"extinguish// all lands falling and required for the said": Elegy and Exploitation in the Poetry of Paisley Rekdal and Cecily Nicholson
Paisley Rekdal’s West: A Translation (2023) and Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars (2014) offer exciting ways to re-think the poetic elegy and documentary poem. Both writers explore how violence results from struggles over the ownership of land. Rekdal reflects on the building of the transcontinental railroad across the United States during the nineteenth century, seeking to memorialise those who were exploited as part of its construction, particularly Chinese labourers. Nicholson focusses on the local, charting the history of Poplar Island, Qayqayt land in the Fraser River by the Canadian city of New Westminster.
In this talk, Dr. Munro consider how Rekdal and Nicholson use elegy to rematerialize the dead. Both poets draw attention to collective memories that are more inclusive and resist dominant narratives, including those which prioritise human over non-human experiences.
Niall Munro is a Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Oxford Brookes University where he is also Director of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre and of the Centre’s award-winning poetry pamphlet press, ignitionpress. He is the author of Hart Crane’s Queer Modernist Aesthetic (2015), and co-editor of On Commemoration: Global Perspectives upon Remembering War (2020) and Dambudzo Marechera at the Old Fire Station (2024). His two current book projects focus on the way that modernist writers reflected on the American Civil War and how contemporary American poets commemorate people, places, and events.
