Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0674001680. Price: US$31.50.

The rich possibilities of ecopoetics and the ground for thinking ecological literature are well laid out in Bate's latest book. As he explains in the preface: "This is a book about why poetry continues to matter as we enter a new millennium that will be ruled by technology. It is a book about modern Western man's alienation from nature. It is about the capacity of the writer to restore us to the earth which is our home." From these expansive beginnings, Song of the Earth is divided into three sections. The first three chapters give a context for ecopoetics by exploring the divide between nature and culture and our longing to return to nature. The middle chapters supply fruitful examples in landscape aesthetics and animal nature from the Romantic period to contemporary poetry. The final chapter grounds ecopoetics in Heidegger's work. In Chapter One, "Going, Going, Gone," Bate introduces the reader to the divide between nature and culture. During the 16^th century the word "cultivation" undergoes a split between tending fields and a figurative cultivation in which the mind and morals are made fit for society. Austen and Hardy serve as opening examples of how the divide functions in the 19^th century. Bate illustrates how in Sense and Sensibility, John Dashwood's lack of respect for his the family land finds its parallel in his uncivil treatment of his stepmother and half-sister whom he turns out of the family home. Likewise, Hardy's tragic vision is grounded in the irreconcilable conflict between rooted, traditional communities and the mobility of contemporary economy, technology, and industry. In Chapter Two, "State of Nature," we find that from Oliver Goldsmith to Cobbett to Austen and Hardy and up to Philip Larkin, the better life is always just behind us. Yet, rural nostalgia as a myth is no less important than history since by myth we imagine and make sense of our place in the world. For Bate, literature provides the means of thinking a union between humans and nature precisely because fiction can think outside the current state of affairs. Yet, even in literature, we remain within a fundamental epistemological problem: "the act of identifying the presumption of human apartness from nature as the problem is itself a symptom of that very apartness. The identification is the product of an instrumental way of thinking and of using language" or as Bate explains in the next chapter, "A Voice for Ariel," "The writer's image of nature is always refracted through language: Areil only speaks when brought into the service of Prospero" (75). The ecocritic occupies the awkward position of speaking for the Other. To resolve this dilemma, "It may therefore be that a necessary step in overcoming the apartness is to think and to use language in a different way" (37). Bate examines how particular Romantic writers and their successors do not simply walk in nature nor simply write about nature; rather, these writers create for the reader a phenomenological experience of dwelling with nature. The result is an "ecopoetics" that allows us to think nature by making nature present to humans. Bate wants poetry to make an impact on the phenomenological nature of living in the world. He explains, "Ecopoetics asks in what respect a poem may be a making (Greek poiesis) of the dwelling-place—the prefix eco- is derived from the Greek oikos, 'the home or place of dwelling'" (75). He claims that poiesis provides the path to dwelling since its metre resonates with "nature's own rhythms" producing "an echoing of the song of the earth itself." These opening chapters that …