SOURCE: Dunkerley, Hugh. “Unnatural Relations? Language and Nature in the Poetry of Mark Doty and Les Murray.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 8, no. 1 (winter 2001): 73-82.

In the following essay, the author emphasizes Doty's descriptions of nature and use of metaphor to “lead us back to a sense of a lived, embodied experience in the world.”

          What can words do but link what we know           to what we don't           and so form a shape? 

—From “Difference” by Mark Doty

In an essay entitled “Nature and Silence,” Christopher Manes makes an important connection between language and our perception of nature. In our culture, he says, “nature is silent … in the sense that the status of being a speaking subject is jealously guarded as an exclusively human prerogative.” He goes on to say,

The language we speak today, the idiom of Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism, veils the processes of nature...