Swarbrick, Steven. The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton

Situated firmly in conversation with ecocritical materialisms by way of the Lacanian real and Lucretian void, Steven Swarbrick's The Environmental Unconscious uses its psychoanalytic framing to tease out specific instances of ecological negativity within early modern poetry.Swarbrick's book offers a welcome and timely intervention of what he calls the "eco-psychoanalytic" into contemporary ecocriticism via previously unexamined instances of loss and lack in early modern ecopoetics.The titular "environmental unconscious" that Swarbrick outlines is a far cry from Lawrence Buell's original usage of the phrase.Where Buell offered a foreshortening unconscious of ignorance that requires our waking, an unconscious situated against possibilities, Swarbrick's formula of the unconscious rejects this reparative imperative and instead focuses in on the generative aspects of the fundamental inaccessibility of the real and the possibilities of language beyond the human.This liberatory frustration magnetizes the ecocritical and psychoanalytic negativities together, each polarizing and drawing the other out in a mutual reinvigoration.Working through a series of close readings on Spenser, Ralegh, Marvell, and Milton, Swarbrick dedicates a chapter of the book to mapping how each of these authors "reveal the ideological shortcomings of returns to matter" in their poetry, a move in direct opposition to the dominant New Materialist assumptions of fundamental matter/meaning relations (22).Rather than the oversaturated modes of relation that tend to dominate the environmental humanities in our age of climate crisis, Swarbrick argues the early Anthropocene poets he examines instead deconstruct the premise of a coherent Other to relate to in the first place.Poetry is for Swarbrick a form organized around loss, just as Lucretian materialism argues matter and language are organized around void.Ultimately, despite the subtitle, this is less a book "on" ecological poetics as the central focus and more a book "on" ecological poetics as substrate, as the ground on which Swarbrick stakes his arguments.Seeing those poetics as that ground, rather than as grounding, eases some of the moments when Environmental Unconscious edges close to feeling overly expansive.

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