Phillips, H orcid.org/0000-0003-0056-6875 (2021) The Role of Plants in Jon Silkin's Holocaust Memorial Poems. Textual Practice, 35 (12). pp. 1973-1988. ISSN 0950-236X
Abstract
This essay argues that plants are an integral part of Jon Silkin’s poetic memorialisation of the Holocaust. The distinctiveness of Silkin’s Holocaust memorial poetics lies in its suggestion that plants can be witnesses to memory of the Holocaust. Silkin’s plant witnesses demonstrate human-like capacity for empathy and affect, as the boundary of species between plants and humans is reconstituted. In this essay I analyse three poems from the span of Silkin’s career, ‘Milkmaids’ (1964), ‘The People’ (1974), and ‘Trying to Hide Treblinka’ (1992), which each defamiliarise concentration camp sites by depicting them as natural spaces where plants grow. In reading these poems, I consider the ecological form of memorialisation that Silkin creates, exploring what poetry at the interface between ecological poetics and Holocaust memorialisation can look like. I consider the implications this poetics has for an alternative understanding of the spatialisation of Holocaust memory.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an author produced version of a journal article published in Textual Practice. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Jon Silkin; Holocaust poetry; the Holocaust; memory; poetry |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 27 Apr 2021 11:04 |
Last Modified: | 22 Oct 2022 00:13 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Routledge |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/0950236X.2021.1900375 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:173397 |