“A garden of green lace”: P. K. Page’s Ecolect

The aim of my paper is to analyse a recurring rhetorical strategy in some ecologically informed poems by P. K. Page. The growing amount of ecologically-informed writing and literary criticism seems to demonstrate the fact that thematically oriented analyses that regard nature and landscape as adversaries have been finally superseded. Many writers are now attempting to redefine their relationship with the environment by using a holistic approach that recognizes both human and nonhuman life-forms as equal and interdependent. The analysis of the ecolects (Sykes Davies 1986: 274, 319) employed by P. K. Page in some exemplary texts I shall discuss, shows her to be more interested in capturing the relationship between writer and nature than to reflect on the man/nature relationship in oppositional terms.