Hydromaterialism and Membrane Logic in Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s of Sea

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is a UK-based ecopoet and academic of Kenyan and British heritage who has published two poetry collections, Swims (2017) and Of Sea (2021), as well as two works of creative non-fiction, The Grassling: A Geological Memoir (2019) and Twelve Words for Moss (2023). Burnett’s most recent collection, Of Sea, builds on her previous published work and methods of environmental exploration. The focus lies on encounters with specific invertebrates in a local body of water. Burnett’s collection is also a response to the Sixth Extinction, a time of accelerated anthropogenic biodiversity loss, in which the health of the world’s water is under threat—and consequently, the health of every being on the planet. Most affected are invertebrate species, which are often overlooked in favour of charismatic megafauna, and Burnett’s collection’s focus on aquatic invertebrates renders it a ground-breaking text that pushes the limits of lyric form to rebel against readily received aesthetics. The experimental free verse text was generated out of a practice of swimming, or swimwork, a method that arises in the work of other contemporary writers, such as Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Victoria Whitworth’s Swimming with Seals (2017). Burnett’s Of Sea shows us that literature can bridge the gap between a polluted world and the human self, and that the lyric form can contribute towards facilitating connections to the more-than-human world in crisis and opening multispecies dialogues through its employment.