Reforesting the Rhizome: Peter Larkin's 'Roots Surfacing Horizon' (2008)

This essay foregrounds the significance of contemporary scientific accounts of mycorrhizal networks in the poetry of Peter Larkin. In contrast to critical readings that have focused on scarcity, gift, particularity, and landscape, the essay is the first study of such multiplicities and connectivity in his poetry. Commenting on a single long poem by Larkin: ‘Roots Surfacing Horizon’ (2008), and drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘rhizome’ concept, the essay firstly notes Larkin’s enactment of both rhizomatic and arborescent metaphorics, in a manner that simultaneously exploits mycorrhizal systems and ‘reforests’ the rhizome. The essay then draws out in detail the linguistic, formal, spatial, temporal and material ramifications for the poem of attendance to these mycorrhizal symbioses; and further supports this demonstration by reading an unpublished poem by Larkin entitled ‘Roots on Foot / Feet in Root’. The essay subsequently effects some further theoretical contextualizations. Firstly, it compares Larkin’s implied ecology of engagement to ethico-political philosophies of nonidentity. Secondly, it aligns Larkin’s ecological poetics with the conceptual and descriptive dimensions of network theories, in order to examine how Larkin articulates the hybrid status of entities. Thirdly, it explores Larkin’s sensuous registration of mycorrhizal differentiation as anthropocene cohabitation or ‘becoming-with’. The essay concludes by emphasizing comparatively the already fully developed entanglement of Larkin’s ecology, which is held to offer both a poetical and a philosophical enactment of the radical potentiality of a non-human environment for inhabitation.