Fire Was in the Reptile’s Mouth: Towards a Transcultural Ecological Poetics

This paper compares two creation narratives from indigenous peoples on either side of the Pacific Ocean, the relationships between which catalyse the theorisation of a transcultural approach to ecological poetics. The comparison of these narratives reveals important, rhizomatic similarities, and also unmistakable regional differences, concerning the origins of language and culture in Yanomami (Venezuela) and MakMak (Australia) communities. Concomitant with the centrality of indigenous thought in this theorisation of ecopoetics is the de­centrality of human-only conceptions of poetics. Accordingly, the paper considers non-semantic forms of poetics such as birdsong in order to de-centre classically Western, humanist conceptions of language and ecology

What’s an Ecologically Sensitive Poetics? Song, Breath and Ecology in Southern Chile

This essay explores the ecologically sensitive properties of oral poetics, or of written poetries with a close relationship to oral traditions. Looking in particular at the work of contemporary Mapuche poet Leonel Lienlaf (from southern Chile), I outline some of the important links between his written work and the Mapuche oral tradition. I then show how the proximity of Lienlaf's poems to songpoetry-and, by extension, to the voice and to the limits of breath-produces a highly ecologically sensitive poetic. Several parallels are drawn between properties of Mapuche songpoetry and of Aboriginal songpoetry, suggesting that a similar concern with ephemera, bodily location and movement can also be found in the work of some contemporary Aboriginal poets

The Ecological Poetics of Deborah Bird Rose: Analysis and Application

In the essay that follows I outline and then respond to the poetic qualities of Deborah Bird Rose’s thinking. Trained as an anthropologist, Rose was a highly original scholar. She pioneered ecological ethnography by focusing on the links between social and ecological justice, in particular with the Yarralin and Lingarra communities in the Northern Territory, and she is a founding figure in the environmental humanities, multispecies studies and extinction studies. Her sustained interest in poetry and the poetic imagination made her ever aware of the power of ‘deep stories’; Rose wanted always to be close to ‘the cadences of the[ir] poetry’ (Wild Dog 16). Unlike many scholars in the humanities, for whom writing and reading are dominated by genres of prose, references to poetry and to contemporary poets are common in Rose’s work, and her writing regularly gestures towards the poetic. Rose’s work is vital for ecological criticism that attempts to grapple with the drastic cultural and climactic changes of this century, particularly for criticism with decolonising ambitions

Redox-mediated reactions of vinylferrocene: Toward redox auxiliaries

Chemical redox reactions have been exploited to transform unreactive vinylferrocene into a powerful dienophile for the Diels–Alder reaction and reactive substrate for thiol addition reactions upon conversion to its ferrocenium state. We have further investigated the ability of these reactions to facilitate redox-auxiliary-like reactivity by further hydrogenolyisis of the Diels–Alder adduct to the corresponding cyclopentane derivative

Country Escaping Line in the Poetry of Philip Hodgins

This paper reevaluates the work of late Australian poet Philip Hodgins (1959-1995) in the context of related inquiries into the work of other late poets Jennifer Rankin and John Anderson. The emphasis is on Hodgins's 'landspeak', or the unusual capacities for his lines to both delimit Australian country and to leave open the potential for what is unknown and/or unseen. This relates to tropes of provincialism and of geopoetics in other Australian poetry. The paper argues that, despite the apparent conservatism of his poetics, Hodgins's work actually interrogates the foundations of colonial Australian places

What are protoclusters? – Defining high-redshift galaxy clusters and protoclusters

We explore the structures of protoclusters and their relationship with high-redshift clusters using the Millennium Simulation combined with a semi-analytic model. We find that protoclusters are very extended, with 90 per cent of their mass spread across∼35 h−1 Mpc commoving at z =2 (∼30 arcmin). The ‘main halo’, which can manifest as a high-redshift cluster or group, is only a minor feature of the protocluster, containing less than 20 per cent of all protocluster galaxies at z = 2. Furthermore, many protoclusters do not contain a main halo that is massive enough to be identified as a high-redshift cluster. Protoclusters exist in a range of evolutionary states at high redshift, independent of the mass they will evolve to at z = 0. We show that the evolutionary state of a protocluster can be approximated by the mass ratio of the first and second most massive haloes within the protocluster, and the z = 0 mass of a protocluster can be estimated to within 0.2 dex accuracy if both the mass of the main halo and the evolutionary state are known. We also investigate the biases introduced by only observing star-forming protocluster members within small fields. The star formation rate required for line-emitting galaxies to be detected is typically high, which leads to the artificial loss of low-mass galaxies from the protocluster sample. This effect is stronger for observations of the centre of the protocluster, where the quenched galaxy fraction is higher. This loss of low-mass galaxies, relative to the field, distorts the size of the galaxy overdensity, which in turn can contribute to errors in predicting the z = 0 evolved mass