'In connecting the religio-imaginative work documented in this study to ecopoetics, Azambuja crucially highlights the uses and purposes that modernist Zen can and has been put to, distancing this study from other works on modernism and religion that by emphasizing a connection to William James might foreground the isolated and inward nature of spiritual life in the modern age. At the same time, Azambuja skillfully invokes Zen thought and practice to challenge versions of ecopoetics that may well be too narrowly focused on the material. The Zen of Ecopoetics is thus a timely and provocative study capable of inspiring scholars working in the fields of modernism, literature and religion, and ecopoetics.'
Jamie Christopher
Callison,
Professor of English Literature at the University of Agder, Norway; an excerpt from a review in Literature and Theology.'Enaiê Mairê Azambuja's
The Zen of Ecopoetics: Cosmological Imaginations in Modernist American Poetry considers the influence of Zen Buddhism and Taoism on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and E.E. Cummings. Azambuja's insight into the early-twentieth-century Western reception of Asian religion, combined with her readings of modernist poetry, new materialism, and ecopoetic theory, provides a lucid sense of connection among religious, poetic, and theoretical discourses. Azambuja shows how these discourses can engage with each other in productive and mutually-informative ways.
The Zen of Ecopoetics presents a subtle, nuanced and original approach that is set to contribute greatly to modernist and ecocritical studies.'
Peter Jaeger,
Emeritus Professor and author of 'John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics' (2013).'Enaiê Mairê Azambuja's adventurous study
The Zen of Ecopoetics: Cosmological Imaginations in Modernist American Poetry presents readers with the North-West passage between the Buddhist philosophical embrace of "nothingness" and the revolutionary poetics in which there are "no ideas but in things". The chapters of this rich study show us that the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance writings did not pull themselves by their socks out of nothingness-they are part of a lineage of thought that includes the unselfing imaginings William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, and many others. This book locates the ancestors of new materialism and contemporary eco-theory in ways that strongly challenge the notion that these modernist masters were secular materialists.'
John Whalen-Bridge,
Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore.'Azambuja weaves a rich tapestry of Zen philosophy, American modernist poetry, and the concept of cosmopoetics, uncovering the hidden threads that connect the practise and philosophy of Zen to its transformative environmental resonance in our own time. By skilfully juxtaposing Zen and Western philosophy, this book powerfully reveals their shared creative impulses and daring leaps into the realms of the ineffable and the unknown.
The Zen of Ecopoetics is an intellectual tour de force that enlightens and inspires us to rethink our understanding of reality, spirituality, and our attachment to poetic form.'
Allan Kilner-Johnson,
Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Surrey, UK.
