Abstract

The Audacity of Spring is a collection of lyric poems that engage with classic and modern poetic strategies, employing modes and forms such as the elegy, the sonnet, and the villanelle. This collection is otherwise written in free verse, with close attention paid to the sonic, rhythmic quality of language. These poems consider notions of embodiment— in particular, they explore conceptions of the female body, or the human body generally, and how these bodies are commodified and objectified by patriarchal society and neoliberal ideology. The speaker in this work peers into the past: a personal past and a literary one— cataloguing the rites of girlhood and family, as well as engaging with a series of intractable poetic influences. The speaker also examines crucial intersections of desire and lack, of subjectivity and objectivity, of natural and artificial, of human and animal— interrogating and troubling these binaries. The work explores how the internal self is mediated, morphed and distorted by its interactions with the external environment. The Atlantic Canadian landscape features prominently in these poems, highlighting the speaker’s various connections to, as well as their fragmentation from, the natural world. These poems examine human agency and expose the contradictions or limitations of our existence when confronted by the sublimity of the natural world, all the while confronting the ongoing perils of climate change amid progressive environmental decay.