The Last Cigarette

Abstract

Criticism 63.3_07_Eltringham.indd Page 313 12/07/21 6:09 pm Criticism Summer 2021, Vol. 63, No. 3, pp. 313–318. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.63.3.0313 © 2021 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 As a temporal category “the Anthropocene” makes a fundamental claim about periodicity: the geological age of the anthropos is upon us, or “we” have ushered it in, and it is categorically distinct from what came before (geologically, the Holocene). Subjectively, this idea induces the nauseous vertigo of living as subjects in two radically incommensurate times at once: what Anne-Lise François calls “the simultaneity of speed and slow time. . . . To listen to the geologists, the Anthropocene would be humanity’s last cigarette, a name for the fast consumption of deep time.” Such a disjunctive “poetics of thick time,” to name one of the central modes David Farrier identifies in Anthropocene Poetics, is corralled in a particularly persistent way, he argues, by “lyric’s capacity to pull multiple temporalities and scales within a single frame” (9). One of the many virtues of this book is the way in which Farrier’s sustained focus on the viscous “now” of lyric address enables his close-reading practice to trespass the bounds of the words on the page, in order to access deep times that he reveals to be snagged in the trellises of stanzaic structure. Throughout, these textures of violence or tenderness are shown to add up to a “form of knowledge in the traffic between entities,” a politics of matter and relation to the more-than-human world (19). THE LAST CIGARETTE Daniel Eltringham