Otters and Others: Ted Hughes to John Kinsella

Abstract

Attitudes to animals and their relationship with the human have undergone significant changes over the last six decades, from the rise of the environmental movement to debates about genetic modification. Poetry has responded to these developments but also contributed to argument and activism. This essay aims to make sense of this history and its literary consequences by investigating the representation of otters in the work of a series of poets from Ted Hughes to John Kinsella. Shape-shifting, elusive, never entirely other, otters allow writers to negotiate the fluid boundary between animal and human and the value of what is wild. They enable explorations of sexuality, the attraction of animals as re-makers of human geography, and the risk to all life forms posed by pollution and nuclear contamination. By analysing a range of work from Britain and Ireland, with some attention to American and Australian contexts and the international rise of Bio Art, the discussion aims to clarify both how views of the natural have been reconfigured and how these shifts animate very different kinds of verse, from the formality of Seamus Heaney and Alice Oswald to the late modernism of Colin Simms and Maggie O’Sullivan.