Purton Green

This ecological epic, sparked by a debate over the proposed destruction of a minor footpath in England, probes the fragile boundaries between human and environment. Purton Green is a long poem focused on access to landscape. This movement is built around a prolonged and acrimonious court case over the proposed deletion of an obscure footpath in West Suffolk, England. The 2008 report in this case amounts to a judicial meditation on who deserves access to landscape, how, and why—and on what "access" and "landscape" themselves could mean. The poem is composed of lyric writing based on fieldwork, "ground-truthing," in 2015 and 2021, combined with quotation and manipulation of language from the legal report (because the text of the legal decision also comprises a conducive and constituent ecology). Purton Green is a palimpsest, an over- and underwriting of landscape and experience. The poem engages the pastoral in the sense of the shepherding I (or eye), as well as the textual blank space of what we call context, the in- or a-human. It asks what becomes of the epic in an age of environmental rupture, in which the human (if not language itself) may shift or flicker at any moment from focus to periphery. Purton Green explores how the body's apprehension of incorporation into ecological matrices can decenter the traditional Western poetic tropes of what we call "nature poetry." What lies beyond the human resides also, and necessarily, beyond language, but what lies at the very edge of human language (and human singing) seems to be a fruitful site for recalibrating the species's relationship to what we like to think of as the environment in a period of rapid flux and change.