyday citizens.

I read recently a terrific first book, Irredenta, by the poet Oscar Oswald. His project, apparently, was to re-purpose the pastoral poem for a decolonized, climate-threatened, politically uncertain North America; and he succeeds in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

Oswald writes our undeniable connections to the earth, reaching to reconcile a disconnect between human consideration and activity and the natural world. “There is no universe but ours,” he writes, as part of “LYCIDAS,” “and theirs. Our common song is optional.” And his, too, is composed as glorious song, one that sees a way through to salvage, even save, the ways we’ve cornered ourselves. One might suggest that his is very much a song of hope.

Click here to read a few poems from Irredenta in On the Seawall!

Click here to read Oscar Oswald’s essay “On Pastoral Poetry and the Language of Wilderness” in Literary Hub!

rm: Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

OO: Irredenta comes from a pastoral pulse, the genre in its political garb. Pastoral shepherds, lovers, witches, children – in classic pastoral literature these figures occupy the boundary of civilized and wild worlds, where the terms ‘wilderness’ and ‘culture’ ripple into one another