Black Nature Poetry: A Study in Silthood

Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry, anything but nature poetry" (Dungy 2009). Until 2005, less than 1% of UK published poets were black (Free Verse/Spread the Word), with nature poetry especially "colonised" (Jamie 2021) by white middle-class men. The way in which UK black nature poets navigate this literary genre, despite racialisation of the publishing
industry and unconscious bias in critical reception, is the overarching issue to which my project, through the following research questions, responds. What critical and ideological challenges face UK black eco-poets and nature writers publishing in this "almost universally white" (Barkham 2021) canon? How are such challenges reframed as affordances for uniquely creative and critical interventions? There's been more scholarship on postcolonial, African American, and
Indigenous ecocriticism than on black British nature writing. Therefore, significance of this research is rooted in the decolonisation of canon, consciousness and critical gaze in a way that furthers scholarship around UK black-authored nature poetry as a valuable field of study, deepens the dialogue between race studies and environmental criticism, and opens up the canon while challenging the biases of canonisation itself.