Tom Bristow, ‘Contracted to an eye-quiet world’: Sonic Census or Poetics of Place in Alice Oswald. Symbiosis 10.2 (October 2007) 167-185

This essay was originally published in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, Volume 10.2

This essay begins:

“History can be built through geography. A key question raised by the transatlantic and ecocritical academies is whether it is as important to localize writing as it is to historicize it. Two poets, William Carlos Williams, located in New Jersey, and Alice Oswald, a poet of England’s south-west peninsula, meet this enquiry through their linguistic and anthropological surveys of the Passaic river and the river Dart, respectively.

Tom Bristow

Tom Bristow is at the University of Edinburgh