Peter Larkin’s sustained engagement with the poetics of scarcity registers the eco-philosophical ramifications of a resource economics now generating scenarios of absolute scarcity in the face of unlimited growth. Simultaneously, he explores something like a theological ontology of dedication, what it means to accept a mode of finite being with roots in the radicalism of Romantic ecologies, by which scarcity can be understood as prophetic.
- Carol Watts
Larkin’s is the most radically decentered poetry of ecological apprehension and conscience that we have in English, and if it is also among the most estrangingly beautiful, that is no accident. Larkin’s verse rides its Modernist inheritances through and past what we now think of as postmodernism, fetching up on some farther, stranger shore. - G. C. Waldrep