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The early twenty-first century has seen a growing cultural awareness that a human-caused mass extinction of wild species is underway and accelerating. Ursula K. Heise, in her 2016 book Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, has pointed out that the "sheer volume of texts and images concerning particular endangered species or the general panorama of biodiversity loss has by now turned into so large-scale a phenomenon that it deserves the attention of cultural scholars" (2). Part of this cultural attention is to be found in literary criticism, which is increasingly concerned with the plight of endangered and recently extinct species, and also with the prospect of further extinctions as the effects of the Anthropocene gather pace in what palaeontologists such as Michael Novacek are calling the "Sixth Extinction," the greatest wave of extinctions seen since the sudden demise of the dinosaurs (Thomas, "A sixth mass extinction?" 349).
The loss of wild species is indeed staggering, with extinction rates between a thousand to ten thousand times more rapid than what has been the norm for millions of years. The world presently loses literally dozens of species of animals and plants every day (Chivian 18), so that by 2050, thirty to fifty percent of all species currently on earth may be made extinct (Thomas et al, "Extinction risk from climate change" 145-148).
Heise suggests that environmentalists' and conservation scientists' engagements with extinct or endangered species "gain sociocultural traction to the extent that they become part of the stories that hu- man communities tell about themselves" (5). It is only fitting then, that as part of the increasing cultural awareness of biodiversity loss there is a growing literary or poetic response, a body of "extinction poetry" covering the story of ourselves and our relations with the natural world in the recent Anthropocene, that is both a call to arms and a great lament, and which differs markedly in character from the nature poetry that preceded it. A stanza from W. S. Merwin's "For a Coming Extinction" may serve as representative here:
Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing. (68)
Poetry of extinction is characterised more than anything...