A Poetic Correspondence on Ecology and the More-Than-Human World: Allan Cooper and Harry Thurston’s The Deer Yard

Abstract

The Deer Yard is a poetic experiment conducted by two Canadian nature poets, Allan Cooper and Harry Thurston, who exchanged a poetic correspondence based on the model of eighth-century Chinese poets Wang Wei and P’ei Ti’s Wang River Sequence. Writing from opposite Canadian coasts, The Deer Yard poems chronicle a winter season and capture the intellectual and emotional alertness with which both poets respond to the green world. Time and again, the 21 paired poems making up this collection testify to their authors’ biocentric intimation that human beings are part of nature, not apart from nature, and that it is life, not homo sapiens, that is at the centre of existence. The earth is conceptualised as being a gigantic network of subtle interconnections, at once fragile, beautiful and necessary. Nature is presented not as taking revenge, but rather as spontaneously following its cycle of winter darkness into the resurrection of light in springtime.