Stone Mountain Fairy Shrimp, James Goodman, Guillemot Press, 2022, ISBN 978-1-913749-22-4, £12.00

YARN, Peter Dent, Leafe Press, 2021, ISBN: 978-1999945114, £9.00

Life Here is Full of Tomorrows, Mélisande Fitzsimons, Leafe Press, 2021, ISBN: 9781999945190, £8.00

The question of what ecopoetry, or an environmentally engaged poetry, might look like is, I think, extremely unresolved. Opinions range from the view that ecopoetics are purely a way of reading poems, and not a viable approach to making them to the conflation of nature poetry with ecological work. I have long argued against this last position: it seems evident that poetry that uses capital N Nature as a proxy for human emotions, that indulges in the pathetic fallacy, for example, is egocentric rather than ecocentric. Wordsworth, to take a salutary instance may be a Nature poet but his work is not in any meaningful sense engaged with the natural world as…